> 2023

Proof that Republicans are Pedophiles:

The Republican party is obsessed with children � in the creepiest of ways
This article is more than 1 year old
Osita Nwanevu

For all their posturing about defending children from abuse, their record
tells another story
Wed 30 Mar 2022 08.46 EDT
Last modified on Fri 1 Apr 2022 11.32 EDT

Republicans have kids on the brain. Over the course of the last year,
conservative activists and Republican state lawmakers have been whipping
up a set of interrelated moral panics over the supposed indoctrination of
children in our schools and child abuse � from the notion that elementary
school teachers are raising up junior divisions of the Black Panthers
with critical race theory to the insistence that trans people, who today
comprise less than half a percent of high-school athletes in the United
States, might soon bring an end to girls� sports. The word �grooming� is
now in wide circulation on the right ? � a dogwhistle that implies basic
education on LGBT identity and sex is priming kids for predation, perhaps
at the hands of the Satanic sex traffickers at the heart of QAnon�s
conspiracy theories.

All of this spilled into last week�s confirmation hearings for US supreme
court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which Senate Republicans did their
best to derail by mischaracterizing her sentencing on cases on child
sexual abuse images. As has been widely reported, those sentences had
been entirely in keeping with sentences delivered by most federal judges
in comparable cases, including sentences delivered by Trump judicial
appointees with broad Republican support. But that mattered not a whit to
Republicans on the Hill. �Every judge who does what you�re doing is
making it easier for the children to be exploited,� Lindsey Graham told
Jackson in a heated exchange. Ted Cruz accused Jackson of �a record of
activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that stems back
decades�.
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And Josh Hawley, best-known for defending Donald Trump�s allegations of
election fraud and cheering on the rioters at the Capitol on January 6,
led the pack with a fusillade of similar attacks on Jackson at the
hearings and on social media. �I�ve noticed an alarming pattern when it
comes to Judge Jackson�s treatment of sex offenders, especially those
preying on children,� he tweeted ahead of the hearings. �Judge Jackson
has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their
appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker.�

Again, the Republican attacks on Jackson�s record, like the rest of their
fearmongering about kids these days, have been ludicrous. It is true,
though, that one of our parties has proven itself remarkably willing to
defend sexual predators in recent years.

Here�s a genuinely alarming pattern the senator should take an interest
in. In 2016, former Republican speaker of the House Dennis Hastert ?was
convicted for trying to pay off men he had sexually abused as a high
school wrestling coach. His victims had been boys between the ages of 14
and 17 at the time. After Hastert had pleaded guilty to making a set of
payments, Hastert�s legal team compiled 41 letters in defense of his
character from friends and former colleagues, including Republican
congressmen David Dreier, Porter Goss, John Doolittle, Thomas Ewing, and
the former Republican House majority whip Tom DeLay. �We all have our
flaws, but Dennis Hastert has very few,� Delay wrote. �I ask that you
consider the man that is before you and give him leniency where you can.�
Unmoved, US district judge Thomas M Durkin sentenced Hastert to over a
year in prison. �Nothing is more stunning,� he said, �than to have the
words �serial child molester� and �speaker of the House� in the same
sentence.�

The Hastert case might have stunned more people if Americans hadn�t been
busy following the 2016 campaign, with its flurry of sex and other
scandals, at the time. But the sexual misconduct allegations that had
piled up against Donald Trump, from well over a dozen women by the year�s
end, have since been mostly forgotten by the press and the public ?�
including allegations from five contestants in Trump�s Miss Teen USA
pageants that he would walk into dressing rooms while girls as young as
15 were changing. Notably, Trump had previously boasted to Howard Stern
that he would intentionally walk in on undressing contestants in the
adult Miss USA pageants. �You know, they�re standing there with no
clothes,� he�d said in an appearance on Stern�s show. �And you see these
incredible-looking women ?� so I sort of get away with things like that.�
?In fairness to Trump, a number of Miss Teen USA contestants either
directly disputed the recollections of his accusers, or told reporters
they couldn�t remember Trump being present in the dressing rooms.

What is not in dispute is that Trump also happened to enjoy a friendship
of well over a decade with Jeffrey Epstein. This past December, a former
Miss Teen USA contestant testifying at the sex-trafficking trial of
Ghislaine Maxwell told the court that she had met Trump through Epstein
at the age of 14. That raises more questions about whether Trump knew of
Epstein�s activities ?� in 2002, he�d told a reporter that Epstein liked
women �on the younger side� ?� although it�s not at all obvious how much
he would have cared if he had. After Maxwell�s arrest in July 2020, Trump
told reporters that he had interacted with Maxwell socially �numerous
times� but hadn�t been following the case closely. �I just wish her well,
frankly,� he said.

Incredibly, Maxwell wasn�t the first accused accused sexual offender
Trump had wished well from the White House. In 2017, Alabama�s Republican
Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of romantically and sexually
pursuing teenagers while in his 30s, including a woman who told the
Washington Post that Moore had molested her when she was 14. �On a second
visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his
clothes,� the Post reported. �He touched her over her bra and underpants,
she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.�

Initially, Republicans met the allegations � which Moore denies � with
the kind of response one would expect from a responsible major party. The
Republican National Committee pulled its support from the campaign, and
Republican leaders including Republican party chairwoman Ronna Romney
McDaniel and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell called on Moore to
step aside. Then, about a month after the allegations broke, Trump
officially endorsed Moore by tweet. And, on the very same day, the
Republican National Committee recommitted itself to the Moore campaign.
�The RNC is the political arm of the president,� a senior RNC official
explained, �and we support the president.�

This is worth repeating. In 2017, the Republican party now babbling
nonsense about public schools and LGBTQ people grooming children for
sexual abuse ?� the party that spent the past week in the Senate arguing
that Democrats are soft on pedophiles ?� officially backed a credibly
accused child molester for election to that very body. If the Republican
National Committee had gotten its way, there�s a chance we would have
spent the past week hearing Roy Moore opine on Jackson�s ethical
qualifications. It�s a mercy of sorts that we heard instead from the
likes of Hawley who, as the White House noted earlier this month, refused
to say whether he�d vote for Moore during his own campaign.

The Republican party�s ambivalence on child abuse extends beyond pure
politics and the protection of accused politicians. Nearly 300,000
children between the ages of 15 to 17 were married in the United States
between 2000 and 2018. An estimated 60,000 of them were below the age of
sexual consent in their respective states; it�s thought that roughly 80%
of American child marriages overall are between girls under 18 and adult
men. Activists across the country have been pushing hard against those
figures over the last few years. And while resistance to child marriage
bans can be found on both sides of the ideological spectrum ?� which one
would expect given that child marriage was legal in all 50 states as
recently as 2017 � some of the most dogged defenders of the status quo
have been red-state Republicans. Not long ago, for instance, the Kansas
City Star called Josh Hawley�s state of Missouri �a destination wedding
spot for 15-year-old brides� � especially ones who had been impregnated
by men, thanks to uncommonly lax laws that facilitated the marriages of
more than 7,000 children between 2000 and 2014.

When a ban on marriages to children 14 or younger advanced by a
Republican party representative came up for a vote in February 2018, it
was opposed by 50 members of the Missouri house � two Democrats and 48
members of her own party. Thankfully, that bill still passed the chamber,
and a comprehensive ban on all marriages of adults over 21 to children
under 18 was signed into law in Missouri later that year. But the
significance of Republican lawmakers� hesitation wasn�t lost on the
marriage ban�s advocates. �Last week they were arguing that the
government should be involved in approving a minor�s abortion,� Missouri
representative Peter Merideth told the Riverfront Times after February�s
vote. �So it�s a mind-boggling contrast when a minor who�s not even old
enough to enter into a legally binding contract is being told they can
enter into a relationship that makes statutory rape legal.�

It�s no mystery why Hawley and other Republicans are more interested in
inventing child abuses and a record of leniency for abusers among
Democrats than they are in criticizing their own party�s tolerance for
predators. The more interesting question is why Democrats haven�t
discredited the right�s narratives on this front more forcefully. While
the party�s hands aren�t fully clean ?� Bill Clinton was on Epstein�s
flights too, after all ?� the hesitance to engage more aggressively
probably has less to do with that than it does with their preference for
a particular mode of response to Republican attacks in general.

Feigned surprise and the performance of indignation have been the twin
pillars of Democratic counter-messaging for as long as anyone can
remember. Pundits have puzzled about the lack of cover Dick Durbin and
Senate Democrats offered to Jackson over the course of the hearings; one
explanation that makes as much sense as any other is that Democrats
assumed the attacks on Jackson would backfire naturally and make Senate
Republicans look bad ahead of November�s midterms. Time will tell if they
were right, but we have ample reason to doubt it. They�re running against
a party that�s repeatedly defended the abusers of children with few
lasting electoral consequences ?� a party whose hypocrisies rarely
matter.

Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist