"The Republican party is obsessed with children - in the creepiest of ways"

[TygrBright]

From The Guardian: The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways

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.

The whole article is spot-on and well worth reading. Good analysis, although I don't entirely agree with the author's take on why Democrats aren't doing a better job of dealing with this stuff. To my mind it's the continuing "Don't get into the mudpit with the pigs and try to wrestle" philosophy that the Party has adopted for so long.

And generally, I agree with that approach. But I would love to see Democrats doing a better job of pointing out the whole "They accuse others of what they are doing themselves, to distract and divert attention from their own crimes" reality that has become the pervasive GOP self-protection strategy.

disgustedly,
Bright

[LakeArenal]

1. I got a hide for one of the sentences in your 4th paragraph.

Even tho it’s true. Hope yours doesn’t.