From "grooming" to "child abduction": Right's slurs get more bizarre

[Nevilledog]

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Kathryn Joyce
@kathrynajoyce
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"It's basic demagoguery—a blood libel to get people out with pitchforks." After VA students' walk out last week, the right is targeting its organizers with a new narrative: that LGBTQ people aren’t just "grooming" kids but "kidnapping" them too. New @Salon

salon.com
From "grooming" to "child abduction": Right's slurs get more bizarre
A student-led group in Virginia promised to protect trans kids. That sparked a massive right-wing freakout
5:02 AM · Oct 6, 2022

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/06/from-grooming-to-child-abduction-rights-accusations-against-lgbtq-advocates-get-even-worse/

Last spring, as the right began using the word "grooming" as a slur against LGBTQ people and their allies, journalist Melissa Gira Grant noted at the New Republic that the word provided a way to "say both the quiet and the loud part." Contorting a term long used to describe real instances of child sex abuse into a weapon to be deployed against LGBTQ people and commonplace policies — for example, that their existence can and should be acknowledged in schools — was the "loud" part. It was a shocking but pithy means of demonization; as Gira Grant wrote, the "right is using the reality of child abuse to raise unfounded fears and panic about criminal and predatory behavior hiding in plain sight." The quiet part was the secondary implication: If one's "enemies" really are "an ill-defined yet pervasive threat to children, what wouldn't be justified in stopping them?"

This week, that quiet part got noticeably louder, as right-wing activists escalated the already-dangerous rhetoric of "grooming" — language that multiple social media platforms have banned from use as an insult related to LGBTQ issues — and graduated into claims that LGBTQ people and liberals are literally kidnapping and trafficking children.

There's a backstory: Last week in Virginia, some 12,000 high school students at close to 100 schools walked out of their classes to protest new guidelines proposed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin on how Virginia's public schools should handle transgender students. In 2020, Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation requiring school districts to adopt policies granting students access to bathrooms and facilities that correspond with their gender identity, using students' requested names and pronouns, and protecting students' privacy related to sensitive issues like gender or sexuality. But to Youngkin, who was swept into office last fall on a wave of anger around "parents' rights," those guidelines were "a big mistake" that "excluded parents" from vital decisions, as the governor told "Fox & Friends" last weekend.

So last month, Youngkin proposed a new set of guidelines, which are currently under a 30-day public comment period that has already drawn close to 60,000 responses. Under the proposal, trans students would be compelled to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their biological sex at birth; parents must give written permission before teachers can use students' preferred pronouns or names; students can't talk to school counselors about their gender without parental permission; and, perhaps most important, schools can't conceal any information they learn about students' gender identity from their parents.

*snip*

[regnaD kciN]

1. I'm waiting for them to go full Nazi/LaRouchian...

…and declare that the LGBTQ (like Jews) are a different species from humans, and must be destroyed if the human race is to survive.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

2. Lying and libel need to be seen

As a separate thing from free speech. Its libel and abuse.

[Timeflyer]

3. Who puts the reThug glossary together for them? Maybe Steve Bannon?

They seem to get simultaneous memos alerting them to the latest agreed-upon lingo implying that Dems and liberals are demons who eat babies. Then the same slurs show up everywhere, like "woke" and "parent's rights" and "grooming", shorthand to get emotional reactions in the reThug base.