Underemphasized how much "groomer!" stuff is fueled by how big conservative institutions—Catholic & Southern Baptist, Boy Scouts, school athletics—have been rocked for years now by actual examples of powerful people molesting kids and covering it up. It's a redirection of that real trauma response.
You see it mentioned as an accusation of hypocrisy, and it is. But it's deeper than that. They intuitively blame gay rights and the end of the closet for bringing that all out into the open, and in a sense they're not wrong about that. And the accusation seems so plausible because they've seen it.
"There's a cabal of elite pedophiles using their power to hide a massive conspiracy to abuse kids" doesn't sound like delusional crazy talk when the institutions that form the pillars of your community and culture have been repeatedly exposed as doing exactly that.
To Joe's point about the media, it's true it's particularly glaring and inexcusable to gloss over or ignore it in the case of Jim Jordan. But it's a connection that needs to be made more aggressively. The Rufos of the world need to be directly challenged on it and coverage of them should mention it.
Their accusations against LGBT people are not just factually meritless. They're projection. For most, probably not consciously. For some, like Rufo and at least some politicians, I have no doubt they're both aware of the dynamic and deliberately use it.
Almost zero mainstream coverage of groomer panic antics has mentioned this connection, and that has been a real failing on the part of the media. It is a huge part of the story, really the central element of it. It's not an unrelated cheap shot, it's essential for understanding what's going on.
I dunno, I'm not sure I even think "projection" quite captures it. It's... it's more of a conceptual definitions thing? And a supremely Orwellian, "freedom is slavery" one.
By "grooming" they mean raising people to believe that they have agency in their own lives and aren't obliged...
...to conform to a particular patriarchal role
They're not confused about this! They know that's what they mean, they just sincerely (on some level) think that's "bad for kids" insofar as it leads them into sin
With the homophobia angle, it's worth remembering that child abuse is a crime of opportunity. Sports coaches are more likely to have access to children of the same sex, and altar servers were always boys until quite recently.
I've been saying this since forever; the grain of truth upon which *anon rests is that there really is an international conspiracy to protect and enable pedophiles hidden in plain sight within a church ostensibly dedicated to an loving god. It was exposed. All of it.
Nothing happened.
ive been adjacent to horrendous child abuse and molestation my entire childhood and life, not from the queer community, but from my roman catholic church where a classmate was molested and the priest vanished without explanation, baseball coaches caught molesting kids at camp,
In retrospect, not even counting my own direct experiences, I saw that happen with pastors, teachers, coaches, Scout troop leaders... and for each of those, plural. And that was all over the course of a few years as a teenager in a small Southern town with only about 5000 people.
It really is a deeply pervasive cultural problem. And stigmatization of homosexuality is a huge part of enabling it, though not the only part. Opposite-sex abuse certainly happens a ton, too.
It’s projection too, by redefining child sexual abuse as simply being gay or trans in their vicinity, their continued support of actual mass grooming and sexual abuse is deflected and absolved. Same play as redefining anti-Semitism as just opposition to Israeli human rights abuses a
It's misdirection. And, I think, signalling - they call trans people groomers with a little wink to their right-wing chums because they, too, are in on the scam.
It’s weird to think of the Boy Scouts as a conservative institution per se, since I came up in the 90s when liberals were on balance seemed poised to win the culture war fights before liberal orgs cut support, leaving national completely at the mercy of conservative churches for support and access.
Conservative churches (primarily LDS) had been taking over well before that & eventually started pushing so hard on the "no gays/athiests/etc" angles that most troops never gave a shit about. the national org coming down hard on locals was what forced liberal orgs to start parting ways
I suppose I was understanding it backwards, from the north being not caring about these issues (it did really feel like they were going to be dropped at some point) to the increased conservative pressures on the group.
Yo!
Yeah, I hit my breaking point with exTwitter and this place is definitely the alternative that has the most energy and where many people I used to follow over there have gone.
It's almost like and hear me out on this Nazis create problems they know will be extremely damaging and then run around pointing the finger at everyone else to get stupid people all riled up.
