The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways
For all their posturing about defending children from abuse, their record tells another story
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”.
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.”
