Republicans: Party of Sex Pests

Republican attempts to portray ordinary gay people as “groomers” are happening for the same reason Republicans continually accuse Democrats of cheating in elections:

In 2006, Florida Rep. Mark Foley was forced to resign after it was revealed that he’d sent sexually explicit messages and propositioned teenage congressional pages via email and text.

In 2015, former Rep. Dennis Hastert, the longest-ever serving Republican speaker of the House, pleaded guilty to making illegal hush-money payments in order to cover up his history of sexually abusing high school wrestlers he had coached decades before.

“Nothing is more stunning than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence,” the judge said at his sentencing.

During and after the 2016 presidential race, among the dozens of women who accused former president Donald Trump of being a sexual predator were several contestants in the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant, who reported that he barged into their dressing room while girls as young as 15 were changing. (Trump allegedly told them, “Don’t worry, ladies, I’ve seen it all before.”)

His campaign denied the accusation, but CNN unearthed a 2005 Howard Stern interview where Trump bragged about walking into backstage dressing rooms at the pageants he ran.

During the 2018 midterms, Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of preying on girls as young as 14 and 16; the New Yorker reported that his habit of trying to pick up high schoolers was so notorious that it actually got him banned from a local mall.

Also in 2018, Rep. Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s fiercest allies and a co-founder of the hardline conservative Freedom Caucus, became embroiled in a scandal over his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, where a team doctor named Richard Strauss, who committed suicide in 2005, was found to have sexually abused more than 177 male student athletes.

An investigation commissioned by the university found that Strauss regularly used examinations as an excuse to grope and fondle the students, sometimes to the point of ejaculation; often ordered them to strip nude unnecessarily; and in two cases, attempted to perform oral sex. Numerous former wrestlers told reporters that Jordan was personally aware of the abuse during the early 1990s but chose to turn a blind eye. The Congressman simply denied having any knowledge of it—and suggested at least one of the accusers claiming otherwise was acting on a personal vendetta against him.

And finally, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida is currently the subject of a literal sex-trafficking investigation, which is looking into whether he had sex with an underage 17-year-old girl, among other issues. (Greene is close with Gaetz, who denies the allegations, and has defended him).

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The way Republicans set aside the vast array of sexual abuse charges against Trump and lined up behind him has been discussed so many times that there’s no real need to go over it again. The party’s response to Moore, meanwhile, was what you might describe as, well, semi-pathetic. To their credit, a number of elected Republicans called on Moore to exit the race or said they would vote for a write-in candidate, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee pulled its funding from his campaign.

The Republican National Committee did as well, at least briefly.

But after Donald Trump decided to re-endorse Moore, the RNC resumed its support of his candidacy, stating, “We stand with the president.”

When it came to Jordan, congressional Republicans simply circled the wagons. In 2018, then House Speaker Paul Ryan waved off demands for an ethics committee inquiry into whether Jordan was lying about his conduct as a wrestling coach, saying that the panel “​​investigates things that members do while they’re here, not things that happened a couple of decades ago when they weren’t in Congress.”

He then called Jordan “a man of honesty and a man of integrity.”

And this doesn’t even mention Tucker Calson, an explicit defender of “grooming” projecting his own neuroses onto ordinary schoolteachers. Using accusations of pedophilia to justify attacks on speech is the very definition of Republican cynicism.