The GOP Is Fanning the False "Groomer" Myth

The political right in America has a long history of creating bogeymen to scare and intimidate middle of the road voters into supporting their anti-equality agenda.  Once of the most pernicious is the "groomer" myth that gays "recruit" and are a threat to children and youths.  Never mind that the vast majority of pedophiles and sexual predators are HETEROSEXUAL males, typically white, and that medical science now knows the causes of homosexuality and that it has nothing to do with recruitment or grooming. Sadly, the political right rarely lets the truth get in the way of their agenda which can be summed up as opposing social change that lesses the dominance of white evangel "Christians."  A lengthy piece in Politico looks at the history of the "groomer" myth that was largely fomented and championed by opponents of desegregation, school busing for racial integration, and equal rights for women. What we are witnessing today is a resurrection of an anti-LGBT and anti-accurate history effort that has existed for half a century.  Perhaps not coincidentally, much of the rise of the "groomer" myth began in Florida with Anita Bryant and similar opportunists who put their own social dominance over the rights and safety of racial and sexual minorities.  Indeed the forces at work in Florida today are a revival of the racist and anti-gay efforts seen in the 1970's.  Here are article highlights:

In December 2016, with the world still reeling from Donald Trump’s surprise victory against Hillary Clinton just weeks before, Edgar Welch, a North Carolina native, opened fire inside a popular pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., Comet Ping Pong. Welch had gone down a social media rabbit hole and convinced himself that a ring of predators, led by Clinton, was abusing and trafficking children inside the pizzeria.

As the political columnist Jonathan Chait observed, back in 2016, “the pedophilia charge was confined almost entirely to QAnon. … And while some of the details produced by its theories would find their way into the minds of Trump and his inner circle . . . . the broader narrative that American politics was a fight over pedophilia remained marginal.”

No longer so. Conservative politicians and commentators loosely and frequently accuse opponents of being “groomers” and “pedos.” It’s an ugly slur that conservatives use to target gay and trans people, and really, anyone who advocates for gay and trans rights, or simply a more civil and open society in which gay and trans people can live their lives openly and freely.

It’s not just the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. It’s the editor of the Federalist. Leading figures inside the Manhattan Institute. Fox News Host Laura Ingraham. Rep. Jim Banks, the former head of the Republican Study Committee. Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, and herself a conservative pundit. Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, whose own tweets as of late would suggest a sharp turn to the right. And countless local and state elected officials and activists.

If this all seems unhinged, it’s not unprecedented. In the 1960s and ’70s, conservative opponents of school integration, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights coalesced around a similar narrative. They wrapped concerns about social and cultural change in a grim warning that America’s children were the target of gay people who aimed to “recruit” and abuse them. In many cases, it worked. It set back LGBTQ rights in many states and localities and effectively stalled efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment.

It’s a cautionary tale. Some conservative politicians and pundits surely know that they’re spinning fantasies in the service of scoring wins. But as the Comet Pizza shooting demonstrates, too many people believe those fantasies and are willing to act on them.

When conservatives targeted LGBTQ Americans in the 1970s, their intended target, ironically, was not always or necessarily gay people. The debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s is a case in point. . . . In its final version the amendment read simply that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” . . . It seemed likely if not inevitable that the ERA would quickly win approval by the requisite 38 states and become a permanent fixture of American jurisprudence — until Phyllis Schlafly intervened.

Schlafly found a sympathetic reception among millions of women who agreed that the traditional family was “the basic unit of society, which is ingrained in the laws and customs of Judeo-Christian civilization [and] is the greatest single achievement of women’s rights,” and that the ERA was “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.”

ERA opponents warned that the amendment would have far-reaching consequences, denying divorced women the right to alimony or subjecting women to the draft. But in language that seems eerily familiar today, they also claimed the law would compel schoolgirls and schoolboys to use the same restrooms — a charge that many feminists suspected of appealing to fears that white schoolgirls would be forced to use the same toilets as Black schoolboys.

Critically, children — and alleged dangers to children — lay at the heart of the anti-ERA movement. By making the amendment synonymous with LGBTQ rights, STOP ERA struck at fears of mixed bathrooms and “homosexual teachers.” The amendment would “legalize homosexual marriages and open the door to the adoption of children by legally married homosexual couples,” according to literature distributed by a state-level affiliate in Florida.

[O]pponents of the ERA knew what they were doing. They were creating a problem that did not exist to resist social changes that many white conservatives deeply resented.

Take, for instance, racial integration. In Florida, where the movement gained early traction, many activists associated with Women For Responsible Legislation (WFRL), the state’s leading anti-ERA organization, were veteran organizers against school desegregation and, in the 1970s, active participants in the anti-busing movement. In one breath, they warned that the ERA would create gender mixing in “gym classes,” “college dormitories” and “rest rooms.”

The anti-ERA forces continued to build on this well-established nexus between LGBTQ rights and school desegregation. In 1956, two years after Brown v. Board, the Florida legislature created the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee to stymie efforts to desegregate public schools. By the early 1960s the committee broadened its scope to probe the purported dangers that school children faced from gay men and, to a lesser degree, gay women.

The report focused largely on schools, where closeted gay teachers supposedly harbored a “desire to recruit” young boys, as “homosexuals are made by training rather than born.” It described an unnamed “athletically-built little league coach in West Florida” who “lived at home with his mother” and “systematically seduced the members of the baseball team into the performance of homosexual acts.” . . . . The homosexual’s goal is to ‘bring over’ the young person, to hook him for homosexuality.”

In much the same way that conservatives today see a far-reaching conspiracy to groom and traffic schoolchildren, a special investigator who cooperated with the committee lamented that “the homosexuals are organized . . . . Ten years later, as they organized against the ERA, conservative activists in Florida and elsewhere well understood how to crystalize opposition against school integration and LGBTQ rights into grassroots opposition to women’s equality. They understood it because so many of them were pioneer organizers in all three efforts.

Florida was hardly the only state to give rise to anti-integration, anti-ERA or anti-LGBTQ activism. Boston, the cradle of liberty, was arguably the poster child for the anti-busing movement, and in 1978 California nearly passed a ballot initiative that would have barred gay teachers from employment in public schools.

But Florida seemed always at the center of the fight. In 1977, country and western singer Anita Bryant, a resident of Miami, Florida, spearheaded a successful effort to pass a referendum overturning a city ordinance extending standard civil rights protections to gays and lesbians. . . . Bryant denounced a “life style that is both perverse and dangerous” and won plaudits from other conservative Christian leaders for her efforts to “stop the homosexuals in their campaign for equal rights.”

Critically, children — and made-up threats to their safety — were at the heart of Bryant’s campaign. Her organization, after all, was named Save Our Children (SOC). Claiming a fundamental threat to her right to dictate “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up,” she presaged today’s activists in portraying schools as the front line of the era’s culture wars. . . . Unsurprisingly, many of SOC’s leaders were veterans of the state’s anti-busing and anti-school desegregation movement.

[C]onservative activists, . . . . were successful at creating a bogeyman that focused the fears of many middle-of-the-road voters. That bogeyman was the child predator — gay, prurient and dangerous. He turned schools and libraries into recruitment (aka, “grooming”) forums. And he had to be stopped.

That’s roughly where we are today, as local and state governments from Tennessee and Idaho, to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to Ohio and New York, seek to ban or restrict public drag shows, remove books addressing LGBTQ-related topics from schools or restrict what teachers can say about sexuality or race in the classroom. As in the 1960s and 1970s, the voices warning of predatory grooming are often the same ones opposing other bogeymen, like “Critical Race Theory.” Then as now, the opposition nexus unifies broader concerns about the pace and nature of social change.

History does not inevitably repeat itself. This moment could prove fleeting. But conservative success in the 1970s in fabricating threats to children, then rallying people to organize around them, offers cold comfort to those who view this form of retrenchment with a worried eye. And as Comet Pizza should have taught us, when you play with fire, people can get hurt.