Alt-right blames gays for paedophilia

The religious right in the US is rapidly becoming the American Taliban. South Africa’s alt-right is adopting some of its most hateful memes.

There’s an appalling narrative emerging from the alt-right that… well, I’ll let a cartoon that the anti-vax diet-peddler Tim Noakes retweeted do the explaining:

This view, that advocating equality and social acceptance of sexual orientations and gender identities other than cis-heterosexual is a stalking horse for great evil, is a classic propaganda technique.

When whipping up public hatred for a particular group, you have to establish the belief that this group does evil things. This is as transparent an attempt at demonising lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, queer and allied (LGBTQ+) people as the anti-Semitic cartoons of pre-war Europe were an attempt at demonising Jews.

Here’s an example of the latter:

This 1934 front page of Der Stürmer, a pro-Nazi German tabloid newspaper, was translated and published in 1976 in the Christian Vanguard, itself a newspaper of the New Christian Crusade Church, which espoused white-supremacist so-called ‘Christian Identity’ values. The original can be seen here.

Likewise, the campaign against homosexuality has, from the start, included appeals to ‘save our children’.

Deleted

Noakes subsequently deleted that retweet, and it appears both him and Jeremy Nell, the cartoonist better known as Jerm, deleted the following exchange, too:

So, according to Noakes, they’re trying to legalise paedophilia in the United States, and according to Jerm, people who support ‘LGBTQ stuff’ almost always support child grooming and paedophilia.

These claims are absurd, of course, but they make it clear that the political context for their hysteria comes largely from the American culture wars.

In that country, right-wing politicians are busily trying to get all teaching that promotes understanding, tolerance, and acceptance of gay people out of schools. In fact, they go one further, and seek to eliminate all literature from schools that makes reference to sex, and especially non-heterosexual relationships.

They use outrageous deceptions, such as circulating video clips of adult-oriented drag shows at which children were (but shouldn’t have been) present, to claim that all drag shows are akin to strip shows, and that this demonstrates initiatives such as Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries essentially amount to sexualising and grooming children.

They cannot tolerate that children are being taught that they are free to be who they are and express their gender however they wish.

Amusingly, the very laws designed to keep supposed filth out of schools can equally be applied to the Bible, which contains some seriously dodgy tales of rape, incest, and polygamy, not to mention slavery, murdering children and committing genocide against innocent people, all condoned by God.

Bogeyman

Of course, nobody is trying to legalise or decriminalise paedophilia in the United States, as Noakes claims, or anywhere else. That’s just a bogeyman to fuel the hatred.

He approvingly retweets a comment claiming that the term ‘minor-attracted person’, or MAP, is part of the process of ‘normalising’ paedophilia.

That is not true. The term has been in use for many years by academics and organisations who work to prevent child sexual abuse. The reason is that the DSM V, the big book of psychiatry, contains a specific, narrow definition of paedophilia which does not cover all cases.

In dealing with people who do, or might, abuse children, it is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of attraction (romantic, friendship, sexual), between different cases (offending, non-offending), and between attraction to different age groups (pre-pubescent, pubescent, adolescent).

That means specialist terms are needed to describe each of these, as well as an umbrella term, to describe all of these. That term is ‘minor attracted persons’.

This is a term of academic rigour, not a way to an attempt to normalise or legalise the sexual abuse of children.

Nor is it true that one can generalise from a few anecdotal outlier cases to an entire class of people, as Jerm and Noakes both do.

The association between homosexuality and paedophilia, or rather, the lack of association, is discussed in considerable detail in this essay by Dr. Gregory M. Herek, one of the most influential scholars on prejudice against sexual minorities.

And here’s a study (albeit an old one) that finds gay people do not abuse children at a higher rate than straight people.

Suggesting that LGBTQ+ people are, or support, or give cover to, or tolerate child molesters is a hateful calumny, and not a subject worthy of serious debate.

One could, with far more justification, demonise churches as a stalking horse for paedophiles. And not only the Catholic Church; the major Protestant denominations have also been entangled in child molestation scandals. New revelations about nefarious churchmen are surprisingly routine, nowadays.

Hateful pair

When I called Noakes and Jerm a hateful pair of bigots on Twitter, the people who support them in their anti-LGBTQ+ crusade soon explained to me that even in South Africa, sex education for school children amounts to ‘soft porn’. (It doesn’t.)

They are also outraged that this education extends to non-heterosexual relationships, because that goes against their religion, they claim (sounding suspiciously like the Taliban).

Because I defended LGBTQ+ people, they said I give off ‘paedo vibes’. They claim LGBTQ+ people ‘take out their dicks’ for school children. It is truly outrageous what lies people will come up with to justify their hateful prejudices.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which thousands of unsubstantiated cases of ritual abuse were concocted to instill fear of a global elite cult who sought to abduct children for sacrifice, prostitution or pornography.

Sex education

These are people who are offended that children get taught about sex at all. They call this ‘sexualisation’, as if sex education has some sinister agenda.

Ironically, sex education designed to help children understand the changes in their bodies and how sex works, also teaches them about consent, and gives them the tools to identify and defend themselves against grooming and molestation.

The hysterics claim they’re against grooming and sexual abuse, but in fact they oppose giving children the knowledge to avoid it.

That threat of abuse, almost always, comes from people the children know and trust: their parents, their siblings, their uncles and aunts (yes, women can be child molesters too), their youth pastors, their priests, their sports coaches, their teachers.

The threat rarely, if ever, comes from drag queens or other queer people.

But no, the religious right wants us to believe that the real crime is sex education, literature that references sex or non-heterosexual relationships, and education designed to instill tolerance and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people.

Education breeds abstinence

The hysterics are entirely ignorant of the fact that young people who actually experienced modern, liberal sex education, though much less religious than their parents, abstain from sex for far longer than older generations. So much so that psychologists are worrying about their mental health.

If the religious right is against sex, which it is outside of marriage, they ought to be encouraging the kind of education about sex and tolerance that children receive today.

It is true that some alarming left-wing ideas are being introduced into education, against which we ought to guard. Critical theory in general, and critical race theory in particular, is among them. Sex education, and teaching acceptance of sexual and gender diversity, whether in themselves or among others, are not.

Beyond the pale

More importantly, however, demonising gay, queer, or trans people as if they pose a grave threat to children is hateful and malicious. It is beyond the pale.

This is what hanging out in alt-right circles does to you. It feeds you hateful propaganda and turns you into a bigot. First it’s trans people, then it’s gay people, then it’s immigrants (as code for black and brown people), then it’s doctors or scientists or big business, and before you know it, you’ll be a God-fearing White Pride Patriot, railing against the global elites who practice Satanic rituals and run paedophile rings.

If schools are teaching children not to hate LGBTQ+ people, and that they are themselves free to express their identity however they wish without fear of discrimination, I’m all for it.

If parents want to teach their children that homosexuality is a sin, or some other bigotry masquerading as religious ‘morality’, they can do that at home. But then they don’t get to accuse perfectly innocent people of child abuse.

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR

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