Grooming, No Not About Fluffy

Grooming is the new buzzword that the Republicans are using to generate hate. The way the Republicans use it is transphobic and homophobic slur.

Accusations of 'grooming' are the latest political attack — with homophobic origins
NPR
By Melissa Block
May 11, 2022


Mallory McMorrow was stunned when she saw it.

With horror, the Michigan state senator, a Democrat, read an email accusing her of "grooming" children. The email was sent by a fellow senator, Republican Lana Theis, who was soliciting funds from her supporters for her reelection campaign.

In that email, Theis wrote that children are "under assault in our schools" by what she called "progressive mobs trying to steal our children's innocence."

And then it got personal.

"She accused me by name of grooming and wanting to sexualize kindergartners," McMorrow tells NPR. "I mean, my heart absolutely sank."

McMorrow says she kept thinking about her 1-year-old daughter, Noa.

You have to understand the origins of the word “grooming” and it is…

"You know, grooming is the act of befriending a child for the purpose of molesting them," she says. "Just the most horrific, disgusting, vile accusation that can be thrown at you."

Lately, that accusation has been thrown at those who support LGBTQ rights —teachers, companies, politicians — in addition to McMorrow: "Grooming" has become an incendiary buzzword of right-wing rhetoric, weaponized in the fight over anti-LGBTQ legislation.

It is a vile term that the Republicans and conservatives are using just for political gains. Not only that but are causing emotional harm to people who are victims of child abuse. USA Today reported that...

Some conservatives have begun using words like "grooming" often associated with child sex abuse.

Such rhetoric hurts the LGBTQ people, particularly gay men who have long been accused of predatory behavior.

Careless use of words connected to child sex abuse diminishes the experience of survivors, advocates say.

And in another NPR article,

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

One word features in a lot of recent right-wing rhetoric, and that word is grooming.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT")

TUCKER CARLSON: They're grooming 7-year-olds and talking to 7-year-olds about their sex lives.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE INGRAHAM ANGLE")

LAURA INGRAHAM: This isn't programming. This is propaganda for grooming.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

J D VANCE: If you don't want to be called a groomer, don't try to sexualize 6- and 7-year-old children.

INSKEEP: OK. That was Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, along with Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, just a few of those who've been pushing a baseless accusation. NPR's Melissa Block reports it is a smear with a history.

Republicans are not running a campaign about the issues instead they are running their campaigns on issues that are wedge issues and using transphobia and homophobia to create fear.

We have seen this since the 1970s Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign and the 1950s with the Lavender Scare and. NBC News had an article on Bryant last month in it they said,

Action had to be taken, and a campaign to limit the legal rights of LGBTQ people — all in the name of protecting children — was enacted. A woman who spoke at this hearing said it was her right to control “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up.” That woman was Anita Bryant, formerly Miss Oklahoma and a white, telegenic, Top 40 singer who was well known for her Florida orange juice commercials (“A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!” she’d say). Bryant spearheaded an anti-LGBTQ campaign of such impact that its echoes can be heard in today’s rhetoric. The year was 1977.

[…]

“It’s a contemporary version on these older attempts to annul homosexuality,” said Lillian Faderman, author of “The Gay Revolution,” among other queer history titles.

“In the present environment, you can’t go after homosexual teachers anymore,” Faderman said. “We have too many allies. And so Florida has found another way to do it by this ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which doesn’t go after homosexual teachers precisely. But the idea is the same. That is, that homosexuality is a pariah status, and it shouldn’t be discussed in the public schools.” 

It is staring again, all the hate, all the discrimination, and all the bigotry. Time in their article, "You've Probably Heard of the Red Scare, but the Lesser-Known, Anti-Gay 'Lavender Scare' Is Rarely Taught in Schools" [In an early version of what is now call "Critical Race Theory" otherwise know as censorship, we can't have our children learn of what bad people we were back then.] wrote:

What happened to Shoemaker [Shoemaker was an employee of the National Security Agency who was fired because he was gay.] in 1980 was the continuation of a policy launched nearly 30 years earlier, in 1953. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government became policy. Known as the “Lavender Scare,” the policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters,” says historian David K. Johnson. According to him, this aspect of American history has largely been overlooked.

The Republicans are at it again Transphobia & Homophobia 2.0.

But thanks to social media it is more robust than the 1970 attempt to stir up hate against us is on steroids.