There was a time when a groomer was a predatory grown-up preparing to molest a kid. Then Christopher Rufo, the activist who did more than anyone else to inject the term into today's politics, redefined it as a "spectrum of behavior." Children, he tweeted in 2022, "can be groomed into a sexual identity, groomed into an ideological system, and, in some cases, yes, groomed for abuse." The rhetorical aim was clear: It was a way to raise the specter of the child molester without having to demonstrate that any specific person is a child molester.
That specter has long haunted our culture wars. Whenever a sexual minority's legal rights or social status seems to be increasing, someone is certain to raise the alarm that Pedo Power will surely be next. In 1994, as gay freedom was becoming a mainstream cause, the head of the right-leaning Rutherford Institute claimed that "the logical implication of American acceptance of homosexuality is the acceptance of pedophilia as simply another form of 'sexual orientation.'" In 2004, with gay marriage a central issue in the year's elections, the head of Liberty Counsel wrote that "Once the same-sex marriage barrier is broken, a wide range of sexual paraphilia rights are sure to follow, including, but not limited to, pedophilia." In 2015, right after the Supreme Court's Obergefell ruling struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, the prominent Texas Republican Allen West circulated an article about pedophile advocates under the header "That was FAST: Yesterday it was gay marriage; Now look who wants 'equal rights.'" (The article was actually several years old.) In 2022, with a new group in the culture-war crosshairs, The Federalist ran a feature headlined "Why Accepting Child Transgenderism Will Pave The Way For Accepting Pedophilia."
