When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis began banning books from public schools throughout his state, he justified his actions by claiming that he was protecting children from dangerous material. At the top of this supposed list of concerns, DeSantis and his Republican supporters insisted they were stopping "groomers" and other pedophiles from targeting young people. Literature promoting LGBTQ rights and other liberal ideas are, according to these conservatives, surreptitiously indoctrinating children and making it easier for adults to molest them.
This, of course, is not true. And yet that DeSantis and his peers on the right have latched on to an outlandish conspiracy theory regarding grooming — one that links pedophilia to LGBTQ rights — speaks to the political power of this narrative, which is compelling and motivating to a huge number of voters.
It is also not a new narrative. Whether they know it or not, DeSantis and his ilk are using a tactic that existed for decades, one that can easily be explained using basic psychology. And as far as psychological tactics go, the pedophilia/groomer social panic is one that has been successful at manipulating voters for decades.
"The Right has a long history of using accusations of pedophilia to target its political opponents."
"The Right has a long history of using accusations of pedophilia to target its political opponents," says Violet Lhant, Public Education and Research Coordinator at the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign.
Lhant cited the Lavender Scare, which coincided in the mid-20th century with the McCarthy era witch-hunts against alleged Communists. During that period in American history, right-wingers led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, created a social panic that increased their power during the Cold War as the nation became more and more irrationally frightened. These conservatives prominently scapegoated homosexuals, starting with a 1950 report by a Senate subcommittee called "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government." At the time, they argued that LGBTQ government officials posed a security risk because they could easily be blackmailed due to an inherently "weak character" or by threats of exposure.
In addition, McCarthy-era conservatives realized that if they equated LGBTQ people with pedophilia, they could demonize not only the LGBTQ community but also the liberal causes more broadly. This led to the propagation of materials alleging "recruitment" campaigns targeting children among homosexual adults, with the most notorious being a 1961 short film titled "Boys Beware!"
"A few things happen if we deploy this idea that our opponents are out to sexually harm children, to sexually molest and violently assault them," Dr. Gillian Frank, who studies religion, sexuality and gender at Princeton University, told Salon. For one thing, it associates one's opponents with the worst evil that humans are capable of committing, and by rendering them in this way as monsters, obviates the usual responsibility to treat them with basic respect. It also triggers a primal instinct in every parent to protect their child, one that can then be channeled against political opponents if the parents aren't discerning enough to realize they're being manipulated. Finally (and, from a strategic standpoint, most significantly), the tactic creates a psychological dynamic which forever deflects focus away from legitimate questions about social justice.
"One of the things we need to understand about this smear is the ways in which it is deployed to not talk about the issues of social equality, economic equality, the status of people's citizenship and recognition, their right to privacy or protection," Frank explained. "We're shifting it away from all those things — rights of women, equal rights of black people, which promoted the idea that there was a sexual danger to children by virtue of granting civil rights — has been this long-standing trope." In the process, the accusation deftly transforms any attempt by marginalized groups to challenge the status quo "as existential threats to you and yours."
This trend was exemplified in the 1970s by former beauty pageant winner Anita Bryant, who spearheaded an anti-gay rights campaign to repeal a Miami-Dade County, Florida ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Dubbed "Save Our Children," Bryant's crusade claimed without evidence that efforts to protect gay people from discrimination were really covert attempts to "propose" their lifestyle to children. Bryant's crusade soon became famous far beyond the confines of the Miami metropolitan area, eventually being adopted by national Republicans and turning Bryant into a right-wing folk hero.
"The Right has a long history of using accusations of pedophilia to target its political opponents."
"The presumed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse in the American political imagination really only took hold beginning in the 1970s," Dr. Paul Renfro, Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and author of "Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State," wrote to Salon. Bryant depended on a core mythology, one which held that "gays 'must recruit the youth of America.' Today's opponents of 'grooming' use similar framing."
By the 1980s, Americans had become susceptible to unrelated moral panics that likewise perceived threats to children everywhere, from fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons to horror movies like "Silent Night, Deadly Night." In that psychologically tense climate, Lhant explains that "there was also widespread fear mongering about gay people sharing locker rooms with straight people, much like the trans debate today." The nation's mind was already fertile soil for moral panics directed at protecting children, and the anti-LGBTQ crowd leaned into that. "In the early 1990s several major LGBTQ+ rights groups even had to make statements explicitly disowning The North American Man-Boy Love Association, showing how much this myth permeated public consciousness."
Marilyn Mayo, a Senior Research Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, draws a direct line between these 20th century manifestations of the pedophile smear and modern right-wing conspiracy theories like Pizzagate (which falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party leaders ran a child sex trafficking ring from a local pizza restaurant) and QAnon (which falsely claims that Donald Trump is trying to stop an international pedophile ring, a particularly curious conspiracy given Trump's own connections with Jeffrey Epstein).
"People who are supportive of the LGBTQ community and the progress it has made are also now also being demonized and called groomers and pedophiles... Politicians and librarians who support such events are being harassed and threatened."
"In general, people who are supportive of the LGBTQ community and the progress it has made are also now also being demonized and called groomers and pedophiles," Mayo wrote to Salon. "We have seen this in numerous protests against 'drag story hours' and other similar events. Politicians and librarians who support such events are being harassed and threatened."
Politically, Mayo noted, these false narratives are fueling a wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation; the Human Rights Campaign found that as of July 2022, 23 states have introduced new discriminatory legislation and 13 have signed them into law. Similarly, over the past six months more than 40 bills have been proposed by Republican lawmakers in 18 different states that limit what teachers can say about LGBTQ rights to children in their classrooms. Nor have the negative consequences of this smear have not been limited to legislation.
"Right-wing extremists have also adopted the groomer narrative to further demonize LGBTQ+ people, justify harassment and violence towards the LGBTQ+ community and advance their own infiltration of the mainstream right," Mayo told Salon. "The Proud Boys have disrupted at least 10 LGBTQ+ events since March 2022, accounting for more than half of anti-LGBTQ+ extremist event activity tracked by the ADL Center on Extremism this year."
R. G. Craven, a Senior Research Analyst and Lead at the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, observed how right-wingers have also found that accusing opponents of pedophilia chips away at their support. Nearly everyone who agrees with pluralism, diversity and acceptance of LGBTQ rights also opposes pedophilia, so the assumption is that at least some of the people within this group can be convinced to abandon the cause if that cause is erroneously linked with literal evil.
"The anti-LGBTQ movement has been engaged in a strategy they describe as 'divide and conquer' for several years," Craven wrote to Salon. "They oppose LGBTQ rights and believe if they can delegitimize the LGBTQ community, they will be able to divide them from their supporters and chip away at recent progress." The additional consequence of this, Craven concluded, is that America is now "an environment where LGBTQ people cannot access basic services like healthcare or housing and face increase risk of violent attack while simply living their lives."
Cory Bernaert, a Florida kindergarten teacher who has expressed concern that the state's new "don't say gay" bills will harm both his students and himself, described the consequences of this smear in an interview with Salon in May.
"The major concern that I have for teachers is really their mental health and their mental stability, once these words 'pedophile' and 'groomer' are being used to describe them," Bernaert explained. "The reason being is any educator has devoted their life and really everything they have in their being to fostering a love for learning in children. It's very common for everyday people to have a complete misunderstanding of the actual work ethic and the amount of time that goes into being an educator."
