[danaris]

(Posted elsewhere in the discussion, but that ended up being on a dead thread)

There is a strong movement afoot to define any material teaching about

1) consent (whether it mentions sex or not)

2) the child's own body (in ways designed to help them recognize and avoid things like sexual abuse)

3) queer issues of any kind, but especially trans issues

as pornographic, regardless of the actual content, so that they can ban it and claim they're saving the poor children from horrible, horrible sexual material.

This is not a new movement; conservatives have been trying to ban queer people from any kind of public visibility for decades by claiming that their very existence is sexual, ignoring the fact that heterosexual romance and sex is being shoved into our faces constantly, often in far more blatant ways, and often in media explicitly aimed at children. They're merely redoubling their efforts now that it's becoming clear that society at large is starting to genuinely accept trans people, which they cannot abide.

[mrguyorama]

Remember that the conservative take for decades was "if we allow gays to marry, what's next, allowing dogs to get married? Or people to marry kids?"

Conservatives have been pushing to make being gay or trans or queer in any way to be morally equivalent or at least directly leading to pedophilia forever.

[danaris]

...And while I honestly never would have believed it a decade ago, it's becoming increasingly and horrifyingly clear just how much of that is naked projection. So much has come out recently about their complicity in both committing and covering up child sexual abuse, and yet due to the prevalence of Fox News and the advent of the "post-truth era", their base—who supposedly cares very deeply about that sort of thing—simply waves it off as at best a left-wing smear campaign, and at worst, well, one or two of them may have done some stuff, but that's nothing compared to Pizzagate, right??!

[mrguyorama]

The reason for this is that a lot of the base has a "Strong man" centric world view, where a good thing is a thing done by a "good" person, meaning a good person can do no wrong and a bad person can do no right, while everything a "good" person does is by definition good.

This means that the people they follow and support can do an identical action to someone they hate, but the liked person does a good thing and the hated person does a bad thing in their eyes.

Take for example, epstein. Both Bill Clinton and Trump (among a hundred others) were clearly and publicly acquaintances of Epstein, however, to conservatives, clinton is a pedophile and trump is innocent.