More on the theme of, why now? Some of the reasons are eternal; that certain themes seem to be more apparent currently may just be random variation in the news of the day. (I saw a comment somewhere about the NYT story I posted about two days ago wondering why the NYT thought this was news; it’s not new.)
*
First: Projection
Slate, Jordan Weissmann, 9 April 2022: So, Let’s Talk About Republicans and Sex Crimes, subtitled, “This seems like an appropriate moment.”
It’s been widely noted that Republicans seem to get embroiled in sex scandals more of than Democrats, though perhaps, maybe, it’s because when Republicans do it, it makes for a better story. (Hypocrisy; schadenfreude.)
The article begins with the confirmation hearings for judge Katanji Brown Jackson and the Republican accusations of Democrafts who supported her as being “pro-pedophile,” an absurd mischaracterization of Jackson’s records (as a defense attorney, a role that Republicans apparently do not understand).
And then reviews history: Foley in 2006; Hastert in 2015; Trump in 2016; Moore in 2018; Jordan in 2018; and Gaetz currently.
And makes this key point, related to the idea of projection — e.g. that Republicans so quickly accuse Democrats of stealing elections, because Republicans take the idea for granted and assume that since they do it, everyone else does too. Accuse others of what you do.
Some have gone further, remarking that the GOP is particularly afflicted with a pedophilia problem. “Every accusation is a confession,” goes one popular refrain. (Some large social media accounts have been trying to make the phrase “pedocon” stick.)
…
The way Republicans set aside the vast array of sexual abuse charges against Trump and lined up behind him has been discussed so many times that there’s no real need to go over it again.
With further details about the party’s defenses of Moore and Jordan.
\\
Second: Disgust
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 9 April 2022: Why is the right so obsessed with bathroom issues? Behind the new wave of anti-LGBTQ attacks, subtitled, “A panel of experts on conservative fascination with bodily functions — it’s vicious, illogical and also revealing”
Republicans have become increasingly obsessed with bathrooms, toilets, locker rooms and other such spaces. At Donald Trump’s recent rally in Georgia, for instance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told the audience that “Pete Buttigieg can take his electric vehicles and his bicycles and he and his husband can stay out of our girls’ bathrooms.” [[ my comment: she is deeply, deeply confused ]]
Greene was wallowing in obvious anti-gay bigotry and stereotypes. But she knows her audience well: Trumpists and Republican voters generally share her vile beliefs. Of course the facts do not matter: Like other so-called conservatives, Greene is fomenting a moral panic around the specious claim that the LGBTQ community somehow poses a “threat” to the “traditional family” and offers another example of how “real Americans” — meaning white, supposedly Christian conservatives — are somehow being oppressed or discriminated against in “their own country.”
This is a long article in which the writer speaks to various experts about “what the larger implications of such culture war-moral panic attacks may be for American politics and society.”
The recurring theme here is a key element of Moral Foundations Theory, as popularized by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind (my links about it). The five or six elements of this idea are listed in this post, and one of them is the foundation of sanctity/degradation — that is, some people are, more than other people, motivated by feelings of disgust and the importance of purity. And these people are apt to be, in the language of American politics, conservatives. (I would add that some of these feelings are left over, in a sense, from a pre-technological past, when much care did indeed have to be taken to avoid contamination and infestation (see Leviticus), in ways that our modern society, via science, has learned to avoid or prevent. But the instinctive feelings are still there, and are very powerful, in some of us.)
And it’s about how conservatives think of everything in terms of black or white.
A professor of psychiatry:
Toilet life is private life. Partly, that’s related unconsciously to disgust and shame about the human process of elimination. But the Republicans displace anal disgust onto other things and people: For example, onto dark-skinned people and the LGBTQ community. Republican disgust with toilets and with homosexuals is becoming ubiquitous. Southern Republicans and others often talk about toilets, bathroom functions and LGBTQ people interchangeably. Not only do Republicans see things in black or white, they also see things as male or female, without any room for the complexity of “trans.” Instead, they are primarily preoccupied with getting rid of what’s disgusting to them.
And another key point, which I alluded to a couple posts ago: Republicans either deny, or have no solutions for, existential threats like climate change, which would require too much long-term thinking and short-term sacrifice. Their solution: Look–over there! Perverts!
The GOP are obsessed with toilets because it’s beautiful, raw red meat for their base and to stir up cultural anxieties about LGBTQ folks ahead of the midterms and elections. They don’t have any solutions or plans for climate change, income inequality or COVID relief. Transgender people are going to be the scapegoats and Trojan horses for their ugly culture war for the midterm and 2024 election. This explains Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s question to Justice Jackson about how to define a woman. They’re going to say that Democrats are all godless atheists who are going to turn your son into a woman, and also that they are part of an international cabal of sex traffickers, as in the QAnon theory.
One more:
There is an obsession with purity. It is part of the right wing’s hyper-religiosity and repressive sexual politics. It’s part of their obsession with the notion of “contamination” by immigrants, especially from what Trump called “shithole” countries. …
And this:
What calls itself “conservatism” in the United States is actually a reactionary movement that began in the 1930s as a frantic attempt by corporate interests to block Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration from adopting the worker-friendly tax and regulatory policies that were then emerging in Europe and some other parts of the world.
American reactionaries have for decades sought to trump up imaginary moral panics in order to scare less-informed Christians about various minority groups. The target group has always shifted over time, but they generally rotate between racial minorities, women and LGBTQ people, and atheists and liberal believers.
The latest “trans panic” is literally a complete repeat of the lies that were told in the 1970s and 1980s by people like Anita Bryant to try to stop lesbians and gays from having any sort of freedom to live openly. It’s all the same lies about bathrooms and “recruitment.” This rhetoric, and the laws it inspires, are nothing more than scapegoat operations to distract lower- and middle-income people while Republicans pick their pockets, such as by canceling school lunch programs while many people are still jobless.
\\
* So as not to, er, contaminate my blog with photos of Republican politicians, I am showing instead a photo of, and linking to the recipe for, the dinner dish I plan for this evening, which I will begin as soon as I finish this post.
