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Notes -
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
The grooming accusations feel like a motte and baily to me, where the motte is "Trans people want their culture to be normal enough that people aren't worried about their kids seeing a trans person and considering being trans too, the same way they might see a firefighter and decide they want to be one." and the baily is "gay people are doing all these things because they want to rape our children."
There's also the facet where- forget the baily- people actually are afraid of the thing I just described as the motte as well. But when the "groomer" rhetoric is used, it often still seems like an exaggeration and catastrophisation of this fear into the "gay people are doing all these things because they want to rape our children" implication.
I do like how people here on TheMotte will actually come out and say it when what they care about is that they don't think queer culture should be normalized and explain their reasons. I wish the greater culture war would focus more on object level concerns.
I’ve posted before about this- grooming is directionally correct even if some of it is probably an exaggeration. And the only objections from the LGBT lobby are accusations of bigotry, sophistry, and lack of denial of the meat of the accusation.
So no, it’s obviously something that is at least close enough for government work. That’s why it sticks.
Well it's weird, its a word with a Rape affect but that is overloaded. "They groomed the prince to be king- those horrible, horrible groomers." Suddenly it seems silly to use as an insult
"You're teaching my kids things that affect how they behave and prepare them for a world where gay and trans and queer are things they can be!"
"chad-yes.jpg, gay and trans and queer are things they can be. Do you have a problem with that? Why?"
(I know why. We talk about it here all the time. But my point is to display how- without the affect it devolves back into the reasonable version of the debate that we tend to have here.)
But I won't argue that it hasn't been effective. Tools of war and all that.
I think a lot of the efficacy has come from the word being overloaded with rape affect though.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect when describing gang members "grooming" kids to act as runners for their gang, or when people talk about cult members "grooming" prospective converts into going along with questionable practices by the cult leadership, or when people talk about an emotionally abuser grooming their victims into rationalizing their reactions to abuse.
Nobody worries in these contexts, because "groom" as a pejorative has a long and entirely uncontroversial use to refer to a specific sort of abuse of trust, whereby a person in a dominant position induces a vulnerable individual into granting them a special and unaccountable position of trust, increasing the victim's vulnerability and isolating them from others who might object or intervene. One of the more pernicious examples of this is grooming for sexual abuse, but the pretense that grooming kids for rape is the only possible meaning of the phrase is absurd to anyone who's spent more than five minutes on google.
This lie persists because it is rhetorically useful to progressives, and for no other reason.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect in the cases you mentioned because people don't tend to throw around pedo accusations in the same sentence with grooming accusations in those cases.
If it's a lie, then speak plainly and specify what kind of grooming you're talking about. Right now it looks all too much like a gotcha - shout "grooming pedos, grooming pedos", then smugly proclaim "ah ha, but grooming doesn't just mean 'sexual'!" when people rightfully assume that "grooming" and "pedos" is the same accusation.
Building secret relationships with a kid* outside the circles of trust of their parents, family and other authority figures, for purposes of encouraging them to take actions that that their parents and family would not approve of. That's the understood, central definition of "grooming" across all contexts, from sexual to emotionally abusive to criminal to fringe-ideological, and always has been. It is a profoundly fucked-up and hostile thing to do, completely irrespective of the reasons why one chooses to do it, because it is a direct attack on the parents' relationship with their child. There is no context when any authority figure should be encouraging and assisting my kid in keeping secrets from me, ever, under any circumstances. That this fact even needs to be stated is a complete travesty. They are my kids, not the teacher's, and while we have all accepted that some parents are so bad that the government needs to step in, that is emphatically not the case here or the teachers would be reporting the parents to the cops rather than lying to them.
*The same principle generalizes to adults as well, as seen in discussions of emotional abuse in relationships and cult recruitment, but with adults it's murkier because they are empowered to make their own decisions. This doesn't actually prevent them from being groomed, but it makes the situation murkier than it is with kids, at least from the outside.
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