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And, to note, this seems to happen in every iteration of the LGBT+ movement- there are a bunch of assorted bigwigs who say creepy sounding things, claim they’re just trying to trigger the normies, and then turn out to actually be giant creeps who were 100% serious. And the LGBT+ movements seem to have no interest in preventing it from happening in the future.
Say what you will about the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts of America’s history, they did improve and take significant efforts to keep this from happening again, and senior leaders seem to have been genuinely horrified and have a sincere intention to make sure it doesn’t happen again because they don’t want kids to get raped. Various LGBT bigwigs seem to simply not care.
How much of the activist segment isnt at least on some level prone to being creepy? I mean in order to be a full time activist of any cause you have to have made it a rather large portion of your identity. You cannot be a pro-gay activist and have the “gay” part be some minor part of how you see yourself. It’s also true of other things; being an advocate of science means that science and science education are central to your identity more so than other parts of your whole. If it wasn’t, you’d probably be finding other ways to spend your time.
The other part is that radical overstep is a useful tool. If I have people in my movement that are 5-6 steps ahead of where I want society to end up, I can push forward with my real agenda and it won’t seem that radical. I can advocate for using AI in crafting legislation to vote on and have a much easier time if some guy over there is saying “let’s turn over all government decisions to AI.” I can call him crazy, but at the same time, I can sane-wash my position of having AI write the laws and giving Congress only the power to vote up or down on those laws. I could advocate for radical police reform— and sound much saner than the people saying “disband the police and replace them with social workers.”
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I can understand the LGBT movement to an extent; first, a lot of the activism and politics came out during the 60s/70s when sexual liberation was a big thing (even for normies, you may have missed the thinkpieces about parents should be naked at home around their kids so that the kids can become familiar with what human bodies look like and will grow up without hangups. Them were wild 'n' woolly times, my friend!)
Laws about age of consent were out of line with the age for gay sex being a lot higher, especially as for straight sex it got lowered but the gay sex was unchanged. So age of consent laws were up for revising, there was the psychological/social/political/liberationist guff around children being sexual beings and sex being normal and natural and stop calling non-vanilla sex perversions and all the rest of it. You must also bear in mind that the politics of the sexual liberation movement and the gay liberation movement were not at all interested in being conventional or fitting in with wider society, they wanted to break it all open (marriage was slavery, the roots here of 'sex work is real work' and 'queering the paradigm' and so on).
Of course the paedophiles jumped aboard the bandwagon and used the excuses of "you're oppressed and we're oppressed, we should make common cause!". LGBT (more so the gay movement) also being accused of being paedophiles and under legal restrictions, on top of all the social attitudes need to be changed stuff, weren't going to start acting like morality police themselves about someone's messy, kinky, queer sex life. They didn't want to be forced into the closet of "look like and act like the straights" anymore, they wanted to be accepted as-is. Gay marriage was not on the agenda, it wasn't even favoured (until time passed and it became more politically advantageous to present the nice picket-fence view of gay life as 'we are just like you and just like you, we want the right to marry the person we love' in order to get social approval and acceptance).
So the weird and the perverted came in under the umbrella of the movement because you can't afford to turn away any allies. Besides, you normies are accusing these people of being kiddy-diddlers? Yeah, you say that about us too, and it's not true, so why should we believe you?
This led to a lot of egg on certain faces later on, and a lot of whitewashing the past (see Peter Tatchell for one such "I never said anything like that, if I did I was tricked into it, and I'll sue if you keep bringing this up" reaction.
So there's the lingering attitudes of "we can't afford to throw anyone under the bus because we too were considered disgusting perverts back in the past" when it comes to not condemning the trans (who are busy re-writing history themselves about Stonewall in order to lay claim to historic legitimacy) and the MAPs types who are still sneaking around.
There still remains the fear that "if we agree with the bigots about this issue, then they'll turn on us afterwards".
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Again, once the evidence and pressure became overwhelming.
The Church has put policies and safeguards in place. The response, whenever the next trans or gay person is found to possess child porn, is still "but what about the Catholic church anyway???"
We've changed. You have no excuse now not to clamp down on self-identified trans people who are also paedophiles. Better in the long run to admit it, own it, and do something about it than to deny it happens and cover it up. Take it from a Catholic.
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