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Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them"
In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.
Similarly, leftist hatred of sexual misconduct is targeted at "the (cis-white) patriarchy," not the misconduct itself.
A girl at my local school had to be withdrawn recently because another student with a penis wouldn't stop aggressively sexually propositioning her, and the staff with the new progress pride flag in every classroom window wouldn't do anything about it. They said "she" was just expressing her identity as a lesbian.
This is only going to escalate in the same way that anti-gun rhetoric coupled with pro-crime policies did. The same leftist prosecutors already have "queer affirming" prosecution policies that are going to effectively decriminalize age of consent violations as long as it's "queer," while legislators simultaneously increase penalties for 17 year olds getting married.
And there's another factor. When leftists really don't like something, they get aggressive about it. They "problematize," they make hashtags, they get people fired, they set a party line and ruthlessly establish conformity by any means necessary.
When they don't really care and just want to stop conservatives from doing anything about it, they make whatever soothing/mocking/rationalizing mouth-noises necessary to convince the person they're talking to that nothing is going to happen, and anyway it won't be bad... besides, it's too late to stop it, and anyway you probably deserved it.
Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles. The excuses and rationalization about pedophilia look an awful lot more like the "deflect" mode than the "deal with" mode. And I think you're too smart to be doing this unconsciously.
Edit: and of course the second I open twitter CNN is going to bat for a gay man who raped a 12 year old
Edit edit:
You know what's going to happen when the "sex and gender clinic" starts talking about a "growing scientific consensus," don't you?
Not a good parallel - in the scenario I painted, the beneficiaries of any such policy would still be straight white males, who by pure force of statistics are the majority of pedophiles. It would be more akin to republican gun owners realising the loophole and joining suburban gangs en masse, which they won't do only because of their distaste for the company they would have in those suburban gangs. Sex with minors is generally a small group activity, not subject to that issue.
That's just saying that they don't participate in your current moral panic about it. There is a lot more anger from leftists about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" (...here? Who here believes in the latter so firmly as to get angry?) than about union-busting at the moment too, but rest assured that leftists are firmly against union-busting.
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