Another warning to readers who may be sensitive to this topic: I’m going to be talking about Jeffrey Epstein and sexual abuse again today.
I am watching the Republican response to the recent release of the Epstein emails. I’m especially interested in what prominent Catholic Republicans have to say.
These emails, as I covered last time, provide yet more evidence of what we all already know: Donald Trump knew exactly what Jeffrey Epstein was doing with those teenage girls, and likely participated in their abuse. He wasn’t just a clueless buddy of Epstein’s. He was a perpetrator. This becomes more obvious every day.
I am a Catholic. I remain a Catholic even though some horrific priestly sexual abuse scandals in my own community here in Steubenville have rocked my faith in a way I can’t even describe. I’ve seen how devout conservative Catholics respond to mounting evidence of sexual abuse being committed by somebody they think is a hero. I’d love to know why people close their eyes to sexual abuse for as long as they do, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. And I’d love to know what it is that makes people finally believe that a person they’ve chosen to idolize is actually an abuser. So, I’ve been watching the reactions of public Catholics who support Trump, to the Epstein case.
The podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is a Catholic, of course.
Kelly is currently being dragged by just about everyone, justly, for claiming that Jeffrey Epstein is not a pedophile because he liked “very young teen types,” by which she means fifteen-year-olds. She was wrong; some of Epstein’s victims were younger than that. But in any case, Kelly insisted that these were all fifteen-year-olds and “the barely legal type.” She was wrong about that as well. In the state of Florida, where Epstein was trafficking girls, the legal age of consent to have sex with an adult is eighteen, and in New York where he also lived it’s seventeen. Fifteen-year-olds are not “barely legal.” They’re two or three years shy of legal. A man in his 50s getting sexual massages from a 15-year-old is committing child sexual abuse.
Kelly was doing this, in a roundabout way, to explain why President Trump couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong.
You may recall that last year, Kelly started calling Governor Tim Walz “Tampon Tim,” lampooning him over and over for signing a law providing menstrual products to teenagers in public schools free of charge. The law didn’t actually state that tampons had to be placed in boys’ bathrooms; only that they must be made available to students. Most schools were putting them in the office for students to ask for, and in the girls’ and unisex bathroom. But the Right ran with this idea and wouldn’t stop harping on the notion of tampons in the boys’ room. Kelly and her ilk were horrified that a boy might have to see an unused tampon: a wrapped cylinder of cotton with a string at one end. A hygiene product, like toilet paper.
My first thought is that Kelly, and other Republican commentators, think a teenage boy’s sexuality is so delicate that he has to be carefully protected from even seeing a feminine hygiene product. But she and her ilk think teenage girls are so worthless that if a girl is sexually abused by a monster, they’ll go on television to downplay what the monster has done. At least, they will if by doing so, they think they’ll be able to shield Donald Trump from the consequences of his actions.
Today, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights decided to get in on the act.
Our old friend Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic league, who does not know how AIDS is spread and whom I once compared to a boiled ham with glasses, also insisted that Epstein is not a pedophile. He brought it back, as he always does, to his defense of the church’s handling of sexual abuse and his own hatred of LGBTQ people. He compared her statement to his insistence that the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church was actually due to “homosexuals” infiltrating the priesthood, because most of the victims were older teenagers. I knew he was going to bring this up before I even opened the tab. He is always talking about his pet theory that sexual abuse is caused by nothing other than the abuser being gay.
It seems that I have to amend my remarks about the American Right Wing, and about American Right Wing Catholics. They also don’t care about boys’ sexuality, when they can callously use abuse victims to attack a person or group they don’t like. They don’t care about anybody.
They never care about anything except their agenda.
A long time ago, I used to think their agenda had something to do with old-fashioned family values.
Now, I see that their agenda is just to elevate and protect powerful men.
That’s all they care about.
And it’s the same for the people who shield abusers here at home: in the end, they don’t care about values or victims or protecting the vulnerable. They just want to curry favor with powerful men and protect them from the consequences of their actions.
And I’m sorry I wasted so much time trying to understand them.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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