Why you should always be skeptical when "but the children" is used in a political context.

Recently a resident r-slur here has posted a picture of me saying the rightoid obsession with drag and gays has absolutely nothing to do with children. This is confusing to me as it pretty clearly doesn't - but then it dawned on me, a lot of people here don't actually know anything about American politics or the rhetorical cowtools used by conservatives and libtards alike as a trojan horse for questionable policy.

In the case of rightoids it's more so that they know the things they believe are truly awful and unpalatable to much of society, so whenever given the chance they'll shield whatever religious drivel they're spewing in the language of virtue - "what about the children."

This allows them to dismiss any criticism of the things they're saying and flip it on their opponents - often with libertarian smears or "why do you hate children" or whatever else is swirling around the rightoid fever swamp at the time.

You see - libertarian serves a similar purpose as "nazi" does for leftoids. Unquestionably "nazi" is the worst thing someone can be in the western world, but rightoids have an uneasy relationship with "nazi" given how many nazis keep popping up in rightoid spheres, and republicans want to keep "nazi" out of the mainstream discourse - so in comes the libertarian smear. Ironically, a popular smear used by nazis in weimar Germany as well (not calling republicans nazis, but it is interesting that rightoids historically have favored the libertarian smear.)

If you spew awful things about drag, s, or gays that's not a good look, even the most awful of magatards know it isn't a good look, so it needs to be wrapped in something else before they sell it to the general public. That's where "libertarian" and "what about the children" enters. this way they can sanitize their horrible and more often than not factually incorrect drivel as a virtuous quest to protect children.

American politicians have been doing this for ages, a relevant chapter from a popular book:

"Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton's 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband's crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.

You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It's an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it's highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it's a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you've got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree."