We Really Need to Talk About MAGA's Sexual Predator Problem

This week, Robert Morris, the founding pastor of Texas’ Gateway megachurch was indicted for lewd acts with a child.

Roberts has served as a Trump spiritual advisor and been close to his campaigns and presidencies, with his church a longtime visible and vocal political advocate of the Republicans’ alleged “family values” platform.

And what’s so vile and infuriating about this most recent revelation, is that not only is such sexual predation commonplace in the Conservative Right, but it will again be completely ignored by Trump, his complicit party, and a collaborative Evangelical Church. Also turning a blind eye, will be tens of millions of the very self-righteous religious people in all our lives across this country who’ve been the loudest in condemning perversion, all while enabling it.

For years we’ve been hearing the GOP proudly say they’re all about “protecting children.”

We’ve witnessed their endless, impassioned campaign soliloquies and furrow-browed Sunday sermons about the supposed dangers of sexual predators pouring over our borders, lurking in public restrooms, and teaching our children.

The Right’s nightmare visions of immigrant rapists, drag queen indoctrinators, and leftist media pedophiles have served as irresistible red meat for pew sitters and Fox News viewers, whose near-complete fixation on sexual immorality has been unavoidable, while obscuring the grotesque truth:

MAGA leaders are the most prolific and sprawling collection of perverts, predators, and sexual abusers in this nation by a massive margin—and it starts at the very top.

We have a Commander-In-Chief with dozens of credible assault allegations, numerous appearances on the Epstein flight logs, who was declared in court to be liable for sexual abuse against E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay 5 million dollars. And this was over a year before Conservative’s once again nominated and elected him.

Such revelations in any other setting, under any other conditions would have cost a man his job, his community, his family, and likely his freedom. Instead, the professed “enemies of immorality” elevated a deviant molester to the highest office in our nation.

Then there’s Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, being confirmed to our highest court following credible allegations of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford. Once again, the declared rape-hating Evangelicals were suddenly unusually forgiving or tellingly silent.

And, Let’s not forget Florida Republican Representative (and Trump’s first choice for Attorney General) Matt Gaetz, about whom the House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence" of violating House rules, state, and federal laws, "and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape” (including having sex with a 17-year-old girl). And again, crickets and radio silence from the Right-Wing, MAGA, religious, self-identified child protectors.

And if you do an online search for “Republican Lawmaker” or “Evangelical Christian pastor” and “sexual assault,” you’ll need a few hours to really scratch the surface. The virtual and paper trail is endless.

And that’s what makes the GOP and its partner churches’ endless persecution of immigrants, trans people, librarians, school teachers, and drag queens so damn infuriating. There is little to no evidence of any of these people harming children or sexual assaulting strangers or abusing the people in their care—while a massive, disgusting body of work of conservative leaders doing so.

And these collective sins are being uniformly ignored, justified, normalized, and rewarded by the very Christian people who claim they want to keep people safe, as they anoint the rapists and reelect the abusers.

It’s a flat-out disgrace—one the rest of us need to keep talking about.

We need to share the data and the facts about who is really doing the physical and emotional damage, who is really concealing sexual violence, who is really indoctrinating kids and grooming young women and protecting pedophiles.

We need to flood social media with the stories, so that the victimizers face accountability and their survivors are not trapped in shame and silence.

And we need to defend the character and safety of people who these GOP hypocrites are willfully and unjustly targeting.

The truth is, children are far safer in a public bathroom with a transgender person than with a MAGA Evangelical—and it ain't even close.

If Conservative Christians really want to protect children and stop sexual crimes, they should start at home.