Christian Right’s Moral Panic in Nebraska Exploits ‘Grooming’ Lie to Grab Political Power

New Crusade reminiscent of outrageous anti-LGBTQ campaign in the 1980’s

It was the beginning of the Reagan Era and America was careening to the far right. A mysterious new plague killing gay men was quickly emerging in major cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was in ascendence, with blistering attacks on LGBT people, women’s liberation, and abortion rights. The modern conservative movement was born, and the Christian Right was beginning to flex its muscles, slowly realizing that it had the organizational capacity to hijack the Republican Party.

A growing Christian Right needed to build a vibrant infrastructure to lobby Washington and change laws to enact its oppressive moral vision. The 1970’s and 80’s saw the formation of “values” groups such as The Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, Focus on the Family, The Christian Coalition, and the American Family Association.

To expand their influence and offer a veneer of credibility, they staffed their shops with “experts” who would provide “research” that conveniently backed their agenda. New, well-paying openings were created for hucksters, con artists and quacks who willingly served as political puppets. One such opportunist was Paul Cameron (pictured), a former associate professor at The University of Nebraska, who was fired for unprofessional conduct.

As his career collapsed and he descended into the professional wilderness, Cameron created a niche by exploiting his psychology background to produce shoddy and fabricated studies on the dangers of being LGBT, which he called an “octopus of infection stretching across the world.”

Cameron’s new career included creating pamphlets such as, Child Molestation and Homosexuality, Murder, Violence and Homosexuality, and Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do (It’s More Than Merely Disgusting). His lies and distortions quickly gained notoriety, with The Advocate magazine calling him, “The most dangerous antigay zealot in the United States today.”

Cameron made his splashing debut on the antigay political scene in 1982 as the chairman of the Committee to Oppose Special Rights for Homosexuals. His group’s goal was to defeat a Lincoln, Nebraska, gay rights amendment that supported banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations. He spoke frequently about LGBTQ people recruiting children and spreading disease and even said they were more likely to commit “sexual mass murder.”

But, like most right wing extremists, he went too far. In a speech on May 3, 1982, at the University of Nebraska Lutheran Chapel, Cameron announced to the crowd, “Right now, here in Lincoln, there is a four-year old boy who had his genitals almost severed from his body at Gateway mall in a restroom with a homosexual act.”

The townspeople were apoplectic over this disclosure and demanded justice for this poor, traumatized child. When police were questioned, they said no such record of this event existed. Cameron was forced to admit that he invented this terrible tale, but he defended his lie by saying it “could have happened.” Of course, the sun could hypothetically freeze – but that hasn’t happened either.  

University of Nebraska psychology professor James K. Cole told the publication Denver Westword:

“It’s fascinating that someone with his capacity, a trained scientist, would do these things. He was willing to take any outlandish statement and use it to his purpose….The guy has no moral inhibitions. I find it surprising that the Christian Right would follow someone who has no moral inhibitions.”

With 80-percent of white evangelicals voting for Donald Trump, supporting those with no moral inhibitions has become this group’s trademark. We also witnessed multiple right wing Supreme Court nominees lie about their single-minded struggle to eliminate a woman’s right to choose. Sadly, blatant lying – without even blinking -- comes naturally to this crowd. It’s what defines them, far more than their showy, prima donna pageants of piousness and prudishness.        

Today, we dug out the ghost of Paul Cameron because there is a new moral panic coursing through Nebraska. Right wing “Cuckoos of the Corn” are crowing about fake gay and transgender conspiracies to scare parents into voting for extremist Republicans – and it’s working. While Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) gets most of the credit for reviving the despicable canard of LGBTQ people “grooming” children, this lie was first floated in Nebraska.

The Washington Post wrote an illuminating article highlighting how new Cornhusker crusaders are viciously and unfairly attacking comprehensive sex education programs in the state’s public schools. It’s not enough that these zealots can homeschool their kids or enroll them in private church-affiliated academies. They insist on infiltrating public schools to brainwash all schoolchildren and poison their minds on sex. I call this dishonest assault on reality and perversion of the curriculum “Paul Cameron 2.0.” It’s really the same deceitful, disgraceful garbage that was debunked in the 1980’s, yet repackaged and presented for a new generation.

It seems these extremists prefer peddling reckless Christian indoctrination over education. They demand that schools fail their students and set them up for unplanned pregnancies (which they can’t easily terminate) and increase their risk for dangerous sexually transmitted infections. In the case of LGBTQ students, they want to pretend that they don’t exist, and leave them completely in the dark on how to protect their health.

As one might expect, the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics support comprehensive sex ed, which includes lessons on contraception, sexual orientation and consent. Instead of facts, Nebraska’s children will be subjected to fabrications, which won’t prepare them for living in the real world.  

The new vehicle for these blue-nosed hypocrites is the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition. The organization’s co-founder, Sue Greenwald, wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post, “This is NOT Sex Ed as anyone knows it”. She falsely claimed that the school’s lessons were “grooming’ children to be sexual victims.”

In truth, if they wanted to “groom” children, they’d take them to a local Catholic Church or to a nearby Southern Baptist Church. According to The Associated Press:

A Nebraska attorney general’s office investigation identified 258 victims who made credible allegations of sexual abuse against 57 Catholic church officials in the state going back decades, including many that high-ranking church leaders knew about and didn’t report to the authorities.

The report outlines each known case in graphic detail, stretching from the 1930s to the 2010s. More than 90% of the victims were boys, usually young teenagers who served as altar servers.

The Kansas Reflector also revealed:

Klint Bitter, a former youth pastor with Christ Community Church in Omaha, was convicted in 2018 of attempted sexual assault after arranging through an online classified ad to meet with an underaged girl for sex. 

It’s interesting, but I don’t see any comparable reports of systematic sexual abuse coming from neighborhoods in Lincoln or Omaha with high concentrations of LGBTQ people. Perhaps, these organized busybodies would best serve their communities by minding their manners and monitoring their ministers. I suppose it’s easier to scapegoat innocent people than clean their own filthy houses of worship. As Jesus said during his Sermon on the Mount:

“You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Of course, no one really thinks these “good Christians” read the Bible, in a meaningful way. It appears they haven’t even skimmed the Cliff Notes and made it to God’s Ninth Commandment, “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Who do they think they’re kidding? These “prayer warriors” are only pretending to be protectors of our children, when they are cowardly predators who are punching down to harm our most vulnerable citizens.

So, if they aren’t the holy rollers they are pretending to be, what’s their real angle? The Washington Post reveals that these ambitious “values vultures” are motivated by achieving raw political power. Their leaders are nobodies who want to be somebodies and are willing to say or do anything to lift their public profiles. The Trojan Horse they use is Christian Nationalism.

Their cynical movement is generally defined by unqualified loudmouths who could never attain political success through traditional means. So, they took the shortcut of demagoguery to elevate their personal brands, at the expense of the state’s students. Instead of creating real platforms to improve the lives of citizens, these Q-Anon influenced radicals shout “groomer” and “pervert” to selfishly bathe in the spotlight.

While these lunatics started their Inquisition by attacking liberals and LGBTQ people, they rapidly pivoted, using their manufactured hysteria to reach their genuine goal. According to The Washington Post:

The unsubstantiated claim [of grooming] helped activate an army of self-described Nebraska patriots who rose up against the standards, took over the local Republican Party and propelled a wave of far-right candidates for local and statewide school boards. Earlier this month, these activists were part of a broader, anti-establishment insurgency that toppled leaders of the state Republican Party.

Paul Hazard, a former state trooper who dubbed the proposed sex-ed standards “a pedophile’s dream,” was the top vote-getter in the May primary among eight candidates for the Kearney school board. 

It’s interesting that the “scholar” providing intellectual heft for this movement is the late-Judith Reisman. She’s a familiar name, because her shockingly unprofessional books, that smeared LGBTQ people and tried to debunk sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a regular at “ex-gay” conversion conferences that I have monitored for decades. She’s basically Paul Cameron without the psychology credentials to hide behind. The Washington Post found:

Reisman was not trained as a psychologist or sociologist or sex researcher. She had worked as a songwriter for the children’s television program “Captain Kangaroo” in the 1970s. Then, concerned about the effect of television on children, she earned a doctorate in communications in 1980, according to her résumé.

Instead of supporting school board members with expertise in education, Kearny students may have an unqualified cop setting standards whose platform is basically screaming “the pedophiles are coming! I’ll protect you!” Their intellectual guru, Reisman, penned children’s songs for Captain Kangaroo. Perhaps, this is what appeals to their childish, primitive minds? Reisman is just another untrained, quotable quack that offers these soulless moral entrepreneurs a pseudo-intellectual peg on which to rest their hideous hats.

I’m sure with such luminaries setting public standards, Nebraska’s schoolchildren are going to be well prepared for college and workplace competition. Of course, these phonies and imposters will eventually be debunked and discredited, just as Paul Cameron was. But until they are exposed as ignoramuses and frauds, they will ruin lives, break apart families, divide communities and cause spasms of hate violence. Nebraska’s fear-mongering adults are letting down the “children of the corn” – with an ongoing political horror movie that is far from over.