In what appeared to be a moment of misspeaking, anti-LGBTQ+ Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) said in a recent congressional speech, “How about we all come together and say ‘Let’s stop attacking pedophiles’?”
During a congressional hearing on the current president’s actions addressing crime in cities — which seems mostly to be insulting large city mayors, ignoring higher-crime areas in red states, and then sending in armed federal officers against the mayors’ wishes — Sen. Cruz referred to Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) plea for Democrats and Republicans to “come together and have bipartisan agreement.”
“I think that’s a great idea. We should have bipartisan agreement,” Cruz said. “How about we all come together and say, ‘Let’s stop murder’? How about we all come together and say, ‘Let’s stop rape’? How about we all come together and say, ‘Let’s stop attacking pedophiles’?”
I don’t think that’s what Cruz was talking about
It’s not, which is why OP put “technically” in the first sentence. And I think they did a great job differentiating the matter. It’s clearly not what Ted Cruz meant, yet his sentence in itself - taken out of his context - is correct. Pedophiles, as in people who have this attraction, are human beings. They deserve proactive help and support. People who abuse children are criminal( human being)s. They deserve to be treated as the human garbage that they are and be prosecuted. There is a venn diagram style overlap between child rapists and pedophiles. But it is not a necessity to have pedophilia in order to molest children (a lot of criminals assault children not out of sexual attraction but because of power dynamics), nor is every pedophile a molester or plans to eventually assault children. We need to focus on prosecuting child abusers no matter their sexual orientation, while helping people with pedophilic attractions without stigmatizing them in the meantime. Their lives suck as it is already.
The Epstein case has drawn a lot of attention to pedophilia but we need to be really careful to not get lost here.