Tag: Child Abuse Used for Politics

KY: “Tough on Crime” Republican Attorney General Candidate Is Soft on Sex Offenders

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Source: newrepublic.com 9/12/23 Russell Coleman’s bid to become Kentucky’s top lawyer has dredged up a troubling record of lenience. The Republican candidate for Kentucky attorney general, Russell Coleman, is campaigning on a promise to be tough on crime, particularly crimes against children. But before running for attorney general, he served as U.S. attorney for the western district of Kentucky—and a closer look at his track record there shows a frightening laxity regarding sex offenders. Coleman’s campaign comes at a time when state attorneys general exert increasing influence over how laws…

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Stranger Dangers: The Right’s History of Turning Child Abuse Into a Political Weapon

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Source: motherjones.com 3/28/22 Josh Hawley’s attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are part of a long, sad tradition. At some point between the ’80s and now, leaving children unattended in public became unthinkable. To let children as old as, say, 10 walk by themselves became grounds to investigate parents for neglect. As a child of the late ’90s and early 2000s, I knew latchkey kids existed, but nearly exclusively from the aging 1980s children’s paperbacks in my elementary school’s library. My friends whose parents worked too late to pick them up…

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