Josh Hawley wants to end human trafficking in Missouri, but he seems to be a little confused about its point of origin. In a December speech to MO pastors, the ladder-climbing attorney general declares that sexual slavery is a new problem that absolutely did not exist before the sexual revolution.
“You know what I’m talking about, the 1960s, 1970s, it became commonplace in our culture among our cultural elites, Hollywood, and the media, to talk about, to denigrate the biblical truth about husband and wife, man and woman,” Hawley said.
“To denigrate the biblical teaching about the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of family, the sanctity of children and the appropriate place for sexual practice and expression within the family, within marriage, and we're living now with the terrible after-effects of this so-called revolution, which was in fact I think a great step back. And one of them is, one of those effects, is a crisis in our country that goes by the name of human trafficking.”
At first glance, it’s a strange choice, considering that human trafficking is a global crisis, not just an American one, and slavery is not a particularly new institution. Yet ignoring history and the rest of the world also makes complete sense, in the context of today’s MAGA mindsets that insist the US was perfect in the halcyon days before pesky things like feminism and civil rights got in the way.
This may sound like an “old man yells at cloud” situation, but Hawley isn’t speaking from anything slightly resembling life experience. He was born on the very last day of the 1970s, and with a little help from Trump and Breitbart, he’s emerged as the GOP frontrunner against Senator Claire McCaskill this November.
It’s worth noting that his frontrunner status isn’t that impressive when you consider the competition: the GOP’s primary field includes candidates like Courtland “She-Devil” Sykes and Austin Petersen, who raffled off assault rifles on Facebook to fund his campaign.