Sometimes i still by accident (while bored) open a tab of reddit in my brwoser. Realizing with disgust where i went, i close that shit just as fast as i opened it. It is not getting better over there and the percentage of absolute morons grows steadily. It will soon be what facebook is today.
What makes me think it is not both?
Well lets take a step back and look at how many pedophiles there are in the population. While we do not know the exact numbers the educated guesses, from rather too few studies that we have, range from 1% to 5%, most putting it at around 3%. I do not really believe that a tiny minority holds such powers as to influence politics or we would not have an AOC in the first place.
In order to understand why there are people advocating for low ages of marriage i would do take a look at our younger past and ask, why WAS the age for marriage low? And the answer, while not much more pleasent, is much simpler than: we somehow have pedohiles leading the world in the shadows. It is much easier to secure marriages that way, because guess what, children have not much say in their lives. So a powerful or rich person can simply chose whom to marry, take a bunch of money and their victim has no power over the decision. It is terrible but it has not much to do with the sexuality of a minority.
So in short i would say occams razor tells us that it is rather unlikely that these policies are pushed by pedophiles, even if some or even many of them might agree with the goal.
I can not really talk about Republican Senators (as i am not an US citizen) but the reason why child abuse is rampant in the catholic church is because the instituational structures foster abuse. Abusers, in turn, tend to go for the easiest victims. Children sadly are not only easy victims, they are also in the care of those priests, leading to many cases of child abuse. I know it is not an easy pill to swallow, but most of these priests are simply put, predators that had children available to them. If they had to care for vulnerable adults, they might have had preferred those. If you are interested i can link you a study about how many perpetrators of child abuse are in fact not pedophiles.
I know it is easy to see children getting the short end of the stick and to cry out “DAMN PEDOPHILIA” but it is really not helpful. There need not be any pedophiles for children to get abused, sexually or not. Let us keep that in mind while we all fight for more and better childrens rights.
Edit: grammar
Can we not conflate religion, control over peoples authority and pedophilia? This is not about diddling children, this is about shackling people before they really can have a say in the matter. Crying about pedophilia is what the other side does too. It wont open anyones eyes to the true motives.
Just as Israeli government does not equal Isreali citizens, U.S. citizens do no equal U.S. government. Please lets not fall victim to the same hate that fascists use as excuse for their horrible actions.