There was a time when a groomer was a predatory grown-up preparing to molest a kid. Then Christopher Rufo, the activist who did more than anyone else to inject the term into today’s politics, redefined it as a “spectrum of behavior.” Children, he tweeted in 2022, “can be groomed into a sexual identity, groomed into an ideological system, and, in some cases, yes, groomed for abuse.” The rhetorical aim was clear: It was a way to raise the specter of the child molester without having to demonstrate that any specific person is a child molester.

That specter has long haunted our culture wars. Whenever a sexual minority’s legal rights or social status seems to be increasing, someone is certain to raise the alarm that Pedo Power will surely be next. In 1994, as gay freedom was becoming a mainstream cause, the head of the right-leaning Rutherford Institute claimed that “the logical implication of American acceptance of homosexuality is the acceptance of pedophilia as simply another form of ‘sexual orientation.'”