Idaho GOP Chair Moon uses kids for political purposes but failed to stand up for them | Opinion
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Idaho Republican Party Chair Dorothy Moon took to the pages of the Twin Falls Times-News on Thursday to declare that the GOP, but not the Democratic Party, is fighting to stop the “sexualization of children.”
Moon took the case of Eric McDermott, a Boise junior high school teacher and coach who has been charged with raping a student, and turned it into political fodder by pointing out that McDermott was involved in pro-LGBTQ causes.
This is a patently ridiculous argument. Look around, and you can find instances of pedophilia committed by people of every political persuasion. Pedophilia is a crime, not a political position.
Which does not prevent people like Moon from trying to twist the matter.
“The Left advocates for the sexualization of children,” Moon declared without a shred of evidence.
Moon’s screed might be more convincing if not for her own record while in office.
In 2018, ahead of Moon’s third legislative session, there was intense scrutiny of a loophole in Idaho law that allowed child rape to be legalized using child marriage. This was not a theoretical or isolated problem. Idaho had the highest rate of child marriage in the nation.
Isabella Alves of the Post Register had documented a case in which a 12-year-old girl was raped by a man in his late 30s and then married off to him, which was legal at the time. She had her first child by him at 14 years old.
The situation was so bad that then-Bonneville County Prosecutor Danny Clark, a staunch legal conservative who usually carefully restricted himself to enforcing the law rather than advocating changes to it, spoke out forcefully against it.
“If it (the law) unintentionally gives the ability of a pedophile or someone to molest a child, there should be an update to that law,” Clark said, according to Alves. “Let’s not make it legal by saying, ‘I do.’”
In the face of all this, what did Moon do to protect kids who were at the time being married off to adults? Nothing.
Then-Rep. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, wrote a bill that would have made most child marriages illegal. Wintrow said at the time that she preferred a bill that would simply set the minimum age of marriage at 18, so kids could not be married off at all. But there weren’t enough Republican votes, so she tried to compromise by requiring a judge to sign off on marriages for kids between 16 and 18.
Moon joined 38 other Republicans in voting down the bill, ensuring that there would be no minimum age for marriage in Idaho for at least another year.
After a massive public backlash, Republicans in 2020 returned with a new, even more watered-down set of child marriage restrictions — one that continued to allow minors to be married to people over 18 without judicial review in some cases — that Moon did vote for.
That was not the end of Moon’s track record. In 2021, former Rep. Aaron Von Ehlinger, Moon’s political ally, raped a 19-year-old legislative intern.
The victim was not legally a child but had served in the Legislature as a high school page only a year before. In testimony, Moon sought to undermine the victim’s case and shift blame on her. Moon claimed she had seen the victim flirting with Von Ehlinger.
“I’ve been around college students. I’ve been around high school students. And I can tell when there’s, like, flirting going on,” she testified.
Von Ehlinger has since been convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison.
It’s deeply hypocritical to crow about how you protect kids when a principal objective of the last legislative session was to persecute gay and transgender kids.
But to say all that with a record like Moon’s — to treat kids as political pawns while showing no concern for them when it counted — I’m not sure they’ve invented a word for that yet. “Disgusting” points in the right direction, but it does not go nearly far enough.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in eastern Idaho.
