“The Rainbow Beast Is Coming For Your Kids!” warned Indiana Lt. Gov Micah Beckwith last month, because somehow this is really happening. He cautioned the Nazis and bots still using X that this June would see a “more aggressive Pride Month agenda than ever.” In addition to fearmongering about libraries hosting “drag shows for toddlers” and schools “replacing math with 57+ gender ideologies”—math is clearly already endangered in Indiana if the lieutenant governor can’t count past 57—Beckwith predicted June will usher in “Pagan Conquest,” which he described as “ritual child sacrifice—with glitter and hashtags.” (The lack of exclamation point at the end of this statement is itself homophobic.)
Indiana state law already forbids teachers from acknowledging the existence of queer people. Specious claims about “pronoun cults” and “Gomorrah storytelling” wouldn’t even be worth mentioning except that the state’s actual elected lieutenant governor just…tweeted them out. And politicians equating sexual difference with child predation and witchcraft is certainly nothing new. But Beckwith’s rhetoric signals both the persistence of America’s Satanic Panic and the startling political efficacy of equating queer people’s existence with child abuse.
Panic! about Satan in the United States
It seems very plausible, given our current political climate, and also bonkers (because it is) that late 20th century America convinced itself Satan and the forces of darkness were Coming for Our Kids. But it did happen. The Satanic Panic was a decade-plus long unsubstantiated public anxiety extravaganza that led to hundreds of criminal investigations, numerous convictions carrying absolutely staggering sentences, and the longest and most expensive criminal trial to date in American history.
While many are now more aware of the Satanic Panic (thanks in large part to mainstream media scrambling to make sense of QAnon’s rising popularity after January 6, 2021), most are unaware that this modern-day witchhunt explicitly targeted queer adults. In the cases of Margaret Kelly Michaels, Bernard Baran, and the San Antonio Four, the prosecution drew direct links between satanic ritual abuse allegations and the defendants’ homosexuality. Michaels spent five years in prison before her exoneration. Massachusetts incarcerated Baran for over two decades because his insistence on his innocence made him ineligible for parole. The San Antonio Four spent more than a decade in prison until their exoneration in 2016 (four years after one of their accusers recanted her testimony).
American political regressives are still equating sexual difference with child sex abuse (or “grooming”) and coding that predation as demonically anti-Christian. While conspiracy theorists—many of them embedded in white evangelical culture’s fixation on prayer warriors and exorcisms—insist the Satanic Panic never really ended, the mainstreaming of QAnon and the widespread popularity of its Save the Children campaign are bringing this moral panic back into popular political discourse.
An absurd but logical conclusion of this worldview emerged in Pizzagate: the viral 2016 presidential election conspiracy theory accusing high-ranking members of the Clinton campaign of trafficking children through D.C.-area pizzerias for nefarious Satanic purposes. Though thoroughly refuted by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, ultraconservative programs like InfoWars, and convicted felon and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn spread this theory relentlessly. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch drove from Salisbury, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., in response to Pizzagate fearmongering. Maddison fired an assault rifle into the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria because he was convinced children were being trafficked through the restaurant’s basement. (Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria has no basement, by the way.) The president’s ex-girlfriend was promoting this conspiracy theory as recently as November 2023.
Which children are we saving? From whom?
Anti-queer campaigns continue to depict LGBTQ+ artists and public figures as demonic child predators. Iowa and Arizona moved to ban Satanic displays last year. Seventy-five Republican lawmakers introduced a House Resolution three months ago to condemn a Satanic Black Mass in Kansas. And now Indiana’s lieutenant governor thinks the Rainbow Beast that is Pride Month is coming to get Hoosier children in the name of “Pagan Conquest.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Department of Justice is targeting Washington state lawmakers as anti-Christian for requiring Catholic priests to report all credible accounts of child sex abuse. Experts estimate that DOGE cuts to USAid have already killed hundreds of thousands of children. The Supreme Court ruled that Christian adoption agencies can refuse to place children with queer adults; and evangelical families, the most frequent adopters among American religious groups, often traumatize and shun their queer children. As of January 2025, nearly 15,000 Palestinian children have died in Israel’s US-funded genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign; 93% of Palestinian children are facing “imminent death” from starvation while Israel blocks aid to Gaza.
Republican lawmakers seem to think imaginary straight white Christian children need and deserve protection. Actual living children, not so much.
When American elected officials talk about “saving the children” from queers or Satanists or queer Satanists, they never seem to imagine those children could be queer themselves, or that America means anything other than straight white regressive Christianity. But Paganism and Satanism (not at all the same thing, but that’s a discussion for another day) often provide affirmation and celebration of LGBTQ+ people and cultures in a way that many Christian churches don’t—all the more pressing while, for example, Montana tries to legislate trans people literally just existing in public, the FBI is stalking doctors who provide gender affirming care to trans kids, and hate crimes against queer people are on the rise (or were, when we were still tracking them).
Christianity is not under attack in this country, no matter what the DOJ says or does. Queers, Satanists, and queer Satanists are not credible threats to American children, but its elected officials sure are. If we as a country must choose between actually protecting children or protecting white Christian nationalism? By all means let us become lesbians, destroy capitalism, and practice witchcraft.
