Moms for Liberty (M4L), the anti-LGBTQ+ extremist hate group, reportedly honored South Carolina state Rep. RJ May as their 2023 Legislator of the Year and had him speak at their 2022 event on “Reclaiming Education in America.” May was just arrested this morning over nearly a dozen federal charges for distributing child sex abuse material — he has a wife and child.

May’s indictment is notable since M4L regularly seeks to ban LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books as a form of “pornography” and regularly accuses LGBTQ+ people and their allies of “grooming” children for sexual abuse, a decades-old claim that inspires hatred and violence of queer people and their supporters.

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The three-term, 38-year-old Republican allegedly used the screen name “joebidennnn69” to exchange 220 different files of toddlers and young children involved in sex acts on the Kik social media network during spring 2024, the Associated Press reported. He allegedly uploaded the explicit images and photos using his home wi-fi network and cellphone.

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Prosecutors say May’s Kik account contained 265 child sex abuse videos, WISTV reported. Prosecutors also say that May “has a sexual interest in children the same age as his own children” and that he has “a sexual interest in incest” between young children and their parents. Because some of the images featured children the same age as his own child, prosecutors recommended he be held without bail until his trial.

Prosecutors also allegedly found videos on his laptop of him having sex with three underage girls from Colombia, none of whom were his wife. May allegedly used an account on the social media platform Mega to send messages to these girls that “consisted largely of arranging ‘meet up’ dates, time, price negotiations, and rules regarding the videoing of sexual encounters, all of which are indicative of sex work,” the court indictment against him stated.

May’s lawyer has claimed that investigators found no child sex abuse images on May’s laptop and that prosecutors failed to link each allegedly incriminating Kik message directly to May. Nevertheless, if convicted, May could spend over a decade in prison.

In 2024, May, who was the co-chair of the state’s ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus until they kicked him out over the kiddie porn charges, compared Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care to the state paying for “lifestyles” like drug addiction.

“We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done to them,” May said during a House floor debate on the bill.

In their court filing, prosecutors wrote, “If [May] can hide this criminal activity from [his wife who] he shares a bedroom with, then he can easily hide it from any court enforcement mechanism. Furthermore, there is evidence that he has recently traveled to South America to engage in commercial sex, again presumably without his wife’s knowledge that he ever even left the country. Thus, he is very likely to be able to evade detection by court enforcement of release conditions.”

State law requires South Carolina’s Speaker of the House to immediately suspend state representatives indicted of certain felony charges, so May will likely be suspended or forced to resign.

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