Pedophiles too. Prophet Mohammud raped Aisha when she was just 6 months old. Jk, she was practically an adult. She was 9 years old so its all good.
Now let's talk about the word "pedophile". If you ask your friendly neighborhood AI what that word means it's going to tell you that a pedophile is a person who desires to have sex with prepubescent children.
Unless the society you live in has a major totalitarian episode, it is not likely that you will ever encounter anything that is as evil, sick, and degenerate as what pedophiles do to children. The concept horrifies people. I'm going to assume it horrifies you.
Because the concept is horrifying, "pedophile" can be used as a propaganda word of power.
Now let's get back to the case at hand. How likely is a 17-year old girl to be prepubescent?
Note that by asking this question I'm not trying to make an excuse for Gaetz's behavior. There are reasons we put a taboo on sexual contact between adult men and nubile women below the age of majority. I am stipulating that Matt Gaetz is probably guilty of statutory rape (not certain because of jurisdictional variations) and should be in jail.
But. The distinction between pedophilia and what I stipulate Gaetz was doing (technically, "ephebophilia") is an important one.
Ephebophilia ranges from being a mere malum prohibitum to a minor crime, depending largely on how sexually and psychologically mature the victim is. It's not the deeply perverted, sick, damaging thing pedophilia is.
People who run around yelling "Matt Gaetz is a pedophile" are doing something harmful and wrong, and should be called on it. They are confusing behaviors with very different moral weights, and they are doing it to mess with your head.
Their aim is to use the current atmosphere of moral panic about pedophilia among the rich and powerful
to recruit you into a consensus demand that Matt Gaetz be lynched.
This is dark propaganda. This is bad.
It is not very relevant to my logic whether that moral panic is justified or not. I'm not even going to state a position on that, because it would be distracting.
I'm also not going to state a position on what the upper age limit on tweeners should be, because that's not relevant either.
You should ask yourself: do you want to live in the kind of society where men who have sex with tweener girls can be equated with men who rape infants, and destroyed that way?
I advise against this. I'm not going to write down a detailed argument here, except to point out that it would create an opening for people who want to normalize actual pedophilia. In fact, it may already be doing that, and I wish I were sure that nobody is doing this intentionally. There are some very evil people with very long time horizons out there.
If you don't want to live in the kind of society where power word "pedophile" can be used to lynch people who are not in fact pedophiles, you should (1) stop abusing the word if you were doing so, and (2) talk down other people when they do it.
Thank you for your attention.