Texas Dem's claim about abuse victim's family unravels after relatives say they're 'tired of being used'

Here's the part that should embarrass everyone involved: the family of an actual child sex abuse victim had to come out publicly and say they never talked to James Talarico about their case. That's not a footnote. That's the whole story. A sitting lawmaker running for Senate stood up in front of cameras, invoked a real family's real trauma, and it turns out he didn't bother to check with them first, or he did and decided their consent didn't matter as much as the press hit.

Relatives calling themselves "tired of being used" is about as blunt a rebuke as you'll ever hear from people who usually just want to be left alone. They didn't ask to be a talking point. Somebody decided their pain was useful anyway, packaged it, and rolled it out at a podium. That's the kind of thing campaigns do when they think nobody's going to check the receipts.

We'd have the same problem with this if the party letters were reversed. Using a child abuse case as a prop, without the family's blessing, isn't a policy dispute, it's a decency failure. Voters in Texas don't need a lecture on empathy from a candidate who apparently skipped the step where you ask the actual victims if they're okay having their story used as ammunition.

If Talarico wants to run on protecting families, he might start by not treating one like a campaign prop. An apology that actually names what went wrong would be a start. Silence, or a non-answer from his campaign, will tell voters everything they need to know about how this happened in the first place.