We may finally be approaching the final battlefield in America’s long-waged culture war: our children.
It’s hard to imagine, after all, anything more worth fighting for than the fate of future generations. Hence the recent pushback against the left’s attempts to sexualize America’s most innocent demographic.
The issue is finally gaining widespread attention due to outlandish marketing campaigns by fashion houses Balenciaga and Bennetton, and a drag-themed fashion show that includes activities for children (such as drag queen story hour) sponsored by Crocs.
While these disturbing efforts to sexualize children are grabbing the latest headlines, they are merely the latest — albeit the most brazen — attempts to slowly but surely normalize pedophilia in popular culture.
Progressives are attempting to gain ground via tedious, incremental advances — tiny steps that over time turn into miles — just as they have with other social issues.
Take abortion, for instance; in the course of roughly three decades we went from “safe, legal, and rare” to abortion until birth. Or the trans movement, which was virtually nonexistent yet has grown steadily more powerful since the infamous Obergefell v. Hodges ruling on gay marriage in 2015 (in fact, it’s now being compared to the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties).
The march is often so slow and steady that by the time we notice what’s happening it’s too late. But to those who have been paying attention, the Balenciaga and Benneton campaigns were anything but shocking.
Like most debauched notions rearing their ugly heads these days, the idea that children can govern their own bodies dates at least back to the radicalism of the late 60s and early 70s. It’s no coincidence that the late gay activist Carl Wittman asserted in his 1970 “A Gay Manifesto” that “kids can take care of themselves, and are sexual beings way earlier than we’d like to admit.”
This very radicalism has infested every nook and cranny of America’s scientific institutions, The American Psychological Association nearly a decade ago had to correct claims it had dubbed pedophilia a “sexual orientation,” an absurd categorization seeking to equate child predators with the nearly 90 percent of Americans who identify as heterosexual.
More recently it has labeled it a “mental disorder,” which while perhaps more accurate also seems to unjustly link it to more common, and less dangerous, maladies such as anxiety and depression.
Yet over this slow march, each step back is followed with three forward, and the idea of pedophilia as a sexual orientation was back in vogue by 2018.
Such back-and-forths ultimately inch their way in left’s favor over time, hence the latest efforts to rebrand child predators as “minor-attracted persons,” or MAPs.
On we dance, unknowingly casting aside the most basic societal decencies until indecency ceases to exist. How else does one explain that despite the fact that Disney is pushing sex into its content, it generated nearly $70 billion in annual revenue in 2021?
And why else would millions around the world spend countless hours on an app that banned the former President of the United States while turning a blind eye to the platform’s use as a marketplace for child porn? Thankfully Elon Musk is now ridding Twitter of such filth, an effort that seems to matter very little to a left-wing echo chamber accused of normalizing child predation.
The opposition claims conservatives are overreacting and reliving the “Satanic panic” of the 80s. Yet we have all watched as government stings have rescued countless trafficked children across the country while California released thousands of child predators — including rapists — after less than a year in prison. We have seen sexually explicit books depicting acts involving children in schools and libraries.
Rather than act to prevent these harsh realities, Democrats in Congress are working to ensure they unfold unabated.
Cracking down on this material is more critical than ever, especially as the battle spills into one of the few places children have traditionally been safe from such filth: the classroom.
After all, there’s no better way to normalize abhorrent behavior than to convince those being preyed upon that such behavior is acceptable.
Thankfully crusaders such as Libs of Tik Tok and Chris Rufo have rushed to confront the left on this new battlefield, shining a light on the unorthodox curricula playing out in today’s classrooms.
As has Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed a bill forbidding the sexual indoctrination of children up to third grade. It states in part: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
That such a bill was even controversial is disturbing. There’s a big difference between sex ed and kink. The former is science and the latter is fetish. Only one belongs in schools.
But the slow march of the last few years has numbed so many to the horrors unfolding before their very eyes and, by extension, made our current nightmare possible.
DeSantis and Florida have shown the way by investigating drag shows and their sponsors, potentially hitting them with criminal charges. More need to fight back, however, or the phenomenon will continue unabated, damning future generations to unspeakable horrors and ours for allowing it to happen. We owe our children better than this.
Greg Jones is a conservative freelance writer and blogger.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.