The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Conservatives Did Not Inflame the Culture War
The very name “progressive” indicates what leftists are all about — moving the needle to the left. The name “conservative,” by contrast, highlights that we want to preserve core truths. Yet the Left insists conservatives are waging culture war on them.
Political analyst Casey Chalk wonders if “gaslighting on gender and sexual identitarianism from the left [can] get any more absurd.”
The Washington Post last month ran a story about how a decision by the community center in McLean, Virginia to co-sponsor a “Drag StoryBook Hour” for children during Pride Month has, in their awkward wording, “set off culture wars.”
The May election for three open seats at the community center has attracted nine candidates, including Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who has criticized the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that resulted in the drag event. WaPo reporter Antonio Olivo observed, with editorial flourish, that this is “an example of how nothing is safe from the nation’s raging culture wars.”
A suburban community center hosts a drag queen story hour (DQSH) for elementary school students, yet it’s conservatives who are the ones stoking the culture war by complaining about it? A Florida school board member last year chaperoned a group of elementary school children on a field trip to a gay bar and the state’s community centers promote DQSH, but it’s conservatives who are the dangerous extremists for supporting a Florida parental rights in education bill?
Drag queens do bizarre, borderline pornographic acts in front of children, but it’s conservatives who are responsible for miseducating and damaging American youth? Come on.
DQSH spread from San Francisco (surprise!) in 2015 to the rest of the nation over the ensuing years, and Chalk notes it has gained the support of the American Library Association, “whose extensive resource page includes information on how libraries can resist and censure people in local communities who object to these events.”
Drag queens are not only not normal, they’re sometimes guilty of pedophilia, pornography, and other crimes. Nevertheless, Chalk concludes:
Liberal media outlets are claiming that conservatives should be held responsible for the suicides of children struggling with dysphoria.
Yet who encouraged prepubescent children to think about myopic topics like gender dysphoria in the first place? I certainly never heard of such things when I was in grade school in the 1990s. Who told children that their gender and sexual identity were the most important thing about them, and that misidentifying or misgendering amounted to the worst possible offense? Who is making millions of dollars off lying to and emotionally damaging impressionable, easily-manipulated children?
The answer is those advocating DQSH and the many other ubiquitous forms of sexual and gender propaganda influencing millions of American youth. It is they who are deceiving — and often permanently damaging — an entire generation of Americans for the sake of their own ideological agenda, the normalizing of bizarre, pornographic behavior.
No, conservatives did not inflame the culture war over trans ideology and drag queens. But we sure would like to stop it.