The failure to appreciate danger, or the refusal to take seriously the promises of the adversary, are often the result of a deficiency of imagination.
We look in shock at the indoctrination – and resulting sexualization – of the young, surprised that a secular progressive movement would go after the softest of minds. We fail to predict the application of evil because we cannot imagine such evil in ourselves.
After all, who amongst us would teach students that the family unit is racist and prejudicial, or that religion is homophobic?
Or instruct 5 – 7 year olds on “gender identity?”
Or provide rainbow flags and buttons to 3rd graders (and instruct those students they must not tell their parents about what was discussed during school pride week)?
Or force kids to attend a school-wide pride parade?
Then there is Chicago’s plans to give condoms to elementary school students, and the National Association Independent Schools’ plans to teach “queer-inclusive” curriculum to kindergarteners. I could go on, but there is only so much time and space.
What makes all this so much worse is that the State compels the students to attend these schools. You will attend. You will be re-educated. You will like it. The lurking danger of public schooling (and the reason why compulsory public schooling must be opposed) – the danger of what would happen when progressives have control – has emerged.
Anyway, if we call this a war for the children, we must also recognize the strategy of the adversary.
What we are seeing in 2022 is the long revolution’s focus on public schools. This was planned.
For years, progressives have recognized that schools must be converted to a type of national church, emphasizing their secular values and identities. In the past, the ministers of this national church scolded America in broad terms that it would “lose its soul” – and thus be condemned to a worldly hell – “if it did not devote itself to a “conscious social ideal.”1 They wished American students would be able to see “the struggle for social justice as central to their country’s moral identity.”2
As summarized by Marxist literary figure Raymond Williams:
“If we believe in a particular social character, a particular set of attitudes and values, we naturally believe that the general education which follows from these is the best that can be offered to anyone: it does not feel like ‘indoctrination,’ or even ‘training’; it feels like offering to this man the best that can be given.”3
It’s now 2022 and look at their success. Back in 2011, they proposed that “Comprehensive sexuality education should start in kindergarten.” They can now say: “Comprehensive sexuality education is starting in kindergarten.” Dreams become reality. Imagination.
The use of schools – what is properly understood as a structure of power – by the Left is part of the recognition that the poor and middle class would never bring about true revolutionary change. Dramatic cultural change would have to be instituted by the powerful, bringing about what we might call the top-down revolution. And that is what we are seeing with the targeting of grade-school children with programming and instruction opposed by most parents. (Let us not be naïve and think that democracy means the will of the people.)
Public schools are now the tool by which “learning becomes indispensable to the very process of social change and social change becomes the precondition for a politics that moves in the direction of a less hierarchical, more radical democratic social order.”4 Taking them for their word, the radicalization and sexualization of the young is a means to an end.
This is one of the reasons we see the progressive politicians and corporations attacking Florida’s new bill that “bans classroom instruction on ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity’ in kindergarten through third grade.” Florida is thwarting their plans for your child. Disney’s response is to flood the zone – meaning children’s’ programming – with the LGBTQIA+ agenda.
As I said, the sexualization of the young is a means to an end. And what is that end?
The achievement of a type of social justice and the protection and furtherance of what they consider human rights, which “demands sexual autonomy and gender freedom for every human being.”5 This is a community affair, one that necessarily involves government officials and teachers, as “it takes a village to raise a gender nonconforming child.”6
Yet that isn’t the complete picture of their aims, as this is part of the broader effort to achieve the emancipation of man through defeat of the family and the parent-child bond, religion, the institutions that hold us together. To quote René Girard:
“It is not enough for the societal bond to be loosened; it must be totally destroyed.”
How far they are willing to go to achieve these ends are unknown. What price do you make others pay to reach utopia? Historically, others have asked this question and all have found out that “it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.”
And where will we be if this destruction is successful?
I don’t have the answers. There are only more questions for our uncertain future.
How will they rebuild what they destroy, and in whose image will the new world be made?