by S.A. McCarthy
Department store superchain Target has lost over $10 billion in value since conservatives across the U.S. started boycotting the woke corporation for pushing “pride” merchandise on children, including pro-trans “tucking” and binding” clothes designed for toddlers. This follows Anheuser-Busch’s reaching a six-month low after consumers started boycotting Bud Light, which the beer manufacturing giant decided to brand with the face of biological male Dylan Mulvaney, who now dresses and acts as a grotesque caricature of a woman. Although these are, from an authentic conservative perspective, positive results, boycotts aren’t enough.
Conservatives keep losing ground in the culture wars. For all the rabid neocon promotion of capitalism, nearly every major corporation has gone woke and now actively promotes the LGBTQ agenda, especially to children. The chief reason for this is that conservatives don’t fight for the culture our ancestors built for us and killed and died to preserve — we prefer either to hesitate on the sidelines and safeguard vacuous liberalism, a no-man’s-land inevitably occupied by the most aggressive cultural combatant, or, in the case of self-styled intellectuals, simply eulogize the not-yet-dead West. Conservatives need to learn to fight; the Target boycott shows that, at least on a grassroots level, we’re capable of doing that. But when we fight, we need to press the advantage.
By way of example, Catholics recently responded to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ decision to honor an anti-Catholic hate group (a drag performer troupe called “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” who mock Catholic religious sisters and pole dance on crucifixes) as “community heroes.” The Archdiocese of Los Angeles issued a statement saying it “stands against any actions that would disparage and diminish our Christian faith and those who dedicate their lives to Christ.” Catholic Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also expressed his disappointment with the Dodgers’ decision, saying, “If the hate group ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ was anti-Islam instead of anti-Catholic there is zero chance the Dodgers would be honoring them with a ‘Community Hero Award’ next month.”
San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone (an outspoken critic of the LGBTQ agenda best known for barring then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi last year from receiving Holy Communion due to her pro-abortion policies) took an even stronger stance, tweeting: “Decent people would not mock & blaspheme [Catholic religious sisters]. So we now know what gods the Dodger admin worships.… Disappointing but not surprising. Gird your loins.”
Of those three condemnations, the strongest is Cordileone’s. Both the LA archdiocese (implicitly) and Rubio (explicitly) played the old, cliched “imagine if the roles were reversed” card. That particular tactic only works if two requisite conditions are met.
The first is a shared or common sense of justice or fair play. The LGBTQ wing of leftism has clearly demonstrated that it’s already considered “What if the roles were reversed?” and isn’t overly interested in application of the golden rule. When the Left takes power, whether in politics or in business, it promotes its own agenda and silences any other.
The second requisite is simply reason on the part of your interlocutor. The Left has abandoned even a pretense to reason at this point — there is no matter of debating differing means of achieving the same good; there is no good or goal in common between Right and Left anymore. When one side advocates genocide of the unborn, genital mutilation surgeries for children, sex between adults and minors, rampant pornography use, and the destruction of the family, there is no debate to be had.
The old “imagine if the roles were reversed” approach is more than just tired and worn out; it is laughably, scornfully unsuitable to our present age. If conservatives want to actually conserve the things they care about, they would do well to emulate Cordileone’s response to the Dodgers’ drag debacle: “Gird your loins.” This is not an appeal to the reason or moral soundness of an interlocutor but a call to fellow soldiers to prepare for war. The Left has proven that it has no common moral ground with conservatives; it has proven that it seeks to destroy your families and corrupt (or even kill) your children. There is no reasoning with such a beast — there is only war.
The rainbow mafia want to mutilate children’s genitals and convince the bleeding, irreversibly damaged children that that’s healthy. Don’t let them lick their wounds after a $10 billion stock loss. Press the advantage. Ruin them.
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S.A. McCarthy is a Catholic writer and journalist. A former teacher, he now writes on Catholicism, liturgy, culture, education, literature, and Ireland. Much of his work has been published by St. Michael’s Media.
Photo “Target Store” by Mike Mozart. CC BY 2.0.
