by Matthew Boose
Republican culture warriors have devoted considerable energy to subjects like “drag queen story hour” and “protecting women’s sports.” While these battles must be fought, they are oblique ways of addressing the real problem. Drag shows are low-hanging fruit. It doesn’t require much courage to denounce them. What does take some courage is to say, “so-called transgender individuals are mentally ill, and their dangerous delusions must be rejected for the sake of our children, and our personal dignity as rational beings.”
Few elected officials are willing to go that far. Instead, they pick the easy fights, leveraging society’s disgust with the most extreme, freakish obscenities. Disgust, being an arbitrary standard, is not a useful way to measure these things, however. The problem is that today’s obscenity easily can (and frequently does) become tomorrow’s “normal.” We wouldn’t be fighting about drag queens in the first place if yesterday’s conservatives had done their job.
Nor can we place all of the blame on mushy Republican politicians. A majority of Republican voters now accept the revolutionary, erroneous notion of “gay marriage.” And yet we are surprised to find ourselves pressed against the wall, pleading for children to be protected from predators in the name of “parental rights.” The phrase “parental rights” has a “family values” ring to it. It’s weak.
Forget “parental rights.” In a healthy society, the sacred authority of the family (that is, with a father at the helm) is not even questioned.
The paralyzing sickness of “tolerance” has made decent people timid. There is nothing cruel about acknowledging that a man cannot be a woman or vice versa. It’s just the truth. By refusing to give my assent to the delusions of a mentally ill person, I am not causing any distress to said person that the condition already has not. If anyone has been victimized, it is me. I am being coerced to play along with absurd nonsense. And so are you.
Coerced? For too long, rational people have yielded the truth, and therefore power, to a deranged fringe. One sees this in the language that conservatives use to defend their positions: “Biological male” and “biological female” are redundant terms. Is there any such thing as a nonbiological male? According to the Bolshevist cult, there is. In reality, no such distinction exists. Before Republicans were defending “biological sex,” they were caught up in protecting “traditional marriage.” They ended by giving up the definition of marriage and family to people who value neither, and look where it got us.
Things are now so out of control that the very concept of “normal” is attacked as an imposition on that loud minority of LGBTQIAs who have seized the driver’s seat.
To the contrary, the LGBTQ agenda is an imposition on normal people, and until it is rejected at the root, we will live with its poisonous effects. Families (with a mom and a dad) must assert their primacy once again over sexual deviants. This requires “intolerance,” which is a blasphemous act in the regime of “diversity and inclusion,” but it is the only way back to a decent country. Until then, the rights of normal people, including the right to go about one’s business without being harassed over “pronouns,” or smothered with obscenity, or to have one’s child groomed in school, will not be secure.
Contemporary society rests atop a bedrock of deviancy that few, even the right-wing culture warriors, dare disturb. The Right has to set a higher moral horizon than merely reacting to the latest perversities of the Left. As things stand, the Right’s agenda comes across as a hodgepodge of sound bites and grievances, rather than a vision of beauty and truth.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
Photo “Protest” by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.
