It’s a tough question to ask: Why do progressives hate kids?  The question answers itself when you start stacking up the evidence.  Kids across the country -- in various ways and to varying degrees -- are suffering as a result. 

The midterm elections are about a lot of big issues: inflation, housing costs, groceries, gas, crime, the border… but the progressives’ comprehensive assault on children ranks right up there. 

It’s cliché, but America’s future is its kids.  Today, a perverse ethos guides progressives.  That ethos in practice is doing incalculable damage to young lives.  What progressives believe amounts to rationalized debauchery. 

The culture needs to be reclaimed by the decent majority.  Faith in God -- increasingly unfashionable among progressives -- remains the powerful counter to the resulting cancerous nihilism of progressivism.  The spiritual is the raison d'etre for the traditional values and mores that are necessary for society’s survival and health.  

The evil derives, in large part, from Marxism, which, in one form or another, is the animating spirit of modern progressivism.  Marx’s acolytes realized decades ago that to overthrow America’s magnificent experiment in liberty, it wasn’t enough to undermine free enterprise, but destroy the culture, which is the country’s backbone… which, as a matter of fact, is any country’s backbone. 

But Marxists aren’t alone.  The counterculture, which had its impetus in the 1960s, has cut a big, ugly swath through society.  It’s since been absorbed by progressivism and mainstreamed.  Yes, Marxists glommed onto the counterculture, but the counterculture was really an outgrowth of post-World War II affluence. 

The generation that came along in the 1950s knew not deprivation, not like their parents had experienced during the Great Depression.  Nor did they know the tumult of world war (the Cold War there was, but it was a different beast).          

The hedonistic mantra from the 60s -- flagrantly lived out in the Disco 70s -- was “If it feels good, do it.”  Better than half a century later, hedonism is no less potent, though, nowadays, it tends to be expressed in rationalizations like self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and the need to validate feelings, which are, almost inevitably, broken compasses leading nowhere good.                    

Then there are progressive box checkers -- followers, like your uncle and aunt, Frank and Joyce.  They’re swell with your kids, though they’re a tad smug.  Their thinking is derivative.  Despite their educations, credentials, and stations in life, whatever spin comes from progressive thought and opinion leaders, they’ll parrot.  They’d be aghast if you said that their sensibilities hurt kids.

Yet, Frank, an attorney, should know about evidence.  Unless you deny what you’re seeing -- quite a bit of that goes on among progressives -- the evidence is compelling: progressive views and practices are terribly injurious to kids, whether as a result of willful or misguided intention. 

For Frank and Joyce, per script, drag queen story time at the local library or school is about expanding a child’s appreciation for diverse lifestyles.  Men camping it up in outrageous costumes, wigs, and makeup is, indeed, a slice of life that builds kids’ appreciation for porn clubs and stag parties.  Or maybe they, too, can cross-dress like the exhibitionists at diversity-affirming LGBTQ parades.  Or maybe they’ll join the Navy or merchant marine, and as “pollywogs,” cross-dress to transit the Equator.  You never know.   

Drag queen story time is just good fun, right?  Not so, says Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  Rufo correctly asserts that these stagings harm kids and the nuclear family.

From Fox News, October 28:   

Rufo said the folks who created the trend of hosting drag queen events for youngsters left a "trail of evidence" through their writings that suggest they want to "sexualize children and subvert the middle class family."

"They want to basically eliminate what they call the sexual hierarchy in favor of creating a sexual connection between adult and child, which has, of course, long been the kind of final taboo of the sexual revolution," he warned. 

Exposure to drag queens is a warmup act of sorts.  It’s actually a gateway to introducing kids to harder sexual indoctrination and perversions. 

Why stress reading, writing, and arithmetic when schools have a duty to subject students to sexually explicit curriculum?     

Per the Daily Caller, October 29:

[Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education reports that] a producer at a television station told her she could not discuss the different types of sex that 10-year-olds learn in the “Human Growth and Development” curriculum of a Wisconsin school district due to FCC regulations.”         

Today’s sexual indoctrination isn’t the sex education of yore.  Biology matters less than immersing kids in materials that, per Sanzi, instructs grade schoolers in “anal sex, oral sex and vaginal sex.” 

Why is this? 

Rufo is right, in that the left is smut-peddling children to undermine parents -- and let’s add faith -- as the traditional and rightful teachers about sex… sex in respectful, loving relationships… sex not just as pleasure (orgiastic indulgence for subversives), but, ultimately, as the means of procreation, which is the province of biological males and females. 

But Marxists’ fellow travelers -- too many teachers (and their unions), administrators, and academics -- are go-alongs afraid to challenge this pernicious ideology.  Some are true believers; others are debauched themselves. 

There’s a growing epidemic of sex crimes committed by educators against students.

Reported Fox News, October 14:

An analysis conducted by Fox News Digital found that from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, at least 269 educators were arrested, which works out to roughly one arrest a day.

The 269 educators included four principals, two assistant principals, 226 teachers, 20 teacher's aides and 17 substitute teachers.  

What about the derangement of transgenderism?  “Gender fluidity” is a gross conceit, advanced by those who are in full rebellion against God and nature. 

Permitting males who have had some cosmetic surgery, are pumped up on estrogen, and cross-dress into girls’ athletics accomplishes what?  Ask parents of female athletes about the injury to their daughters.  This is a mockery of young female athletes, who work hard to master a sport and achieve. 

Boys in girls’ restrooms?  Recall the notorious case of the cross-dressing teen who sexually assaulted girls in girls’ restrooms at two different Loudoun County, Virginia schools.  This lurid tale occurred not just because of the laxity of school administrators, but in service to lunacy.   

Recently, Vanderbilt University Medical Center was in the midst of a firestorm it created.  It was conducting “gender affirmation surgery” on minors.  The surgery is better understood as mutilation.  Under pressure, Vanderbilt has suspended permanent sex-change surgeries. 

If you want to know why Vanderbilt and other medical centers have jumped into “gender reassignment” surgeries and procedures, follow the money.  Alternative Reporter (October 5) states that the “industry was valued at $1.9 billion last year and is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of more than 11% through 2030.” 

A younger generation of medical practitioners have convinced themselves that altering a body affirms “feelings” about gender.  After all, we live in an age where feelings trump facts, reality, and reason. 

But hospital systems are controlled from their corporate suites.  Make no mistake that mutilating children’s bodies is for cold profit.

Don’t challenge the medical profession’s intentions, though.  The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Children’s Hospital Association want Merrick Garland to sic the DoJ and FBI on detractors, not unlike what the American Federation of Teachers wanted done to parents who objected to the sexual indoctrination of their kids.   

Then there’s abortion, including late-term abortion.  Abortion merits an exposition of its own.  Let’s just say that it’s the greatest offense directed at children, in that their lives are snuffed out before their eyes ever see the sky.

This comprehensive assault on children is the consequence of a progressive worldview that has broken bad.  It’s a frightening, stomach-churning revelation. 

J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.               

Image: British Library