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Don't kid yourself; this is what they want

Interesting headline at National Review yesterday:

Disney Executive Producer Admits to ‘Gay Agenda,’ ‘Adding Queerness’ Wherever She Could

“Admits”! The lede:

During a staff meeting on Florida’s recent enactment of the Parental Rights in Education bill, an executive producer at Disney said she was advancing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to insert queerness into children’s animation.

Bu the raciest gay-agenda thing “admitted” to in the story is the producer’s “sense of ‘I don’t have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background [of a show].’” (Presumably meaning same-sex.) She was glad Disney supported her inclusion of gay characters.

It seems pretty chill to me — and, since you folks can read, write, and behave yourselves in public, probably to you too. Even the National Review reporter — excuse me, “news writer” — Caroline Downey seemed to sense she wasn’t justifying her scare headline, and added, “Raveneau is executive producer on the upcoming Disney Junior musical series, ‘Rise Up, Sing Out,’ featuring the music of The Roots, which ‘tackles the subject of coming together to fight racism and celebrate black culture!,’ according to her LinkedIn profile.” That ought to get ‘em!

She needn’t have bothered: Other conservatives knew what to do. In his email newsletter, Erick Erickson refers to gay background characters as “indoctrination.” “DISNEY WANTS 5-YEAR-OLDS TO LEARN ABOUT SEXUAL ORIENTATION” screamed a chyron on the Laura Ingraham show. Tiny-faced Turning Point activist Charlie Kirk considers it an outrage that “children [will] be exposed to two dudes kissing each other at a very young age” — though he’s not outraged by a dude and a dudette kissing each other in front of kids because, duh, no homo — and suggests Disney, on behalf of gay people, is trying to “increase the ranks of the LGBTQ community” and “obliterate the innocence of children.”

Worse still is Rod Dreher, who has published several shrieks on the subject of Disney’s opposition to Florida’s insane Don’t Say Gay law, including one that, entirely dropping the mask, is called “Disney Goes Groomer.” When Dreher heard about the producer who thought it was fine to have two gay people kiss where children could see them, he doubled down on the accusation:

Groomers. They are all groomers. Why do some of the richest and most powerful people in America, executives of a company that has unparalleled access to the imaginations of America’s children, care so much about the sexuality of kids? It’s creepy. It’s demonic.

BTW when Dreher says “demonic” he ain’t being metaphorical:

(That’s from a Dreher story ululating over Ketanji Brown Jackson’s refusal to play along with the Republican “define a woman” nonsense during her hearings.)

This is all kinds of nuts, but let’s focus on the most interesting part — that none of these accusations of “grooming” and “obliterating the innocence of children” and “demonism” are about anything like a sexual interest in children; instead they’re about allowing children to know gay people exist — which they portray as something akin to child pornography.

Take this story from Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire: “Gay Florida Kindergarten Teacher Worries On MSNBC He Won’t Be Able To Share His Love Life With Kids Anymore.” The headline is clearly meant to suggest the teacher wishes to acquaint his young charges with intimate details of gay sex.

Yet when you read the story (which we can assume most of his audience won’t bother to do with any level of attention or understanding), it turns out the teacher is only saying things like, “my kids do have questions. They want to know who my partner is in pictures outside of my classroom, and I should be able to speak to them” and “that’s what we do as educators, we build relationships with our kids. And in order to build relationships, you talk about your home life, you talk about what you do on the weekends.”

The idea behind the Daily Wire story is the same as that behind the Florida law: That acknowledging the existence of gay people is the same thing as pornography, which is why it’s unsuitable for children. (Not coincidentally, Shapiro is planning his own children’s entertainment network which will probably only use gay characters as villains.)

And if you dispute the point, many of them will tell you that you’re a pedophile and a groomer — as indeed many choads did when I mentioned Dreher’s ravings on Twitter.  One of the things that most outraged them was that I said Dreher had “gone QAnon.” In other words, in response to my accusing Dreher of emulating a conspiracy-theory group best known for falsely accusing people of being pedos, they falsely accused me of being a pedo.

They have slipped the surly bonds of reality. But they have reason to believe they can put it over.  

Think of it: They have seen their movement led by a common crook whose known crimes come at least close to treason — and they have seen him get away with it. Think what a sense of power, of invincibility this gives them! And this crook was also able to put three new votes on the Supreme Court that will not tend to increase the store of human liberty — which excites them even further, because it promises that, instead of lashing out impotently as they have for years, they will be finally be able to hurt the people they’ve been hating all their miserable lives.

That’s why, during the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings, Marsha Blackburn attacked Griswold v Connecticut and Mike Braun attacked Loving v Virginia. They know Roe will be overturned and abortion banned, notwithstanding the majority of Americans who prefer the status quo, and see no reason why they can’t do the same to birth control and interracial marriage, no matter what other people think. They see no reason why they should pretend otherwise, either.

We sometimes talk about how they run their bigot routines on black, gay, and trans people in order to convince other cishet folks to hate them as much as they do. That’s as may be, but increasingly it looks to me less like a pitch and more like a dare: What are you gonna do about it?

If you think Obergefell and gay marriage or even Lawrence and gay rights will be spared, especially given what they’re trying to do to gay people right this very minute, you’re living in a dream world.