The “vibe shift” is real. By “vibe shift,” I mean the shift from American family values to complete cultural degeneracy over the last 30 or so years.

At the risk of sounding morose, the recent right-wing victory party over Pride Month is severely misguided. However encouraged we may be at the progress made against corporate wokeness, so-called “transgender kids,” and public displays of depraved sexuality, these were victories won relatively easily. They were the cultural rot baked in to society in only the last 10 years. The fight against cultural rot, however, is decade upon decade in the making.

The reason we must continue fighting against forms of LGBTQ activism that date back much farther than double mastectomies on kids is for the same reason that a gardener won’t do much good by cutting off the leaves of the weeds in his garden. He must tackle the roots.

Young women aren’t dealing with botched phalloplasties they “consented to” when they were barely out of middle school because of Barack Obama or TikTok or even the evil surgeons themselves. Those were instruments of a culture that was barreling headlong towards the full-scale victimization of children for a long time.

Our culture has willingly sacrificed the innocence of children to the gods of sexual license since at least 1973 when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision invented a constitutional right to abortion. Whether explicitly stated in court decisions or not, the assumed reason for protecting abortion with such fervor was that no one, it was argued, could possibly be expected to practice sexual purity, and thus must be allowed to get rid of the consequences of their conduct whether or not it harmed innocent young life.

Today, the march towards complete autonomy over one’s own body and sex continues, with politicians and activists seriously arguing that there is no reason why a 14-year-old should not be able to decide whether they are a girl or a boy or another thing, regardless of their biological anatomy. The culprits here are less the confused teens caught up in a cultural psychosis and more the adults for whom these children are collateral damage in their passionate insistence that no one can restrict another’s actions when it comes to feelings about sexuality.

Yet we can and we should, for the sake of the children, place guardrails on what someone is allowed to do with “their own body.” Humans don’t exist in isolation. The decision one person makes regarding their own life affects others, creating ripple effects that alter an entire culture. A marriage affects more than the two people in it; it affects their families and friends too. More consequentially, it affects their children, for should they divorce, those children will bear the brunt of that decision. Indeed, children are the most common casualty when humans play fast and loose with what we may broadly define as “family values.” They are the chief victims of abortion, gay marriage, gay surrogacy, gay adoption, no-fault divorce, cross-sex hormones, cross-sex surgeries, and the normalization of social transition in schools outside of parental oversight.

Recognizing from whence came pride merch for children at Target and chest binders for 12-year-old girls is crucial if we are to tackle the root of Pride Month, not just the leaves. This June, we are seeing less of the kind of wokeness that appeared in the last five to seven years. That is worth celebrating … but there’s still much more to do.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pixabay