We're Coming For Your Children

You aren’t winning converts with this rhetoric…

As a pretty devoted grandfather, phrases like this don’t go unnoticed. I consider myself modern, middle of the road politically, and I save my passion and energy for projects well outside the culture war battlefields—like studying the real history of the United States without the cancel culture spin. My last article made the argument that the U.S. Government likely manufactured a reason to pick a fight with Mexico. This war delivered 525,000 square miles and filled in a lot of the missing pieces in the Manifest Destiny puzzle. Was it fair after the Texas War of Independence to demand the new border between our countries be the Rio Grande, and not the Rio Nueces some 130 miles further north?

The current full-court press playing out in the streets and social media is no less than a war. Two sides with radically different opinions and feelings flailing away at each other, it’s difficult to imagine that common ground can be reached. The loose definition of the end of a war is simple—it’s when you have killed so many of the enemy, they can no longer fight. The war over who is in charge of their children could take a long time to sort out. Parents may be reluctant combatants, but once in the fight, they pack a wallop.

It’s interesting theater to see a father in a “Don’t Tread On Me” t-shirt tell the school administrators why restrooms should remain Girls or Boys according to their birth gender. OK, he’s not as modern as I believe I am, but his daughter was in a school system in Virginia where a male who identifies as a female sexually assaulted two girls in two different schools. The school board president didn’t do himself any favors when he lied that he was not aware of these incidents.

The other issue that confounds me is cabinet officials and even a Supreme Court justice who cannot define “what is a woman?” Women’s sports are walking dead when we cannot agree on something so obvious at birth. I remember a scene from the television show Dallas when Sue Ellen catches J.R. Ewing in bed with his mistress. After a few minutes of trading sharp barbs, J.R. poses the question. “Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” It seems like the current administration is asking me that exact question.

I understand gender dysphoria. It’s real. I would not want to be trapped in a body with which I am uncomfortable. But is our current solution worth throwing all the gains of women’s sports in the dumpster? And why, having fought so hard for Title IX, aren’t liberal women defending it? We are being scolded to not believe our lyin’ eyes—a gargantuan task for a nation of people who place great value in believing what they see.

Why is an “Open” category, where both sexes can compete, gaining so little traction? Why not build “Open” bathrooms in public schools and universities? I think the left could get that idea across the finish line and they could fund it with all the excess money they received from Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Take the win. It may buy some time before the eventual disintegration of public education altogether, when businesses (charter schools) and faith-based organizations, with their higher test scores, will control the narrative.

Having raised multiple teenagers, there were moments when I may have considered handing one of them over to this colorful mob. But those times passed quickly, little Johnny got reeled back into the boat like an angry bass and returned to his room for a couple of chapters of The Catcher in the Rye before dinner. Good or bad, they are not your children to come get. You will have to pry them from the cold, dead hands of parents.