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The woke agenda to sexualise schoolchildren points to something deeper and just as sinister.

Josh Daws is the host of The Great Awakening Podcast and an astute commentator on Christianity and culture. Last week, Daws published a brilliant Twitter thread that received a lot of attention, in which he addressed growing concerns about the sexualisation of schoolchildren in Western nations.

The backdrop to Daws’ post is the recent passage of Florida’s parental rights bill, which protects young schoolchildren from sexualised curriculum content.

Many on the left adamantly opposed this bill, sparking a popular conservative criticism that the left was running protection for pedophiles. One widely-shared meme quipped that if someone opposed the new law they must by definition be “evil and want to diddle kids”.

Besides lacking any nuance, Daws’ concern is that this knee-jerk response to Florida’s bill misses the real woke agenda, which is far subtler but just as sinister.

While sex appears to be front-and-centre in the woke revolution, it is in fact only a tool, argues Daws. Along with Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory is being used to radicalise schoolchildren, alienate them from their parents and the values of older generations, and recruit them as foot soldiers in the ongoing culture war.

Daws’ argument speaks for itself, so his thread is reproduced below in full. Strap yourself in for some eye-opening commentary.

Why the Left Wants to Talk to Your Kids About Sexuality

I’m seeing a lot of people on the right share this meme. While it may be a strong satirical response to those who get lost in nuance, it fundamentally fails to recognise why the left wants to talk to your kids about sexuality. Let’s connect some dots.

The left doesn’t want to diddle kids. They want to create little revolutionaries. To do that they need to sever the bond between students and the parents they believe are raising their children to be hateful bigots.

In order to sever the bond between parents and their children, the left is using a two-pronged approach. Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology (properly known as Queer Theory) are not two unrelated sets of ideas. They are two parts of the same strategy.

CRT is usually the first set of ideas to be introduced. This is often enough to radicalise racial minorities, but it’s merely step one for white (or white adjacent) students.

CRT instills in these students a negative self-identity as they’re taught to believe they’re recipients of enormous privilege that was stolen from others and that they are complicit in historic and ongoing injustice. In child terms, they’re taught to believe they’re bad.

Apart from the shame and guilt, this also gives them a worldview at odds with the one their parents grew up with and are trying to pass on to their kids. Step one is complete.

The Deeper Purpose of Queer Theory

Once CRT is done tearing down these kids and leaving them with a negative self-identity, Queer Theory (QT) is introduced and offers them a wide assortment of positive self-identities to choose from.

Instead of living with the shame and guilt of being a member of the oppressive dominant culture, these students can be celebrated for coming out as gender non-binary or pansexual.

In an instant, these kids can trade their negative self-identity and all the accompanying guilt and shame of being an “oppressor” for a positive self-identity as a much-venerated “oppressed” minority.

At this point, the left desperately wants this new identity to stay at school so it has time to be cemented before the parents find out. In the guise of helping these students, schools withhold this information about their child’s new identity from mum and dad.

Once the parents do find out about their child’s new identity, it’s firmly in place and an adversarial relationship between the child and parents has been manufactured. It takes extraordinarily deft parenting to repair the relationship once it has reached this stage.

The parents’ tendency will be to overreact and push the child further into the arms of the woke radicals who now have the little revolutionary they wanted from the beginning. The bond between parents and child has been severed ending the perpetuation of hate and bigotry.

Even Christian Schools are Vulnerable

The left is determined to replicate this process in as many families as they can using whatever means at their disposal. It’s not about diddling kids. It’s about capturing the minds of impressionable children.

Unfortunately, this creates environments where actual predators can thrive. When young children are isolated from their parents, encouraged to adopt different beliefs, and keep secrets from their parents, they are made easy targets for abusers.

“But my school has Christian teachers and a Christian principal. They couldn’t possibly have this agenda.” Aha. This is where we turn to Joe Rigney and connect another dot.

(Editor’s note: see Joe Rigney’s Desiring God article, Do You Feel My Pain? about how empathy can be weaponised for harm).

Hear me loud and clear on this. Most teachers love the kids in their classrooms and want only the best for them. They have had their empathy for these students weaponised against them by leftist activists promoting educational programs that sound nice and caring.

Highly empathetic teachers are being used to promote this agenda unaware of its insidious purpose. An example: I recently saw a teacher at a Christian school announce that she would no longer be using the words “mum”, “dad”, or “parents” in her classroom.

Her reason? She had just read a paper on the importance of making kids from non-traditional families feel included. She suggested replacing “Donuts with Dads” with “Bagels with Buds” or something of the such.

This sounds like a very considerate thing to do for kids who might feel different because they don’t have a dad or live with their grandparents, but its purpose is to subtly chip away at the very idea of the normative nuclear family (a stated goal of the BLM organisation).

This is Not a Secret Agenda

Christians who think that we can embrace the ideas from CRT and reject radical gender ideology need to realise how the former is used to prepare kids to accept the latter.

These are your kids we’re talking about. The left wants them. They would love to sever your bond with them. They think your appeals to childhood innocence are an attempt to force heteronormativity on them. Seriously. They write papers on it. It’s not a secret agenda.

James Lindsay has recorded a three-part series walking through this entire agenda by looking at primary sources. I highly recommend all parents invest the time to listen to them.

The meme I opened this with is an easy response to the insanity we’re seeing today, but it’s not a great explanation. We should take the time to help people see how nice-sounding programs are being used in the classroom to create little activists and put kids in danger.

Image by Pexels.