Make-believe is fun as long as we have the freedom to stop when we tire of playing. Now, however, the wonderful folks that gave us Sodom and Gomorrah want to compel us and our children in public schools to agree with them that their perverse sexual practices and thinking are normal. They want us to agree with them that women can be men and men can be women. They want the objectors among us to face job termination and legal sanctions if we don’t say “amen” to their ever-changing norms.

Here is a hard truth for some. I, for example, was born a male, and I will die as a man. If I hire a surgeon to decommission my reproductive apparatus, I will still be a man who has mutilated his body for no good reason. I will never be a woman. If I were to do this, I would be engaging in an expensive game of make-believe and fooling no one except the gullible who prefer make-believe over reality.

Here is another hard truth. God created sex for reproduction. Remember when He said, “Be fruitful and multiply?” He threw in orgasm as an incentive to reproduce, but far too many in our culture think orgasm, not reproduction, is the reason for sex. I am not criticizing orgasm; it is a happy by-product of the reproductive process. When we seek an orgasm for orgasm’s sake, however, we are majoring in the minor and minoring in the major.

Image: Illustration from the Emperor’s New Clothes, 1900 (cropped) by Hans Tegner.

The hedonism of our time is worrisome. When we cared about reality, William Thomas was a middle-of-the-pack competitive collegiate swimmer. Then William and all his unfeminine bulges decided he could compete better if he changed his name and started competing as a woman. Many are kowtowing to William’s con and talking about what a great female swimmer he is. Where is that little boy who told the emperor he was parading around his empire buck-naked?

There have been times in history when those in power have compelled people to do things and believe things against their will. Christians have forced non-Christians to profess Jesus. Muslims have pressured non-Muslims to convert. These were shameful actions, and now the preachers of perversion are trying to make us accept the unacceptable.

If the self-deluders among us want to keep playing make-believe, let them. We still live in a free country. But I stand with the little boy and Charles Dickens who said, “All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers.”

Ned Cosby, a regular contributor to American Thinker, is a former pastor, veteran Coast Guard officer, and a retired career public high school teacher. His newest novel OUTCRY is a love story exposing the refusal of Christian leaders to report and discipline clergy who sexually abuse our young people. This work of fiction addresses crimes that are all too real. Cosby has also written RECOLLECTIONS FROM MY FATHER’S HOUSE, tracing his own odyssey from 1954 to the present. For more info, visit Ned Cosby.