The rainbow people won’t leave the kids alone.
We were told that the LGBT movement was about adults — giving everyone equal rights and getting the government out of the bedrooms of consenting adults. But this was a lie; LGBT activists were always coming for the children.
Just look at the recent kerfuffle over Netflix. Right-wing influencers and activists have drawn attention to the many Netflix shows promoting LGBT content for very young children (e.g., a cartoon with a little boy putting on a dress to dance for his two dads). Prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have joined in the denunciations, and the backlash seems to have hurt the company’s stock price.
It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary dip or whether Netflix is about to take a permanent hit a la Bud Light. What is clear is that Netflix is deliberately grooming kids with LGBT messages.
Most attempts to deny this malintent are lies so obvious as to be insulting. The suggestion that Netflix shows are just reflecting or representing reality (“LGBT people exist, get over it”) is laughable. If they were just trying to capture reality, there would be a lot more happy, churchgoing evangelical characters on TV. Likewise, if the goal is just to provide representation for misunderstood minorities, why aren’t there more positive portrayals of, say, Latin-mass-attending Catholic families with seven kids?
The truth is that Netflix and its peers carefully curate what they include in their offerings — rival Amazon Prime Video is going so far as to scrub guns from the promo pictures for James Bond films. Pretending that Netflix’s content choices are neutral is ridiculous. Thus, the most compelling argument from those defending Netflix is also the honest one: which is to ask why pro-LGBT content shouldn’t be included in kids’ shows — that is, why is it OK for the prince to kiss the princess, but not for the prince to kiss another prince?
This is an awkward question for many of those attacking Netflix because they have embraced the sexual revolution, including much of the LGBT agenda. From Elon Musk’s personal example to the many right-wing influencers cheering when other right-wing influencers in same-sex marriages buy babies and deprive them of their mothers via commercial surrogacy, these are not people with a coherent conservative sexual ethic.
And yet there is more than cynical grift and political opportunism here. Yes, some people are happy to attack their political and cultural foes for things they accept in their friends, but others are questioning the sexual revolution in general, and the LGBT movement in particular. Two issues have especially induced this reconsideration. The first is that kids were not part of the deal; the second is the sudden prominence of the T portion of LGBT. And, of course, these often overlap.
The result is an unsettling of the settlement that had been tacitly accepted following the triumph of the campaign for same-sex marriage, a campaign that had focused on adults and promised that redefining marriage would not affect others. This promise was false, and people are realizing it, in part because LGBT activists keep pushing the envelope, for example, by inserting LGBT messages into Netflix shows for kids.
Many people who accepted same-sex marriage were surprised by the LGBT movement’s immediate and aggressive pivots toward both transgenderism and by its claiming children as part of the “LGBT community.” They should have seen it coming; these moves were always implicit, even if many people didn’t realize it. After all, the “T” has been part of the movement for years, and the “born this way” narrative presumed that some children are, from birth, part of the “LGBT community,” that they possess intrinsic and immutable gender identities and sexual orientations that must be accepted for them to flourish.
In truth, there is no gay gene or set of genes, and LGBT activists such as the lesbian New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen have admitted that the “born this way” mantra was just a useful lie. The reality is that human sexuality is complex, with many variables, including environmental and mimetic factors. Which is to say that what children are shown can shape not only their view of sexual morality but also their sexuality itself.
We should not be surprised by this formative influence. After all, even left-wing outlets such as The New York Times and The Guardian have run pieces worrying about how porn has deformed the sexuality of a generation of young men, specifically by normalizing sexual strangulation.
Of course what children see shapes their understanding of what is normal, what is normative, of who they are, and what they should want. The right-wing influencers denouncing Netflix for shoving LGBT messages into shows for kids are right to be disgusted, and this revulsion is a sign of the natural law at work in their hearts and minds.
But they should not leave it there. Hurting Netflix for promoting perversion is not enough to heal our culture. Those who see the evil of what Netflix is doing need to go beyond criticism and boycotts. They need to look for a right understanding of human nature and human sexuality, a diagnosis both of what has gone wrong and what it would mean to go right. And for that, they should look to those who saw the present evils coming while consistently offering a better way to live. Which is to say, to the church.
Less Netflix is good, more church would be even better.