Americans are increasingly certain that their political opponents aren’t merely wrong, but evil.

Now, accusing your neighbor of being a moral degenerate is generally frowned upon. For good reason. In the real world, we still need to live together peacefully. And anyway, my liberal acquaintances and friends are delightful people.

It is because my liberal friends are delightful people that I must assume they are being willfully blind to the numerous depravities of the contemporary Left.

Indeed, one of the biggest clues that Democrats are increasingly uneasy about the morality of progressive social policies is the pervasive use of euphemisms.

Take what is perhaps the most pernicious Orwellian phrase in American life: “gender-affirmation care.”

Though Google AI assures me the process “helps people live as their authentic gender, rather than the gender they were assigned at birth,” I suspect most normies don’t really buy into this rubbish. Your “authentic” gender is the one you’re born with, as we all know, which is no more “assigned” to you than your IQ or hair color. We have no obligation to deny objective truths.

You are, of course, free to disagree with me. No one is stopping you from seeking out “gender-affirmation care.” But one of the duties of a civilized people is protecting children from violence. If you tolerate children being subjected to needless life-altering surgery and synthetic drugs that destroy their development, you are abetting state-sanctioned child abuse. It is evil, no matter how benign its official description.

My liberal neighbors would surely wince at the mere notion of subjecting their children to elective reconstructive surgery or sterilizing them with chemical treatments. The well-heeled liberal parents I know treat nonorganic foods as one might cyanide. They would never pump their children full of powerful off-brand pharmaceuticals.

When President Joe Biden signed an executive order to “protect transgender children,” he assured them, “You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You do belong.” As any responsible mother or father understands, indulging self-destructive children isn’t an act of love or compassion. One of the fundamental obligations of a responsible parent is to say no. In 2023, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the Democratic vice presidential nominee, signed a bill empowering courts in Minnesota to strip custody from parents who refused to give “gender-affirmation care.” That, too, is evil.

Many of us have been programmed to treat “social issues” as fronts in a zero-sum culture war. Democrats fashion themselves science-loving rationalists defending the nation from slack-jawed sky god worshipers. In doing so, they put themselves in moral straightjackets. So while progressive activists carve out increasingly insane, maximalist positions on “social issues,” normie Democrats are left either to rationalize or ignore them.

Take abortion. Democrats aggressively deny they support abortion on demand up until birth because they know the practice is abhorrent. Late-term abortions, including the yearly killing of thousands of healthy, viable fetuses that could survive in a NICU, have nothing to do with “women’s healthcare.” You don’t have to put on a MAGA hat to admit it. But in our contemporary political climate, morality is often drowned in partisan considerations.

I simply refuse to accept that most Democrats truly believe it’s good form to bring a young child to sexualized drag queen story hours. Go to them if you must, but these events are only now consecrated because social conservatives have criticized them.

This is often the case. When Florida passed a law barring teachers from discussing sexuality, gay or otherwise, with prepubescent children, Democrats again feigned horror. I’m sorry, but it is objectively immoral to trap children in state-run schools and then indoctrinate them in a way that conflicts with the outlook of parents. These schools can barely teach children how to read, so maybe leave fraught discussions on “sexual preferences” to others.  

And when voters get together and pass laws to ensure that the trendy pornographic agitprop favored by school administrators is excluded from libraries and curriculums, Democrats accuse them of “banning books.”

I’ll take the Left’s grievances about “book bans” seriously the day after a national Democrat sits down and reads Gender Queer aloud to a bunch of elementary school-aged children. Because if you believe Lawn Boy, which features sentences like, “I was 10 years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s d*** in my mouth,” is appropriate for preteens, seek help. I’m not even sure I can get that text past my editors.

Normie left-wingers who prattle on about “book bans” and “Don’t Say Gay” laws aren’t “groomers.” They’re just ignorant or hypocrites or cowards.

I refuse to believe the average normie Democrat parent, especially those of girls, is fine with boys who “identify” as females knocking his or her children around the field or court. Most parents, of course, never have to deal with this insanity, so it’s easy for them to preen about “tolerance.” Those who do, are often too frightened to speak up because they’ll be smeared as “transphobic.”

For the contemporary leftist, there is no worse fate than being accused of bigotry.

None of this is a license to mistreat children with gender dysphoria, or anyone else, for that matter. It’s not their fault. But an enlightened society doesn’t appoint confused children and social science quacks to write educational, medical, or ethics codes.

Indeed, beyond the physical abuse, the very notion that we’d ever tell any child he or she is born in the wrong body is a moral outrage. Imagine teaching students that they were “assigned” the wrong skin color. We would be rightfully horrified.

Well, most of us.

Alas, in many places in this country, children are being told that immutable characteristics like skin color define them and determine their fate. “Anti-racism,” another contemptible Orwellian conception, teaches children that white people are innately bigoted and black people are always victims. The return of this identitarianism is a remarkable moral regression for the country.

In many left-wing districts, children are also taught they have been “assigned” to the wrong country. They are told that the United States, the most tolerant place the planet has ever known, is conceived and exists in perpetual sin. Our state-run school systems were created to produce well-rounded citizens. Today, government schools breed civic unrest. 

Do most normie Democrats subscribe to ideas of anti-racism? Do they really believe the U.S. represents a great repressive force in history? They sure don’t act that way in the real world. Their children, on the other hand…

You can already find some of these depraved ignoramuses marching in support of rapists and child murderers of Hamas on college campuses. Not only are they eroding the stigma of antisemitism, but they’re literally cheering on evil. It should not be difficult to condemn such things. Yet most Democrats, including powerful, erstwhile Jewish leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), are unwilling to speak out. 

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Now, perhaps Democrats are simply unwilling to concede any point in a divisive political environment. Maybe they have adopted a moral relativism that allows them to disconnect their political opinions from their everyday lives. Or perhaps they are just turning a convenient blind eye. 

Whatever the case, all of it is just another example of how politics can envelope decency.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.