Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it.

[Anti Federalist]

Nothing much new here, just two more insane people ruining the minds of their young children.

Just another day in AmeriKa.

But it was interesting that, even for the Washington Compost, the comments were blowing these lunatics up, until they were closed, of course.


Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/29/pride-month-kink-consent/

By Lauren Rowello

June 29, 2021 at 12:18 p.m. EDT

Our family often took the train into Philadelphia, but as we rode across the bridge to attend the city’s Pride parade five years ago, my wife’s leg bounced with a nervous jitter. She squeezed my hand, worried that she might run into a colleague or be harassed by a stranger. My wife is trans, and wasn’t out at the time, so she typically only expressed her authenticity in the privacy of our home. That morning she wore a green skirt and light makeup, brushing her hair all to one side. Even though we’d attended Pride marches and protests in previous years, that day was our first celebrating openly as a family.

When our children grew tired of marching, we plopped onto a nearby curb. Just as we got settled, our elementary-schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a bare-chested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong. The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog. “What are they doing?” my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on. The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their whips and batons, some leading companions by leashes. At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth: That these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.

The kink community has participated in Pride since its inception — risking their jobs and safety to be authentically themselves in public. Still, every year as Pride Month approaches, a debate erupts about whether kink belongs at Pride at all. Those hoping to oust kinksters often cite the presence of children as their top concern. That was pointedly the case this year when Twitter users argued that kink at Pride is a highly sexualized experience that children should be shielded from. Thousands of users supported these posts, claiming that kink at Pride crosses a line because minors also attend events. I agree that Pride should be a welcoming space for children and teens, but policing how others show up doesn’t protect or uplift young people. Instead, homogenizing self-expression at Pride will do more harm to our children than good. When my own children caught glimpses of kink culture, they got to see that the ***** community encompasses so many more nontraditional ways of being, living, and loving.

As much as I want them to spend time in queeer spaces so they can be with families like their own, I also want them to know that they shouldn’t limit their understanding of what relationships or expression look like to whatever’s most familiar. I want them to see that they can make their own ways in the world — and know that they’ll be supported and celebrated by their community. If we want our children to learn and grow from their experiences at Pride, we should hope that they’ll encounter kink when they attend. How else can they learn about the scope and vitality of queeer life?

Anti-kink advocates tend to manipulate language about safety and privacy by asserting that attendees are nonconsensually exposed to overt displays of sexuality. The most outrageous claim is that innocent bystanders are forced to participate in kink simply by sharing space with the kink community, as if the presence of kink at Pride is a perverse exhibition that kinksters pursue for their own gratification. But kinksters at Pride are not engaged in sex acts — and we cannot confuse their self-expression with obscenity. Co-opting the language of sexual autonomy only serves to bury that truth and muddies the seriousness of other conversations about consent. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because anti-kink rhetoric echoes the same socialized disgust people have projected onto other queeer people when they claim that our love is not appropriate for public spaces. It’s a sentiment that tolerates *****ness only if it stays within parameters — offering the kind of acceptance that comes with a catch. The middle-aged, White men who I grew up with said they were “fine” with gay people as long as they wouldn’t be subjected to PDA — as long as all signs of queeer love could be outwardly erased. Queeer people’s freedom to be themselves is, according to this logic, contingent on non-queeer people’s freedom from exposure to it.

My spouse came out as trans. It didn't change a thing.

The arguable difference here is that many of the latest objections are coming from self-identified queeer people, but that shouldn’t necessarily be surprising. Respectability politics demand that queeer people assimilate as much as possible into cis- and heteronormativity, hewing to mainstream cultural standards. Members of the queeer community have internalized those norms to the point that we judge ourselves by them, and then criticize and ostracize others if they don’t uphold them, too. This is the same oppressive message that prevented my wife from transitioning for 30 years, and the same message that still keeps marginalized children from coming to terms with their own experiences with desire and embodiment.

Children who witness kink culture are reassured that alternative experiences of sexuality and expression are valid — no matter who they become as they mature, helping them recognize that their personal experiences aren’t bad or wrong, and that they aren’t alone in their experiences. I can’t think of a more relevant or important reminder for youth, who often struggle with feelings of isolation and confusion as they discover more about themselves and wrestle with concerns about whether they’re normal enough. Including kink in Pride opens space for families to have necessary and powerful conversations with young people about health, safety, consent, and — most uniquely — pleasure. Kink visibility is a reminder that any person can and should shamelessly explore what brings joy and excitement. We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment. Sharing the language of kink culture with young people provides them with valuable information about safe sex practices — such as the importance of establishing boundaries, safe words and signals, affirming the importance of planning and research and the need to seek and give enthusiastic consent. I never want my children to worry that exploring any aspect of consensual sex or touch is too taboo.

If we’re afraid to talk about kink with our children, we prioritize the status quo — sanitizing and censoring their access to information about appropriate and normal self-expression. These are the very attitudes that made Pride necessary — and life-affirming — for so many of us in the first place, and we have no business imposing them on the next generation. Kink embodies the freedom that Pride stands for, reminding attendees to unapologetically take up space as an act of resistance and celebration — refusing to bend to social pressure that asks us to be presentable. That’s a value I want my children to learn. Affirming the kink community helps our children to love themselves and others with courage and resilience. If my wife and I had seen such fierce and determined role models as young people, we might have learned to be ourselves much sooner. We didn’t have that chance, but my children have that community in Pride, and I want to keep it that way.

 

[Anti Federalist]

WaPo Promotes the Sexual Grooming of Children

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/wapo-promotes-sexual-grooming-children-mark-tapson/

Civilization dies in darkness.
Tue Jul 6, 2021 Mark Tapson
82 comments

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Last week The Washington Post, one of the most prominent news outlets in the world, the newspaper whose self-important motto “Democracy dies in darkness” belies its own undemocratic propaganda, saw fit to promote an opinion piece calling for the increased exposure of small children to sexual deviance.

In the article titled, “Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it,” freelance writer Lauren Rowello declared her support for the presence of “kinksters” – practitioners of sexual fetishes – in parades during so-called “Pride Month,” the thirty days a year officially devoted to the compulsory celebration of LGBT narcissism. More specifically, she called for it in order to expose children as young as toddlers to “the scope and vitality of ***** life.”

Rowello, a self-described “gendervague” person who is married to a transgender woman, described how the couple attended a Pride parade in Philadelphia five years ago. (The term gendervague, in case you’re overcome by curiosity, refers “to a specifically neurodivergent experience of trans/gender identity.” You’re welcome.) At one point during the parade, Rowello wrote, “our elementary-schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a bare-chested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong. The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog. ‘What are they doing?’ my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on.”

Her toddler cheered them on. In a saner time, parents wouldn’t allow adults “playfully” engaged in sado-masochism within a hundred miles of their toddlers, but today a generation or two of fanatically woke parents intentionally expose their children to such a repellent display in order to inculcate, as young as possible, a sexual awareness that kids aren’t equipped to process.

“The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their whips and batons, some leading companions by leashes,” Rowello continued. What kind of mother thinks it is appropriate to expose her children to human beings degrading each other with leashes? “At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth,” Rowello explained. “That these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.”

Here’s something else she could have told her children: all human beings are children of God, deserving of dignity, and literally parading them around like animals for sexual kicks is morally reprehensible. Maybe that’s too much “nuance” for Rowello.

Rowello did acknowledge that even among the LGBT crowd, there is debate about whether “kinksters” belong in Pride parades at all, at least partly because of the presence of children. But she argued that “kink visibility is a reminder that any person can and should shamelessly explore what brings joy and excitement. We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.”

Read that last sentence again, and ask yourself what kind of parent is in a hurry to push his or her child to fulfill carnal needs. The answer is that there are only two kinds: pedophiles and neo-Marxist ideologues who are targeting impressionable minds and vulnerable souls, with the intention of weaponizing them against the “cis-normative” status quo.

“If we’re afraid to talk about kink with our children, we prioritize the status quo — sanitizing and censoring their access to information about appropriate and normal self-expression,” Rowello pleaded. Sorry, but “kink” is by definition abnormal self-expression, and it is absolutely not appropriate for children to witness. Sanitizing and censoring what children are exposed to until they are psychologically developed enough to absorb that information is called good parenting.

Rowello’s intentionally provocative article predictably sparked outrage on social media from people who have an actual moral compass and a justifiable revulsion toward the idea of parents grooming their own grade-schoolers into a pathetic subculture of fetishists. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, for example, tweeted to Rowello, “You should be in prison.”

Walsh also shared on social media a tweet from Rowello that included a recent picture of her 8-year-old son, whom Rowello referred to as “they,” wearing makeup. “My 8YO explored makeup for the first time tonight,” she tweeted in May. “They tried an eyeshadow tutorial to make clouds, some flowers (not shown), and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of eyeliner stamps. They shrugged, Maybe I’ll go on [the drag queen show Drag Race] when I’m older.”

No 8-year-old, or adult for that matter, should ever even know that such an infantile program as Drag Race exists, much less yearn to appear on it. But the bullying LGBT lobby has turned transgenderism and drag culture into the tip of the spear of its objective to smash the heteronormative “oppression” of the nuclear family. Drag queens are now everywhere children can be found: targeting them in library story time, indoctrinating them in children’s TV programming, and even steering them into becoming underage drag performers themselves.

Here is the undeniable truth that LGBT groomers like Rowello ignore in their ideological push to normalize perversion and to sexualize kids, even their own: children are quite simply not mature enough to process the mystery and power of adult sexuality – neither its spiritual transcendence nor its dark compulsions. You should no more expose children to a parade full of “kinksters” spanking each other than you should expose them to heterosexual pornography. Either one is guaranteed to warp their understanding of the purpose and proper sphere of human sexuality. This used to be commonsense; today, propaganda outlets like The Washington Post spread the message that what was once commonsense is now intolerant and bigoted.

Children are not emotionally or morally prepared to exert any mastery over their own bodies (for that matter, neither are many adults). They should not be taught that indulgence in “carnal needs that delight and captivate us” is either a personal or societal good. They should most definitely not be led to believe that their sexuality is the most authentic part of one's self. If your sexuality – hetero-, ****-, or otherwise – defines who you are, then you are a tragically shallow person.

That may not be a very “welcoming” or “inclusive” take on the subject, but if your favorite personal expression is dressing up like a demonic, clown parody of a woman and normalizing it for children, or allowing yourself to be led around on a leash in public by a man in a leather thong, then you need to do some serious soul-searching and get professional help. This is not something to be celebrated but psychoanalyzed and prayed over. That is the truth Rowello didn’t tell her children.

And speaking of “Pride”: if your proudest moment as a parent is when you successfully groom your child into the same sort of sexual dysfunction that you and your partner have turned into virtue-signaling badges of noncomformity, then you need to seek help immediately and re-prioritize your life to deconstruct the damage you have done to him or her (not “they”).

In response to Rowello’s WaPo article, I’m Right host Jesse Kelly tweeted, in part, “Nations do not remain stable, healthy nations with this behavior becoming acceptable.” He is exactly right. No culture that finds its authenticity in an idolatry of the flesh and the degradation of the human spirit can survive. A civilization that raises its children to revel in spiritual emptiness and sexual decadence is a doomed one.

If Americans do not summon the moral courage to turn back the tide of the neo-Marxist predation of our children – in schools, in library story time, in our TV shows, in our very streets – then we will have deserved our doom.