Every good superhero needs a villain to do battle with, and preferably a retinue of villains. Look at Batman: He has the Joker, Penguin...
Every good superhero needs a villain to do battle with, and preferably a retinue of villains. Look at Batman: He has the Joker, Penguin, the Riddler, Two-Face, Joel Schumacher’s directorial vision and more. After all, the Caped Crusader needs something to crusade against.
As of this moment, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the 2020 Democrat superhero whose story arc seems most interesting to the media. Together with his husband and sidekick Chasten Glezman, whose superpower seems to be an ultra-magnetic force that attracts social media followers, they fight crime! Or, well, Christians who may believe the Bible still maintains some relevance.
So far, Buttigieg’s most high-profile villain is the Pencenator, the dastardly vice president whose record on LGBT issues as the vice president and former governor of Indiana, as well as his Christian beliefs, aren’t quite to Buttigieg’s liking. That means Pence is obviously a homophobe. Quick, Chasten, to the Shaming-mobile!
“That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: That if you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me,” Buttigieg said during a recent speech. “Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
But a superhero can’t just do battle against one villain.
That’s why Buttigieg essentially called out any Christian who thinks that same-sex relationships aren’t part of God’s plan for a person’s life:
People will often be polite to you in person, while advancing policies that harm you and your family. You will be polite to them in turn, but you need not stand for such harms. Instead, you push back, honestly and emphatically. So it goes, in the public square.
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“People will often be polite to you in person, while advancing policies that harm you and your family,” he tweeted earlier in the month. “You will be polite to them in turn, but you need not stand for such harms. Instead, you push back, honestly and emphatically. So it goes, in the public square.”
So, what are these “policies that harm you and your family?” In a piece at Public Discourse, Ana Samuel — a Ph.D, the academic director of pro-traditional marriage group CanaVox and a Latina mother of six — laid out, politely, honestly and emphatically, why Christians aren’t necessarily on board with Buttigieg.
“Mayor Pete, it cuts both ways. As a Latina mama in touch with a number of other Latinas with traditional family values, I can tell you we are faced every day with people who are ‘polite to us in person’ but who advance and execute policies that assault our values, harm our families, and hurt our children,” Samuel wrote.
“I’m talking about policies that undermine our parental rights and duties by seeking to indoctrinate our children in progressive sexual ideology without our consent and sometimes in spite of our explicit protest.”
Among the examples?
“The public schools in my area where reading assignments from the Language Arts curriculum ask: ‘What is heteronormativity and how is it harmful?’ (Mind you: this is a question from the school district’s recommended language arts curriculum for eighth graders, not from a single health teacher or counselor. It is not unusual for the LGBT theme to find its way into history classes, foreign language studies, and even STEM courses. The explicit goal is to normalize LGBT lifestyles throughout curricula),” she wrote.
She also noted “[p]ediatricians who ask to see our teenagers alone and then push to prescribe them contraceptives or ask them about sexual behaviors that we find offensive. Our teens themselves bring these pediatricians’ inappropriate behavior to our attention. (One OBGYN slipped a prescription for oral contraceptives stealthily to a 14-year-old daughter of a Mexican friend of mine, after she had explicitly stated to his face that she did not wish to see her daughter on oral contraceptives.)”
Beyond that, Samuel notes sex-ed classes “in which our kids are taught unproven Freudian-Kinseyan doctrines that ‘sexual repression’ will cause neuroses” and “[p]ublic library programming where unicorns, rainbows, gingerbread persons, drag-queen story hours, and other symbols of progressive sexual ideology make an appearance, so that we must regularly steer our toddlers clear of the propaganda …
“And last but not least, the latest round of violence against children: efforts to entice children to question the reality of their sex through school gender-transitioning ceremonies, pronoun-sensitivity training, and other transgender propaganda,” she wrote.
“Parents have historically enjoyed the right to direct the education and upbringing of their children, under the correct presumption that parents — rather than school counselors, psychiatrists, teachers, government bureaucrats, or any other persons — are best able to act in their children’s best interests. Now, activists are pushing courts to allow minors to receive puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones against their parents’ objections.
“Mr. Mayor, it is hypocritical for you to cry foul about policies that ‘harm you and your family’ while your side pushes for government intrusions into the parent-child relationship at the most Samuel’s fundamental levels,” she wrote.
Samuel’s Public Discourse piece wasn’t her first foray into the controversial subject of human sexuality.
CanaVox posted a lengthy video on YouTube last year of Samuel discussing different aspects of sexuality. It’s not something leftists would enjoy.
(But fans of Jordan Peterson will find a lot to agree with.)
There are plenty of provocative points throughout Samuel’s Public Discourse piece, and even some conservatives might not like all of them. However, there are several overriding points she makes.
The first is that Hispanics aren’t uniformly behind the Democratic Party’s agenda on LGBT issues. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the fact that they make up roughly 40 percent of American Catholics.
“Although our home countries have often been viciously anti-gay places, there is a deep understanding among Hispanic mothers that those who identify as LGBT have suffered a lot, and that many have lived a life of hurt, harm and pain. We feel great sympathy for your suffering,” she wrote.
“But the ideas you have developed from painful experiences are not always sound ones. And we can distinguish between the two: between affectionate concern for you as a person and disagreement with your ideas. So please stop shutting us out of the conversation by the intellectually dishonest rhetorical expedient of implying or saying that we are bigots. We are the opposite of bigots.”
Second, the issues we’re talking about involve LGBT-friendly policies aimed at the free exercise of Christianity, not the other way around.
“So yes, be polite to us, and we will be polite to you. But we know that we are in an intense battle for the hearts and minds of our children,” Samuel wrote. “We mothers may be underground and quiet, we may not be marching in the streets, and we may not be debating you in public. But we are meeting for coffees in our homes, talking privately with our school teachers, spreading thoughts the media refuses to print, and speaking freely while the First Amendment still means something. Yes, so long as we still enjoy the freedom of association in this country, we will continue to meet and organize, to speak and teach.”
And that’s the point. She was the epitome of polite and honest, but that doesn’t mean Samuel is abandoning her ideals. Far from it.
People on the left may not agree with what she says, but she has the right to say it — as well as to raise children within the bounds of her faith tradition.
Neither Samuel nor the “Mike Pences of the world” are supervillains, no matter how hard Mayor Pete may try to make them such.
If Buttigieg really wants to engage with all Americans, including Christians, it’s time to park the Shaming-mobile and instead deal with them without condescension or prejudice.
Peter Pipe Puffer Buttplug
ReplyDeleteThe leftist victimization parade is getting tiresome.
ReplyDeleteMemo to "democrats": calling everyone who disagreed with you "racist" and "sexist" didn't work too well in 2016.
ReplyDeleteYou might want to think of some actual substance instead of trying to call everyone "homophobes" in 2020.