If we learned anything from the recent midterm elections—and we should have learned a lot—it should be that “social issues” are not the third rail of politics. The claim that they are the third rail is a manipulative lie told ad nauseum by RINOs who are so foolish they don’t understand that the social issues are essential for the health of any society.

From the midterm elections, conservatives should have learned that Republicans won elections from coast to coast in part because they have been “leaning in” to the “social issues” rather than fleeing from them. And we should have learned from the bellicose responses of Leftists that their only defenses are calling names and lying.

Republicans won in part because they justifiably worry about inflation and crime, both the results of doctrinaire leftist Big Government, pro-criminal, globalist policies. Republicans won also because they were disgusted with and animated by the usurpation of public education by leftist change-agents who use their jobs to promote their social, moral, and political ideologies on sexuality—including abortion—and race.

Taxpayers are fed up with obscene, profane, and age-inappropriate materials being presented to their children.

Taxpayers are fed up with divisive, exclusionary, racist, misogynistic, misandrist, misanthropic, anti- science beliefs that leftists identify as unifying, inclusive, anti-racist, philogynist, philandrist, humanitarian, and scientific.

Taxpayers are fed up with paying the salaries of leftwing propagandists who identify as “educators” and “experts” who believe they should have absolute autonomy over the curricula they teach to other people’s children.

Taxpayers are fed up with children being taught that whites are racist oppressors by virtue of their skin color, that masculinity is toxic, that homosexuality is ontologically and morally equivalent to heterosexuality, that all family structures are equivalent, or that boys can be girls–none of which are true.

Taxpayers are fed up with the sexual integration of private spaces and girls’ sports.

Taxpayers are fed up with the Orwellian de facto suppression of First Amendment speech protections as evidenced in speakers being canceled and jobs being lost.

They’re fed up with leftists screeching that conservatives are racist, homophobic, and transphobic when conservatives express their moral or political views with the clarity and confidence that leftists express their deluded, destructive views.

They’re fed up with the lie that conservative moral beliefs about homosexual acts, or same-sex “marriage,” or cross-dressing constitutes hatred of persons who identify as “gay” or “trans.”

I hope conservatives are learning that addressing the social issues is not only critical to winning elections but also that the “social issues” are critical to the health and future of any society. Dave Rubin, Guy Benson, and Tammy Bruce may be smart, articulate, and right on many issues, but embracing their views on homosexuality and marriage will be a political and humanitarian nightmare for the GOP and America.

It’s not just leftist ideas about sexuality that will destroy. Embracing ideas found in critical race theory (CRT) or allowing our children to be taught those ideas as inarguable truth out of fear of being called “racist” will be equally destructive.

Now that many more Republicans have raised their voices against the racist ideas embedded in CRT, leftists are screaming “racist” with increased volume. They feel the wind changing. Their con has been revealed. Their jig is almost up. Well, it will be if Republicans remain unified and fearless.

Not only are leftists shrieking “racist” louder, but they’re also making the disingenuous case that public schools “don’t teach critical race theory.” What they’re not saying is that the ideas promulgated in public schools on race, race relations, and American history are the same ideas on race, race relations, and American history promulgated by CRT and by both the ideologies that preceded CRT and the many money-making operations promoting CRT-derived ideas.

Leftist ideas about identity groups, “systemic bias,” and “systems of oppression” come from numerous ideological frameworks, including critical theory, critical pedagogy, and CRT. Thinkers associated with these theoretical frameworks include Paulo Freire, Herbert Marcuse, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Peggy McIntosh.

Anyone who wonders whether schools teach CRT should spend some time reading what these ambitious scholars promote and then read the resources their local schools provide to students or teachers on institutional racism, intersectionality, oppression, education, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

All the indignant claims from school administrators that they don’t teach CRT are now stinking red herrings tossed out in a frantic attempt to distract opponents from all that inconvenient opposing.

Sure, schools and the organizations that profit from promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in schools may not technically teach CRT and may not use the term CRT. Instead, they extract CRT’s assumptions and repackage them to make them seem less controversial, less scholarly, and more palatable to the gullible among us. For the outside organizations that profit from keeping racism alive, the goal is to make repackaged CRT more marketable to government schools.

From this election, conservatives should have learned that name-calling and lies rather than logic, reasons, and evidence are the chief weapons in the leftist arsenal. They should have learned that courage, boldness, unity, and perseverance in the service of truth are powerful. And they should have learned from the ideological corruption that is now systemic in schools that we must be committed to seeking and speaking truth in the public square even if they have to do it alone and even when doing so is costly.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Social-Issues-Are-Not-the-Third-Rail.mp3

If you’re wondering how America and Western Europe went from marriage-centered societies to post-Christian sexual anarchy abetted by massive government growth enforced by brutal political correctness in just a few decades, let’s just say it was no accident.

Here’s a brief history:

The progressive left has been in a death struggle with religion, the family, capitalism and morality itself since becoming a political and philosophical force during the French Revolution.

With the advent of Marxism in the mid-19th century, the battle intensified, with the left eagerly expecting the collapse of capitalism.

When the West failed to succumb to an economic and political upheaval of the type that seized Russia in 1917, the strategy changed. To liberate people from free market capitalism, it became necessary to liberate people first from bourgeois morality.

Man’s natural inclination is to provide for himself and his own extended family, then for his neighbors and community. Socialism must remove existing loyalties and institutions in order to replace them with government power. That’s why progressives have been a major force behind abortion, easy divorce, single-parent welfare incentives, pornography, collective child-rearing and sexual excess of all kinds. All of these manifestations of the progressive disease weaken the natural family. As families crumble, the state steps in to take their place.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci saw the value of this in the 1920s, calling for his fellow revolutionaries to “capture the culture,” that is, infiltrate the institutions that transmit cultural values. So they did, especially in the universities.

Revolutionaries such as John Dewey, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, all of whom waxed poetically about the Soviet Union, inspired progressive educational and social policies that weakened support for organized religion, marital fidelity and the family while empowering the state.

With the help of like-minded people in Hollywood, they hammered away at social conventions of all kinds. The weapons of choice were radical individualism and moral relativism, which they peddled on college campuses to credulous liberal faculty who passed it on to their students.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, with the advent of the pill, Playboy magazine and mass communications, Western civilization was ripe for takeover by a heretofore alien, ideology of limitless sex. Of course, people weren’t told about the downside of “free love” — the destruction of families, social chaos, the loss of freedom to disagree, and a tightening statist grip on economic and intellectual liberty.

In his masterful new book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage,” author Paul Kengor traces a direct line from the founders of communism to today’s liberal social “reformers.”

The elements change with the times, but not the ultimate objective, which is to “progress” indefinitely toward an evolved, socialist Eden where all is shared and all are equal. Mr. Kengor notes that the progressive canon changes rapidly, and in ways that even progressives cannot always predict.

“But we do know this much: what is seemingly inconceivable to all of us right now, including to progressives themselves, may become the dogmatic position of progressives in a generation,” he writes.

For example, “just five years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” supported “retaining the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman by 2012, that was completely gone. Now, anyone who opposed redefining marriage — and who stands now where virtually all Democrats stood a mere two decades back — is derided as a bigoted extremist.”

A case in point: The ninth World Congress of Families, which will be held this coming week in Salt Lake City, has drawn fire from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign and other leftist organizations, which falsely and strategically portray the pro-family gathering as a “hate” event and the speakers as bigots. I have done some writing for the WCF, and will be on a panel about “How the Culture Undermines Life and the Family.”

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, who had an affair with his children’s nurse and mistreated his own family badly in other ways, railed against religion and the middle-class family: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

His co-author, Frederic Engels, was a prolific philanderer who preached free love in an 1884 essay as a benefit of political revolution, a few decades before abortion became the holy sacrament of the political left:

“With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the ‘consequences’ … Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse …?”

The progressives’ contempt for the family contrasts with the timeless definition of marriage given in Genesis 2:24 and reiterated by Jesus: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

This article was originally posted at the WashingtonTimes.com.