Written by Evan O’Bryan

But if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin,
it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck
and be drowned in the depths of the sea. Matthew 18:6 NLT

About two years ago, the popular animated kids show Arthur broke boundaries when the show’s writers decided the teacher, a regular character on the show, was homosexual. This garnered mixed reviews with some praising the decision, saying Arthur was breaking social norms and introducing children to an important topic, while other, more rational people said they did not want a show meant for four to eight-year-olds to discuss such a controversial topic.

Unsurprisingly, the decision to reveal Mr. Ratburn’s sexual identity was praised by members of mainstream media who soundly criticized all who opposed it. Supporters often spouted rebuttals such as, “Why are you so upset? It’s just one scene of two men holding hands. It only lasts about five seconds,” but conservatives were concerned about the slippery slope, which they have been told is not real.

It appears, however, that not only is the slope real, but it’s also worse than most conservatives feared. Two short years ago, it was scandalous that an animated children’s show would include two homosexual characters, and now we have the perversion of the Blue’s Clues pride parade scene  and drag queen story hour on PBS Kids, neither of which have received nearly as much backlash as the Arthur storyline did.

Exposing young children to highly sexualized content cultivates an inappropriate awareness of sexuality in toddlers and preschoolers. What the media and the government are trying to do to children is despicable, and the worst part is kids do not understand what is being done to them. They do not understand the brainwashing that is occurring, the normalization of ideas and behaviors that are abnormal, and the insidious agenda that encourages children to question their sexual identity. Children should not have to think about these things. No one should have to think about these things but especially not children, because they are impressionable and easily confused.

According to The Washington Post, one out of six Generation Z adults are part of the LGBTQIA+ juggernaut. When will we say enough is enough? We have tolerated and ignored this moral decay–this sin–for too long. It seems that many conservatives have become complacent; they are just watching the world crumble before them.

We must not stop being outraged at the evil we see around us, and we should not stop voicing our opposition for fear of being “cancelled.” As conservatives, we have to make it clear that we are not giving into this leftist propaganda. We must still be willing to fight for what is good, right and true.

---

---

Evan O’Bryan is a high school senior and aspiring political influencer who has been raised in the faith and Christian education since preschool. He is a staunch supporter of Christianity, the MAGA movement, and Conservative ideology. He enjoys challenging the mainstream liberal narrative with those who haven’t yet reached the truth.

---

Writer Lauren Rowello’s peculiar perspective on attending a “pride” parade with her husband and young children five years ago was published in the Washington Post on June 29, 2021 and provides yet more evidence of the existence of the slippery slope leftists deny:

[O]ur 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.

Oh, what a merry image Rowello tries to rhetorically construct, but not even her references to playfulness, cheering, dancing, laughing, and twirling can conceal the grotesque event she seeks to defend.

On what does Rowello base her assertion that it is true that flogging is “who they are”? Does she just mean that the kinksters really, really, really like to flog each other? If so, do all intense, persistent, unchosen sexual desires constitute “who” people “are,” and, therefore, the acts impelled by those desires are intrinsically moral and should be publicly celebrated? Does that go for fisting, urophilia, and masturbation?

The mentally and morally unwell Rowello, who claims to possess “expertise” in “mental health” and “queer identity,” describes herself as,

a gendervague person who is married to a trans woman, topics related to gender and queer identity are an important focus of their [sic] work. Lauren is a former sex worker and teen parent. … A Philadelphia area native, Lauren is an autistic person raising two neurodivergent kids in South Jersey. They [sic]homeschool and spends lots of time in the garden.

Apparently, Rowello views “pride” parades as homeschool field trips, yet more opportunities to indoctrinate her children and all other children with perverse views of sexual morality:

[P]olicing 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 queer community encompasses so many more nontraditional ways of being, living, and loving. … 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 queer life? … Children who witness kink culture are reassured that alternative experiences of sexuality and expression are valid.

“Kink” is an umbrella term that encompasses all manner of sexual deviance. Once again, the desperately wicked human heart is proving capable of inventing and enjoying the most peculiar, repulsive, and degrading uses of the human body, justifying such practices by deeming them integral to “authentic identity.” As long as an act is “consensual,” it is moral—in the view of sexual regressives.

Decades ago, leftists began the largely successful effort to normalize homoeroticism—to set it apart from other forms of sexual deviance. The disordered desire to engage in homoerotic acts morphed into “authentic identity”—that is to say, “who they are.”

Next came the effort to normalize cross-sex identification, which is still going gangbusters but finally receiving some serious pushback.

Largely behind the scenes but peeking out from its dark corner is the movement to normalize polyamory—or as its practitioners prefer to call it “consensual non-monogamy.” (There it is again, that tricksy little all-purpose term “consent.”)

And now we’re seeing the unholy effort to expand the infinitely elastic boundaries of “normal” and “identity” to include fetishes.

Every year, heated debates about the appropriateness of kink in “pride” parades take place within the “queer” community. Rowello counters,

Anti-kink advocates tend to manipulate language about safety and privacy by asserting that attendees are nonconsensually exposed to overt displays of sexuality.

Well, if that don’t beat all, a language-manipulating sexual anarchist accusing other sexual anarchists of manipulating language. Pot, meet Kettles.

Those leftists, including some homosexuals, perhaps sensing the intrinsic moral offense of kinky sexual practices, object to their presence in “pride” parades. The problem for the objectors is that decades ago, while working feverishly to normalize homoeroticism, they jettisoned any and all appeals to a source of objective, transcendent morality. They settled on “consent” as the only criterion that determines whether acts are moral or immoral.

Since they made “consent” the only constitutive feature of morality, they now have to stretch and twist it into knots to justify their moral opposition to children being exposed to kink. Their argument goes something like this: Children who are brought by their parents to “pride” parades don’t consent to seeing men wearing dog collars and buttless chaps being flogged. Lacking a framework or language to justify their moral intuition about the immorality of children being exposed to kink, they absurdly resort to appeals to consent.

Other than an intuitive sense that men flogging each others’ bare arses is wrong, what would account for the belief of leftists that consent is necessary for children to see such public displays? Why is consent necessary for seeing displays of sadomasochism but not necessary for seeing public displays of homoerotic relationships or cross-dressing?

Rowello continues her counter-attack against those who want to ban kinksterism at “pride” parades:

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. … anti-kink rhetoric echoes the same socialized disgust people have projected onto other queer people. … 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.

Her objection to obscenity sounds downright puritanical compared to her advocacy of shameless self-indulgence in carnality.

One could make a reasonable case that the public flogging of bare buttocks by kinksters actually is an exhibition pursued for sexual gratification. And why should that bother Rowello? Rowello implies that engaging in public sex acts would constitute “obscenity” and would, therefore, be inappropriate at a “pride” parade.

But what if consensual public sex acts constitute for some “nontraditional ways of being, living, and loving”? What if engaging in public sex acts is “who they are and what they like”? What if some people delight and are captivated by public sex? By excluding those whose identities include public sex acts, wouldn’t Rowello be guilty of “policing who shows up” and “homogenizing self-expression”? In opposing public sex aficionados/identitarians isn’t Rowello expressing the “same socialized disgust people have projected onto other queer people”?

One of those “queer people” that Rowello likes to talk about is her 31-year-old, cross-dressing, cross-sex hormone-doping husband and the father of her two children, Brenan Duffy. In Vogue Magazine, Duffy (whom Rowello refers to as a “trans” woman) describes his struggles growing up with both a verbally abusive alcoholic father and gender dysphoria, which Duffy recasts as  his “true identity.” He shares his escape into his mother’s closet, wearing her gowns, swimsuits, and tight black skirts:

[H]er closet. … allowed me to step out of the constraints of my own literal and figurative closets into a world where I could safely explore what it meant to be me. … [T]his nook provided valuable refuge throughout my childhood and offered much-needed comfort in times of hardship and isolation. When my best friend died unexpectedly, when neighborhood bullies became unbearable, and during the worst of my father’s alcoholic episodes, it was my retreat.

Duffy attributes his own battles with “debilitating depression, cynicism, and alcoholism” to “false shame and decades of repression,” but could the impulse to reject his sex, like his depression and alcoholism, be caused by his father’s abuse and other factors? We aren’t supposed to ask questions like that. The disordered “queer” community to which Rowello and her unfortunate husband belong command the world—including all children—to affirm them and every deviant sexual practice they enjoy.

Don’t be deceived by the hollow faux-indignant howls that the slippery slope doesn’t exist. It does, and the howls you hear come from ravenous wolves.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The-Slippery-Slope-Leftists-Claim-Doesnt-Exist.mp3

---

Former Illinois state senator Daniel Biss recently guest-hosted a culturally regressive radio program titled “Live, Local & Progressive” in which he sought to draw attention to yet another God-forsaken executive order (2019-11) from Illinois’ morally bankrupt governor, J.B. Pritzker, which was signed “shortly before the Pride parade.” The executive order establishes a 25-member “Affirming and Inclusive Task Force,” essentially to use government schools to advance the ideology and goals of the “trans” cult.

Lest anyone think the task force will be ideologically balanced between those who believe biological sex matters when it comes to, for example, private spaces and athletics and those who believe it doesn’t matter, here’s what Pritzker’s order dictates:

The Task Force shall consist of at least one representative from the Office of the Governor and no more than twenty-five (25) members, selected by the Governor, who have experience or expertise related to supporting transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students in schools including, but not limited to, students, parents or guardians, teachers, school administrators, lawyers, medical professionals, and representatives from community-based organizations.

Note that members must have “experience or expertise” related to “supporting” students who embrace “trans”-cultism. The word “supporting” has nothing to do with assisting students in ways that move them toward accepting their immutable biological sex. It means facilitating their reality-denying feelings, their invasion of the privacy of their peers, their tyrannical linguistic demands of others, and the hijacking of hard-won girls’ athletic opportunities by objectively male students.

Any guesses which community-based organizations Pritzker will include? Could it be the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance? Equality Illinois? The Center on Halsted?

The order took effect on July 1, 2019 and its recommendations are due on the governor’s desk by Jan. 1, 2020.

Biss’ guests were the following:

Nat Duran, a young woman who pretends to be a man and works for the  “LGBTQ”-indoctrinating organization the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance.

Nicki Bazer, an attorney “who represents school districts in her day job, and also does pro bono work on behalf of transgender youth.”

Juliet Berger-White, Deputy General Counsel in the Office of the Governor and another activist for all things “trans”—particularly school issues—who helped craft Pritzker’s executive order.

Nat Duran exposed the lie that “gender identity” is fixed and immutable—a lie that some “trans” ideologues have tried to pass off to a gullible public:

[W]hen folks often think of trans and gender expansive young folks in school systems, they immediately go to restroom and locker room usage, right? Anyone who’s been in a public space and used these facilities know that they are really gendered, and so how do we make sure that students who maybe are exploring different aspects of their identity are able to use these spaces in a way that feels safe and supportive to them…. [E]specially as you think of younger grades, I think especially around middle school, students who are really just figuring out a lot of things about their lives, like allowing room for fluidity as well. I think sometimes… even if a school in the best of intentions enforces a really supportive practice, is it so rigid that it doesn’t allow for a student who’s like, “Well, I think I might be trans, or maybe I’m non binary, but I’m still figuring it out, and so I don’t know what restroom feels best to me right now.

Point of correction: restrooms and locker rooms aren’t “gendered.” They’re “sexed.” They correspond to objective, immutable biological sex.

Duran didn’t explain exactly why private spaces should correspond to “gender identity” as opposed to biological sex. Nor did she explain why it’s hateful for normal students to refuse to use restrooms with opposite-sex peers, but it’s not hateful for cross-sex passers to refuse to use restrooms with opposite-“gendered” peers.

And if, as “trans”-cultists assert, it’s impossible to know the authentic “gender identity” of a person by their clothing, hairstyles, or anatomy, “trans”-identifying students can’t possibly know whether their same-sex peers are male or female. Therefore, they shouldn’t care where they change their clothes or shower. Imagine a boy who identifies as a girl filing an expensive lawsuit to access the girls’ locker room only to discover all the girls identify as boys.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive—particularly when we do it based on an incoherent ideology.

Duran’s discussion of identity exploration and fluidity points to the end goal of the “trans” revolution. The end goal is the eradication of public recognition of sex differences everywhere. Identity exploration, gender expansiveness, and gender fluidity preclude the existence of anything other than the wholesale sexual integration of every space, activity, and context. No more sex-segregated anything for anyone. Even school practices that are “really supportive” of opposite-sex-identifying students is insufficient. Duran and most other “trans” activists seek locker room and restroom free-for-alls—literally, restrooms and locker rooms Free. For. All.

It is critically important to understand that if society is legally prohibited from “discriminating” based on both sex and “gender identity,” there remains no legal way to prohibit what leftists call “cisgender” persons (i.e., persons who accept their sex) from using opposite sex private spaces. If a public school allows biological male Bob who pretends to be Mary to use the girls’ locker room, there would be no way to prevent biological male Tom who accepts his sex from using it. The school couldn’t prevent him from using it based on his sex because they’ve already allowed another male access to it. And they couldn’t prevent Tom from using it based on his “cisgender” identity, because they can’t discriminate based on “gender identity.” Abracadabra, all private spaces become co-ed.

Duran’s discussion also reveals how young the children are whom cultural regressives seek to inculcate with the “trans” ideology.

Duran also longs for government schools to be complicit in concealing information from parents about their own children:

[H]ow do we think through parental communications? If I’m calling home to talk to a parent, [is the student] out, or safe and supported, at home? Am I going to be using a different name or set of pronouns when I do that?”

In the view of “trans” dogmatists, those parents who reject the unproven, arguable, doctrinaire assumptions of the “trans” cult are unsafe and unsupportive and, therefore, deserve to lose parental rights.

Attorney/activist Nicki Bazer deceived Biss’ audience by omission. Here’s what she said:

[T]he rights of transgender, gender expansive, non-binary students are already protected in Illinois…. [U]nder the Illinois school code, all students have a right to equal opportunity to all educational programs and services. And under the regulations that the state board of education has issued, they have defined that, and made clear that you cannot discriminate or exclude or segregate students based on their gender identity. [T]hat applies to all schools within Illinois that are public schools. The Illinois human rights act also touches all non-sectarian K12 schools, or pre-K12 schools, and that also prohibits discrimination in all schools on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. And under the Illinois Human Rights Act, sexual orientation, sex, is defined as including gender identity.

Interestingly, Bazer did not share these relevant words from the Illinois Human Rights Act, which is state law:

The Act permits schools to maintain single-sex facilities that are distinctly private in nature, e.g., restrooms and locker rooms.

Nor did she share this from the 2016 Transgender Students in School  guidelines posted by the Illinois Association of School Boards:

[F]ederal courts in non-school cases have recognized a fundamental right to privacy or acknowledged the legitimacy of safety concerns in cases involving individuals undressing, using the restroom, or showering in an area to which a member of the opposite birth sex has access. Moreover, a federal district court recently asked the question whether a university engages in unlawful discrimination in violation of Title IX or the Constitution when it prohibits a transgender male student from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for men on campus. The court concluded: “The simple answer is no.”

Juliet Berger-White inadvertently exposes the hypocrisy of cultural regressives who claim to value diversity:

The goal of the executive order is to ensure that we are bringing together a crucial group of stakeholders who have great experience on the ground…. These stakeholders have been doing this work on an ongoing basis, but the benefit of doing it from the perspective of a governor-appointed task force is that it can help these private stakeholders collaborate with the government, and the Illinois State Board of Education, to figure out what next steps should be, and what that looks like.”

In other words, outside “progressive” activists are going to collude with the government to advance their sexuality dogma. Who are these “crucial stakeholders”? Are any lesbians who object to the sexual integration of women’s private spaces included? Will the task force include members of the professional mental health and medical communities who in increasing numbers are concerned about “adolescent-onset gender dysphoria,” the effects of puberty blockers like Lupron, and how social “transitioning” at young ages may effect brain development? What about Muslims, Orthodox Jews, or theologically orthodox Christians who are taxpayers and have children in public schools? Are parents and students who object to the sexual integration of private spaces and athletics crucial stakeholders?

The name Berger-White may sound familiar to long-time IFI readers. Her husband, Jeff Berger-White, is a former colleague of mine from the years I worked full-time in Deerfield High School’s writing center on Chicago’s North Shore. He was at the center of a huge community controversy over his decision to teach the egregiously obscene play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

The play revolves around two couples: married Mormon couple Harper and Joe whose marriage is disintegrating in large measure due to Joe’s repressed homosexuality, which he eventually acts upon; and a homosexual couple, Louis and Prior. Louis leaves Prior when he finds out Prior has AIDS, and then has a month-long affair with Harper’s husband Joe.

There’s the black, homosexual, ex-drag queen nurse with the heart of gold, Belize; and the Angel with “eight vaginae” whose visits prompt sexual arousal and orgasm. The play is replete with references to orgasms, fellatio, semen, ejaculation, and f***ing. It includes the line “Suck my ****, Mother Theresa.”

In the heat of the controversy, Mr. Berger-White sent a letter to our local press asserting that it is the responsibility of English teachers to “challenge the emotions and morals” of their students—a belief clearly shared by his wife. His assertion raises some questions:

• Is it really the responsibility of high school English teachers (or government lawyers) to challenge the emotions and morals of students (or other people’s children)?

• Who decided that and when?

• How does the pedagogical goal of challenging the emotions and morals of students square with “progressive” commitments to ensuring students feel “safe”?

• If society agrees that challenging the emotions and morals of students is the responsibility of high school English teachers, why do we never hear about materials being presented that challenge the emotions and morals of “progressive”/”LBGTQQAP” students?

In the Biss interview, Juliet Berger-White asserted that “the law sets the floor,” but that when it comes to government schools affirming “trans” dogma, “there’s no ceiling.” Echoing her husband’s sentiments, she acknowledges the moral implications of promoting the “trans” ideology and policies in government schools, arguing that taxpayer-funded schools should abandon respect for biological sex “not just because we’re legally obligated to do so, but because we’re morally obligated to do so.”

The presumptuous Berger-Whites are using their taxpayer-funded jobs to indoctrinate other people’s children with their sexuality ideology. Their views are premised on arguable assumptions that are rarely addressed and never proved. Neither compassion nor “inclusivity” requires the affirmation of arguable assumptions that deny reality or that deem subjective feelings of greater importance than biological reality, especially if those assumptions result in the sexual integration of private spaces and speech mandates.

Teachers, leave those kids alone.

Conservatives, teach your children well, which can’t be done in places where foolish adults don’t respect physical embodiment as male or female or by cowardly adults who passively acquiesce because they care more about themselves than the children who have been entrusted to them.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/trans-schools_audio.mp3

---

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.