Desmond Napoles emerges from behind the curtain onto the red carpet catwalk stretched between crowds of onlooking adults who hoot and holler as the entertainer swirls pink-tinged hair and hips seductively. Desmond is an 11-year-old boy. His parents smile approvingly from the front row of the “Good Morning America” set.
“I’m very proud of him. I’m proud that he’s found his path so early,” says the father of the boy, who is known by his drag queen stage name Desmond is Amazing, in an interview for the 2018 segment. “My greatest joy in this is just seeing Desmond happy,” his mother adds.
The juvenile star plops down on a chair in front of the studio audience, and the hosts surprise him with secret drag queen guests, who shower the child with gifts and praise for being “inspirational,” “brave,” and “courageous.”
Thanks to the help of his parents and our LGBT-obsessed culture, Desmond, who is now a young teen, has amassed quite the following and market, with more than 160,000 followers on Instagram, Pride merchandise, media hits, and magazine photoshoots, and now even a book and an original song debuted in April called “We Are Amazing.”
“If you can just let go of that, and just love your child unconditionally as you should, no matter what … there really isn’t a problem,” Desmond’s mother declared in a different television interview that year.
Contra the drag child’s mother, there is a problem, and it’s a big one. There’s nothing inspirational, brave, or courageous about a child being lauded for sexual divergence. Children are by nature shameless and imaginative in ways that make dressing up in vibrant clothing and face paint adventurous and innocent. These displays become brave and inspirational only after their parents or other adults opt to capitalize on them.
Led by children like Desmond and Jazz Jennings, whose parents are at best complicit and at worst goading, or by celebrity parents such as Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union who have publicly endorsed the gender confusion of their children, the sexualization of children has been accelerating for the better part of a decade. A brick of misguided approval and ignorance on the cultural gas pedal threatens to plunge the whole perverted enterprise right off a cliff.
We deserve it — because at the core of all the rainbow flag-waving and “love is love is love” sloganeering is the sick reality that any Pride activism involving children is the result of adults sexualizing them, fetishizing them, and exploiting them for political or social gain. When a parent posits that their child’s happiness is more important than their security and a drag queen heralds a kid’s gender whims as brave and inspiring, they project their perverted sexual ethics on a generation of innocents who become casualties of the culture war. Children don’t think in terms of sexuality and gender expression, meaning divergence from the biological binary isn’t a “statement” or an “identity” — until an adult decides to market it as such.
The body count is increasing, which is why a 2018 Desmond segment is so relevant today. It’s instructive about how adults have propelled this issue. If it isn’t Blues Clues forcing gender dogma down the throats of pre-schoolers in the form of an animated drag queen co-opting a familiar tune for a messed-up Pride parade song, it’s a real-life drag queen rapping about the colors of the rainbow flag for the kids on Nickelodeon.
Last month, a TikToker proudly posted a video of adults in New York City encouraging a little girl to twerk and cheering as the tiny child gyrated for their amusement. This is to say nothing of the adults who celebrate the genital mutilation and sterilization of kids.
Same-sex couples began adopting and commissioning the artificial production of kids without regard for children’s parenting needs, drag queens began reading to tots in public places, Facebook fast-tracked the so-called gender lexicon, schools started referring to students by their preferred pronouns regardless of parents’ wishes, and worst of all, doctors who took the Hippocratic Oath began castrating minors. Children are paying the price for all of it.
In one New York City private school, a video shown to first-graders talked explicitly about masturbation. In the cartoon, created for five- and six-year-olds, cartoon characters talk about touching themselves “because it feels good.”
“Hey, how come my penis gets big sometimes and points up in the air?” a young boy cartoon character says in the video.“Sometimes I touch my penis because it feels good.”
“Sometimes when I’m in my bath or when mom puts me to bed, I like to touch my vulva too,” a young girl character replies.
This type of sexualized content for children, branded deceptively under “education,” is truly masturbatory for adults. In inculcating sexual curiosity in prepubescent minds, they’re really stroking their own interests and deriving pleasure from the resulting ideological stimulation of children — often against the will of their parents — which they believe serves their political and social ends.
If they can sexualize kids before their parents have a chance to instill a mature and moral sexual ethic, progressive leaders can mold them into more promiscuous adults who give a thumbs-up to scientifically untethered gender theory and approve of hedonistic policy.
Conservatives love to talk about the culture war, and for very good reason, but we shouldn’t allow the sexual exploitation of innocent children to become an imprecise political talking point under the banner of “LGBT issues.” Two consenting adults in the bedroom is an “LGBT issue.” Parents pimping out their children for entertainment and political points is a disgusting league all its own.
Aside from merely keeping their offspring alive, parents have one primary job: to instill truth in their children. Up is up and down is down, 1+1=2, boys and girls are different — and eventually, boys and girls are marvelous sexual beings who reproduce for human flourishing.
Too many modern parents have left this job of instilling truth to schools and peers, and it’s creating a generation of sexualized children raised by amoral educators who scoff at traditional values and morality and affirm minors who agree to parrot the left’s preferred political ideology. It isn’t enough for parents not to sexualize their children. In not actively fighting against the exploitation of our youth, we become complicit in it and therefore grant approval and legitimacy.
In Romans 1, Paul warns Christians against a litany of sexual sins, including same-sex gratification. He says, “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” In the list of transgressions, he includes “inventors of evil” and goes on to say: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”
Don’t give approval to those who invent sexually debased content that seeks to consume our children by becoming numb to it. Actively fight against it, lest we be destroyed — as a country that pimps out its own children for entertainment and political points deserves to be.
