The double game is falling apart. Last month, faced with a Florida bill meant to ban children from being sexually victimized, organizers of a gay pride parade decided to cancel their event. As many observed, “why would this pride parade need to be canceled if there were no plans to expose children to sexual content?” Exactly.
Conservatives have long been familiar with Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility, which states: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” Well, it seems legislators are finally figuring out how to fight back against the impossible: the Law Against Imaginary Dangers. Why ban something imaginary? Among other reasons, to get people to stop doing it.
In the Florida instance, gay pride organizers insist their events are family-friendly and do not sexualize young children and that concerns over grooming are a crazy conservative conspiracy theory. Yet the parade is forced to shut down when grooming is banned. Let the reader understand.
Florida is not the only effective recent deployer of the Law Against Imaginary Dangers. Just this week in Austin, Texas, faced with a law banning chemical castration of children, an entire department of the local children’s clinic “departed.” Why would doctors, who absolutely did not and would not mutilate children, leave en masse when faced with a ban on mutilating children? Dell Children’s Medical Group did not respond to my request for comment.
It seems that Attorney General Ken Paxton initiated an Investigation Against The Imaginary and called their Law of Merited Impossibility bluff while they were still in Stage 1 (“it will never happen”), right before they were able to deploy Stage 2 (“you bigots deserve it”).
As many of us rarely get a chance to see a fledgling Merited Impossibility limping away in the wild, it is instructive to read the local news coverage on its demise. The Texas Tribune dutifully repeats the requisite Stage 1 assertion: “Dell Children’s released a statement on April 28 that says it does not provide hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery to children.” The reporters then seamlessly transition into Stage 2, writing compassionately of all the parents “left scrambling” now that their children can’t get hormone therapy: “her 12-year-old daughter received her first puberty blocker shot earlier this year [and] is due for another shot later this month, but last Friday got the call that her doctor had left Dell Children’s and the appointment was canceled.”
Another child, whose age is not disclosed by the Tribune, “got on puberty blockers under the guidance of the doctors at Dell Children’s” and formed a truly close bond with the doctors sterilizing her: “These kids develop relationships with these doctors that they trust and that’s ripped away from them.” Ripped away from them, to clarify, by the law banning doctors from doing the thing they were never doing. Touché, Paxton, touché.
Ladies and gentlemen, is it possible the anti-Moloch movement finally stumbled upon a winning strategy? I previously warned of the need to vet your pediatricians, and that defensive necessity remains. Yet as wise tacticians like Jesse Kelly have long argued, we need to go on offense, too. Take a page from DeSantis and Paxton. Don’t wait for the Law of Merited Impossibility to strike near and dear to home. Take action now, work to get your legislators to enact a Law Against Imaginary Dangers, and watch the thing that is not happening finally, at long last, stop actually happening.
