Free Republic

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

Is your daughter a victim of male oppression? Blame Aladdin – as well as The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, The Lion King and Toy Story 2. Disney cartoons and other G-rated children’s movies are full of “gendered sexuality,” subjecting women to the male “objectifying gaze,” as “heterosexuality is constructed through hetero-romantic love relationships as exceptional, powerful, magical, and transformative.” These were the conclusions of Women’s Studies professors Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak in their 2009 research paper, “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films.” The sociologists examined “all the G-rated films grossing $100 million dollars or more between 1990 and...

For years, advocates of the gay rights movement have said that their goal is to make the world a more tolerant place for homosexuals. They have just as adamantly claimed that they had no intention of educating young children in the complexities of human sexuality. Not so in Hollywood. Take, for example, the new animated film Boxtrolls, created by studio Laika. The film is a riff on the old Mrs. Doubtfire morality that suggests that all families are created equal, no matter what their composition. “Families come in all shapes and sizes,” the narrator of the preview says. “Even rectangles.”...

Let me share with you an interesting article from The Washington Post about the teacher of an all-black class in a high school in Alexandria, Va., who expressed his frustration at how poorly the students were performing. The class included both native-born African-Americans and kids who had emigrated from Africa. In a moment of exasperation, the teacher blurted out this question to the native-born students: "Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?" One of them shot back the answer. The kid replied, "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study." Another student...