While the argument could be made that any sense of traditional sexual normalcy has already been shattered with the advent of the transgender movement and the general acceptance in American culture of sexual deviancy, others say we haven’t seen anything yet.

For years, the Left trumpeted the acronym “LGBT,” which stood for the labeling of individuals as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. In 2016, however, the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) added ‘Q’ for Queer, lengthening the acronym to LGBTQ to include so-called “queer or questioning identities.” More recently, activists have tacked on an I and an A — for Intersex and Asexual — in their endless quest to expand opportunities for the denial of immutable biological reality.

But it is the addition of Q to the acronym that is raising concerns among both conservatives and liberals, who charge that queer theory is a doorway to the normalization of pedophilia, bestiality, and virtually any form of sexual deviancy that remains taboo.

Author, researcher, and mathematician Dr. James Lindsay wrote on New Discourses.com that queer education is child abuse and that “nearly all of the gender and sexuality education in America is ultimately based upon Queer Theory, which has nothing to do with ‘LGBT’ education.” He adds: “Queer is not an identity like gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is by definition an explicitly and intentionally activist identity. That is, it is a political stance, not a fact of who someone is—in fact, not an identity at all.”

An article in The Epoch Times last August described “queer theory” as a sexual ideology that began gaining popularity during the 1970s. Proponents “embrace the idea that sexual consent laws should be eradicated for all children, even infants,” a notion that harkens back to the flawed (and criminal) research of discredited former zoologist and “sex researcher” Alfred Kinsey, who used pedophiles to carry out twisted experiments on innocent young children and babies in the 1940s and ’50s.

Kinsey claimed his research proved human beings are “sexual from birth,” and, as The Epoch Times writes, “queer theorists [today] embrace the idea that sexual consent laws should be eradicated for all children, even infants.” (See Alfred Kinsey & John Money: Psychopathic, Serial Sexual Predators (devilslane.com))

Pedophilia or sexual orientation?

The Times article laments that while conservatives are preoccupied with the transgender agenda, there is a quiet push to classify pedophilia as a sexual orientation rather than as a potentially criminal disorder that calls for psychiatric treatment. “In academic circles,” they write, “the push is intensifying to classify pedophilia as another sexual orientation, instead of a mental disorder.”

One obvious step toward this end is replacement of the word “pedophile” with the term “minor-attracted person” (or MAP), a designation that is considered “less stigmatizing” for those who are sexually attracted to children but do not act on their urges. Former Old Dominion University Professor Allyn Walker, a female-to-male transgender, argued in her book The Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, that “MAPs” deserve less stigma, and that the general public does not understand the difference between sexual attraction to children and criminal behavior.

After Walker’s November 2021 interview with the Protasia Foundation, during which she called attention to the preferred “minor attracted persons” term and caused a stir in the media, she and Old Dominion parted ways. She blamed “mischaracterization” of her research due partly to “my trans identity” for her unplanned departure from the university.

Observers say the value in re-categorizing pedophilia as a sexual orientation is to render it another protected class. Thirty-year veteran of prison counseling, Jon Uhler, who has worked with sex offenders, told The Epoch Times that counselors are now being trained to view sex offenders as victims of trauma. He said they are taught to consider information from interviews with pedophiles as truth, instead of “realizing that they’re dealing with the world’s greatest deceivers.” Uhler speculated that there will be “a push to have [pedophilia] recognized as a sexual orientation, which would grant it civil rights status.”

Destructive pedagogy

James Lindsay wrote that queer theory teaches kids to “resist and challenge all norms and expectations of normalcy,” with the intent to make them activists “in this disruptive, destabilizing mode of misunderstanding the world. That has no place in our educational institutions, especially when it’s happening outside of parental knowledge and approval.”

He uses as an example the Drag Queen Story Hours (DQSH) in schools and libraries, which pose as family-friendly enticements to get kids interested in reading, but which in reality provide “a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but ‘living queerly.’” Lindsay quotes the educational paper Drag Pedagogy, which argues for Drag Queen Story Hours in schools:

• It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.

Taken an ominous step further, activists claim that protecting children’s innocence “can injure the child’s development” and that offering “a new mode of analytical inquiry that insists upon embracing the child’s queer curiosity and patterns of growth” is preferable. (Ref. “Queer Futurity and Childhood Innocence,” by Canadian researcher Hannah Dyer.)

Lindsay explains that Dyer’s paper “is specifically about and contains a section heading on ‘Queering the child’s innocence,’ which is perfectly in line with what the ‘drag pedagogy’ people want. Queer Theory in education is therefore so destructive that it aims to rewrite the innocence of childhood as an evil that prevents children from developing ‘queer curiosity and patterns of growth.’”

Protected class

It’s easy to see the threat this line of thinking presents in light of changing the status of pedophilia to sexual orientation. When a group of 50 parents successfully prevented a Drag Queen Story Hour at the San Fernando Public Library last October, the featured drag queen, Pickle, publicly admitted: “It is not a person’s right to physically prevent a protected class of citizens from entering a public library.” [Emphasis added.]

Lecturer and author Derrick Jensen told The Epoch Times that “queer theory examines what is normal and who that hurts or helps.... Normal is oppressive.... Queer theory argues that the violation of the child doesn’t cause the harm done by adult-child sex—it’s caused by a society that makes the child feel guilty for having sex.”

Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Michell agrees that queer theory seeks to normalize pedophilia. She noted that some of its earliest proponents were pedophiles, including the poet Allen Ginsberg, a supporter and member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Ginsberg wrote an essay defending child sex in 1994 which claimed that “pubescent boys and girls” would “get used to our lovemaking (sic) in two days, provided the controlling adults will stop making these hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape.”

Michell added that the transgender craze encourages kids to embrace the agenda without parental knowledge and ties in with queer theory’s low-key effort to mainstream pedophilia. “Allowing minors to make decisions on transgender surgery that would alter their lives forever is one step closer to allowing children to consent to sex with adults,” she said. “I think the push for queer theory in the classroom and gender ideology, indoctrinating them with pronouns, different genders that don’t exist in reality, is to push them toward and normalize them being able to consent.”

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