Word Weld

In our society, supporting people who do not share your worldview is all but inevitable. McDonald’s, Walmart, your bank, your gas station, etc, not to mention Amazon and all the online stores all take our money. And they all to one degree or another bow the knee to the leftists and special interest groups pushing for acceptance and celebration from corporate America. They support leftism in social media and public addresses, and also often give money to prove it. But for the most part, I can still shop at Walmart, buy a sausage biscuit at McDonald’s (though not much else), and spend money on Amazon. Everyone has to be true to their own convictions, of course, and if someone believes that giving money to any of these companies is wrong, I’m not going to argue. My policy is that it’s probably not a good idea to argue with someone whose standard is higher than your own. I might not agree with how Mennonites and Amish dress (or do I?) and what they allow in their homes, but then again they don’t seem to have a lot of the same problems in their communities that we have. Might be something to think about.

Regardless, to my mind you can’t boycott everything because (1) you have to live and if you don’t have the skills and resources to make everything yourself, you have to get it from somewhere, and (2) most companies are like people who pay the mafia for “protection.” Your average company will toe the line culturally in order to not hurt their bottom line. They’re not Christian, and so I don’t expect them to have high moral standards. They’re just trying to make money and with all of these special interest groups running around looking for companies to crucify, I really don’t know if I can blame them for just regurgitating whatever talking points will keep them out of trouble with the roving mobs looking for their next victim. Is it right? No, but it’s no less than I would expect from companies run by unsaved people just trying to be successful in a difficult economy.

But there is a difference between companies that will toe the line out of a sense of survival, and companies that have stated that these are their ideologies, and are actively joining the mob to force these things on you and your family. It’s really inevitable that some companies actually will be run by people who actively oppose your worldview, and you have to make an individual call on where you draw the line. The important thing is that you actually have a line, and then thereafter (and just as important) that you do not cross it. After all, it’s your line. You determine where it goes, and if you constantly cross it, they you really don’t have it. It’s not a useful concept at all or really a part of your life. For example, my wife and I drew the line with Frito/Lay’s brand years ago, when they decided to give money to and actively promote a man who overtly hated Christians and is an activist to destroy the values we believe in. It has been difficult to buy chips as a result, since many stores don’t sell anything but Lay’s brand. But once you draw a line, in order for that line to mean anything, you have to not cross it.

Later on, we had to part ways with Netflix. They were gradually toeing the Leftist line more and more, but after they started making their own shows, things really started to go downhill. It really came to my heart most when they created the show Stranger Things, which was a horror-like show starring children, which would also therefore attract children. But I kept on with them. And then I got concerned when horrific shows’ title cards were showing up as a slide show just on the main Netflix screen. But still I just tried to keep the screen off or on a good show’s title card when not being actively watched. But then, Michelle Wolf did her “Salute to Abortion” on Netflix in 2018, and despite the show not being continued by Netflix, it was the last straw for me and my family. Netflix lost a customer, not that it bothered them, but not that I cared whether or not it bothered them. After all, I was not trying to hurt Netflix’s bottom line, which was impossible anyway, but rather protecting my family, which is a big part of my job as a husband and father. My decision was reinforced in 2020 when Netflix doubled down on its targeting of children with horrible programing by releasing the highly controversial (read “abysmally awful and horrifying”) show, Cuties, which despite not being made by Netflix per se was aired on their platform and defended by their people. And to be honest, I have not missed either Lay’s chips or Netflix enough to really give it much thought.

And now we come to it again. Following a number of “controversies” in schools around the country, lawmakers who care about the parents and families they represent have made some efforts (maybe not as strong efforts as they should, but efforts nonetheless) to at least try to protect children in schools from harm by sexual predictors, who are masquerading as people with souls who care about the children under them. Just as when such things were discovered in the Catholic Church, it is being found that schools are apparently a great place to get access to children if you are a sexual deviant bent on using children for your own erotic pleasure. Certainly not all school staff are such, but it is surprisingly easy to hide amongst them, apparently. The legislature of states like Florida has therefore taken it upon themselves to try to protect children in the school system from predation by limiting what kind of sexual content can be made a part of class time, and putting reasonable limits on what teachers are allowed to discuss with children who are too young to be exposed to sexuality of any kind, much less deviant “sexual” behaviors like homosexuality, lesbianism, “transgenderism,” drag queens, kinkiness, and so on. (Note that I put “sexual” in quotes when referring to these things because these behaviors are sexual in nature, but are not actually sex. Though we know it, no one seems to like to mention that it is physically impossible to have sex with a member of the same sex, only to engage in a kind of “joint masturbation”). Children, and especially young children, do not need to be concerned with deviant sex, actual sex, or sex of any kind. Because children are not sexual in nature. They are inherently not sexual. If you look at the animal kingdom, for instance, an animal is considered a juvenile until it is able to reproduce. Until that time, animals display no sexual impulses at all. Human beings, of course, have blurred the lines in the name of self-gratification. We are bored with actual sex, even sex with random people, so we feel the need, as the ancients did, to alter sex until it feels new and interesting again.

Now, the legislation that is being put forward does only what is stated above. It limits what teachers can present to students in the classroom. They will not be permitted to teach sexual concepts to children during class time. That is all. However, that has not stopped those in society who bellow the loudest about “misinformation” from actively vomiting actual misinformation about this bill everywhere, calling it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” and claiming that it forbids kids and teachers from discussing anything about their families or homes if deviant behaviors are being practiced in said homes. They say the bills force kids to shut up about their same-sex “parents” and they even claim such things as teachers being fired for even talking about the fact that they have a same-sex partner. Now I would love to think we were passing legislation that prevented people are in a large part raising the children of other people to not indoctrinate those children into their fringe behaviors and spread confusion among kids about what their gender is, what marriage is, or about sex long before they should even learn about “actual” sex, but these bills are none of those things. They are protections for children at a very basic, simplistic level. They are saying, “Hey, focus on teaching your academic subject, and stop talking to kids about sex during class.” That is literally it. And yet the misinformation train is crossing the country, with loads of coal on the fire and the throttle wide open.

And as a part of the socio-political pressure being leveraged against the state legislatures writing these bills, of course activists for pseudo-sex are enlisting the “aid” of corporate America, demanding that big brands condemn the legislation and bring “sanctions” against states that are attempting to protect the minds and bodies of innocent children. One of the brands being summoned the most and the loudest by the invoking mob is Disney.

Disney as a company was founded upon the concept of providing entertainment to kids. Since Disney was founded, their mission has been to make money from parents by providing entertainment that kids can enjoy. And in this they have been immensely successful. Now in recent years, they have moved into other venues and focus groups, particularly teens in the 90’s and adults in the 2000s and forwards. As such, they have produced some pretty questionable adult content, such as movies like Deadpool, though there are numerous others. But I was able to give them a bit of a pass on that because this was being sold as their “content of adults.” True, many kids were seeing these shows that ought not to have, but that was not on Disney. That was on the parents. If you took your child to watch any of the Marvel movies, that was on you, not on Disney, because they put that content under the umbrella of the adult wing of their content. This is why when Disney decided to put two women kissing in a brief moment during Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, I was disappointed and the film was ruined for me personally, but I didn’t cancel my Disney+ subscription and swear off Disney. This was a show that was directed at adults, and thus it had content that adults could handle. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t have to watch it, but it fit within the framework of my understanding of the company.

But then things changed, and we started to hear whispers and rumors that Disney was planning to roll out the same kinds of things in their content directed at children (arguably, and historically, their primary content). I began to feel the rumbles that our family and Disney, despite the truly great entertainment they have put out over the years, were going to have to part ways. Shorts that they and Pixar were putting out started feeling like the moral was a bit too left-leaning. The creators of How To Train Your Dragon talked behind the scenes about one of their most likeable Viking characters being homosexual. Then Luca came out, and it was a great film with almost nothing objectionable to children, but it felt like the movie could be a front for a “coming out” metaphor. To my relief, the creator of the film came out and denied this, stating that the story was purely a heartwarming tale from his childhood. I wiped the sweat from my brow. Disney and Pixar hadn’t disappointed yet. Then came Encanto, and while it was not as impressive to me as Luca, there was only minor objectionable content and nothing sexual.

Following the legislation in Florida and the cries for Disney to come out in support of so-called “trans kids” and their “families,” Disney put out a statement of support. I gave a wry look and moved on. They were regurgitating whatever it took to get them out of trouble. But then they announced that a lesbian kiss in the upcoming Buzz Lightyear film that had been removed, was going to be specifically added back to the theatrical cut, in support of those protesting a bill to protect children. So, to do a bit of unpacking, the film already had a lesbian kiss in it. Then, they cut it because, just like with Black Panther and their other films (but not apparently Rise of Skywalker), they figured their audience wasn’t ready for kids to be introduced to deviant romance. Then, because people called for outrage against the legislation to protect children, Disney said, “oh, hey, maybe Americans are ready for our films to introduce deviant romantic behaviors to little kids.” And thus they specifically and proudly announced the objectionable scene will be back in the film, for all the little “trans kids” to enjoy. First off, there are no trans kids, as kids are not sexual and their gender/sex is determined by their DNA, not their mind or their mouth, and certainly not the mind or mouths of their abusive parents, and not by sexual perverts who have been looking for ways to exploit children for decades. But secondly, this blatant, deliberate act not just to get out of the woods with the mob, but to actively join their side, and declare for all the world to hear that they are for the sexualization and exploitation of children by adults has finally broken the last straw for our family. I had drawn the line and Disney crossed it.

As such, I can no longer support Disney, and I hope millions of families around this country will do the same. But if they don’t take a stand, we still will. And I know that there will be others who will have drawn the line further along. That’s ok, just don’t move the line when they cross it again, because your children are at stake. And there will be families whose trips to Disneyland, or their ability conveniently put mostly ok shows in front of their children for the hours of the day when they distract them with TV, or who just don’t want to let go of a childhood memory will just continue on. And by all means. It’s a close facsimile of a free country, after all. But know that the slope we have been slipping down does not level off for our toleration of it. It only gets faster. It will not be long before Disney is releasing movies about deviant sexual behavior, for people who practice it to consume. Main characters will soon have same-gender romances, spouses, and practice white-washed deviant romance on screen. How far down the road are you going to draw the line? And when you get there, you will be tempted to move it… will you? How much are you really willing to give up for the protection of your children? I’ve already given up on most chips, Netflix, and public schools. To me, giving up Disney really isn’t that big of a sacrifice compared with the health and wellbeing of my children.