“We’re Coming for Your Children:” Activists Against Childhood

With ‘Pride Month’ behind us, it’s interesting to take stock of how far the hatred against families and normative structures of human flourishing has come.

A controversial video surfaced recently of activists at a recent gay pride event in the U.S. using the slogan, “We’re Coming for Your Children”.

Amid criticism of what amounts to a threat against parents, sympathetic media has claimed that the phrase is ironic and meant to ‘own’ negative stereotypes, displaying a cavalier attitude towards presumed jokes about harming children or violating parental rights which these same media outlets would likely not extend to off-colour, politically incorrect jokes.

In the context of phenomena like ‘drag queen story’ time and public school curricula including sexual topics despite parental disapproval, however, the slogan seems to align with reality.

NBC, for example, somewhat incoherently reported about the recent controversy, that the original video seems to feature only one person chanting these words, and that it isn’t clear whether that person is actually non-heterosexual, before going on to justify the chant anyway, pointing out that it has been used for a long time:

The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to long-time march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.

For its part, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir released a performance whose lyrics seem to be making a non-ironic, earnest declaration out of the slogan: 

You think we’re sinful, you fight against our rights, you say we all lead lives you can’t respect. But you’re just frightened, you think that we’ll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked. It’s funny just this once you’re correct. We’ll convert your children. Happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it … We’ll make them tolerant and fair. 

Presumably, making children “tolerant and fair” is not ironic. But this non-ironic pronouncement is accompanied by implied advocacy for sexually perverting young persons, as it leads into a straightforward predatory scenario around instilling sexual identities considered deviant by traditional morality:

You can keep him from disco, warn about San Francisco, make him wear pleated pants, we don’t care. We’ll convert your children, we’ll make them tolerant and fair … We’ll convert your children … there’s really no escaping … and the world’s getting kinder, Gen-Z’s gayer than Grindr. Learn to love … someone’s gotta teach them not to hate … We’re coming for your children.

References to the futility of keeping youth from “the disco” and to Gen-Z being “gayer” than a homosexual dating app would seem to constitute the promotion of certain sexual identities among the young, not merely the acceptance of other people’s sexual identities (of course, even the latter would not be legitimate, as a religious family has every right to teach its children not to be accepting of what it considers a sin, given that acceptance and tolerance are different things).

Claims to irony and satire aside, then, the intention to indoctrinate and transform society, and the evident hatred for structures like the traditional family and the values it inculcates, are evident.