This is not a debate. This is war

A lively debate has broken out in the ranks of National Review over the latest flashpoint of this summer’s Boycott Wars: a “Pride onesie” spotted on the racks at Kohl’s. The design is available for toddlers and babies as young as 3 months old. It features a small group of people (plus a dog) happily waving Pride flags in a parade. Fresh off the Target boycott, various conservatives have launched a new hashtag campaign in protest.

But National Review Online editor Philip Klein thinks this is all much ado about nothing. On Twitter, he asked, “What should it matter” if someone wants to dress their baby in a Pride onesie? In a follow-up piece, he elaborated that while he does oppose leftist indoctrination through gender transitions or inappropriate sex ed, he categorizes “Pride gear” differently. After all, nobody is forcing anyone to buy a onesie. So why all the fuss? “It’s just a shirt.”

Or is it? In her response, Madeleine Kearns suggests that Klein hasn’t properly considered the LGBTQ ideologues’ goals. She asks the key question: Why do LGBTQ ideologues have such a felt need to project their ideas onto children? It’s not, as some might claim, because they’re all pedophiles in disguise. Primarily, they are driven to indoctrinate the next generation. Children play a vital role in normalizing and sanitizing their message, whether it’s through cute surrogate babies, “Pride gear,” or picture books about “different kinds of families.”

All these things contribute to what Charles Taylor would call a “social imaginary” in which virtually all forms of sex and romance are equally acceptable. Klein is looking for a seam in a seamless garment, imposing rigid category distinctions on a cultural project whose subtler and more aggressive manifestations are really all of a piece.

It’s worth recalling that this has been a very long game. We can forget that Heather Has Two Mommies is nearly 35 years old. Daddy’s Roommate wasn’t far behind, published in 1995—a story with the additionally pernicious element that it normalized divorce and infidelity. We could go back in time and say, like Klein, that nobody was forcing parents to buy these picture books. And yet, the picture books were beginning to create a social imaginary. No doubt many parents read them and were disgusted, but other parents read them and wavered. Maybe they didn’t have especially strong convictions on these things. They wanted to be kind. They wanted people to be happy. And the families in these books seemed happy. 

Of course, as we all know, yesterday’s picture books that “nobody had to buy” have now become today’s curriculum. Why? Because the culture changed. And why did the culture change? Because without an explicitly countercultural foundation, ordinary people are vulnerable to the power of suggestion. 

Another strong response to Klein highlights the absurd pridefulness of the parents who will buy the onesie with explicitly activist intentions. Those parents doubtless exist, particularly if they’re gay themselves. But I actually suspect that not everyone who buys the onesie will be especially political or ideological. I picture some parents simply going about their day, their shopping, and as they scan the racks, they see a onesie full of rainbows and hearts and happy people. One of the children in the picture is in a wheelchair. What’s the message, to the average distracted mommy shopper? Joy. Kindness. Welcome. Love. Who wants to be against any of those things?

Meanwhile, with normalization comes censorship of those who continue to point out the abnormal. One shopper walked through Kohl’s to expose the whole range of the store’s Pride gear offerings, including a kid’s T-shirt featuring Minnie Mouse. He was sardonic and skeptical, though not unduly inflammatory. Yet, right on cue, TikTok removed the video as “hate speech.” 

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. In the new normal, it’s only to be expected. In this zero-sum game, there is no middle ground. If the LGBTQ activists are right, and the fight to normalize their identities is no different in kind from the fight black Americans waged for full social integration, then conservatives are bigots. If conservatives are right, and these identities fundamentally should not be normalized, then the Pride onesie is insidious. 

Like many others, Philip Klein is still searching for that centrist “Goldilocks zone”—not too hot, not too cold, not too left, not too right. But he will search in vain. This is not a debate. This is war. And the winner gets our children’s hearts and minds. The LGBTQ lobby has understood this for a long time. Do we?