Orban Vs. Blue’s Clues Pride Parade

HUNGARY: This is what an actual pro-family, socially conservative government acts like:

Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which faces elections in early 2022 and promotes a strongly Christian-conservative agenda, has moved further against the LGBT+ community since last year. Poland’s ruling PiS party, Fidesz’s main European Union ally, has taken a similar stance for years.

The latest amendment, submitted to parliament on Thursday by Fidesz lawmakers to a bill that punishes paedophilia, says youngsters under 18 cannot be shown pornographic content, or any content that encourages gender change or homosexuality. This also applies to advertisements, the bill says. It also proposes setting up a list of organisations allowed to hold sex education sessions in schools.

“The new legislation proposed by Fidesz would seriously curb freedom of speech and children’s rights,” the Hatter rights group said in a statement, likening the bill to Russia’s gay propaganda law.

They always say that. What the proposed law would do would be to stop filth like the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade video from being broadcast to Hungarian children. If Hungarian voters saw the kind of thing that American children are propagandized by, they would be totally behind this bill:

Here’s a related video from Nickelodeon, the kids’ network, produced especially for Pride Month:

The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants to keep that garbage away from Hungarian children. Thank God for that. Hungary is not as far gone into decadence as we in America are. They still have a chance to hold this stuff at bay — but not if they elect the Left.

As I have written here, earlier this summer in Budapest, I spoke with an academic who opposes the Orban government. The main reason, as usual, is what he regards as its rampant corruption. He added that he supports gay marriage and gay adoption, but said he does not support transgenderism. Later, he agreed that is free to say whatever he wants in his classroom without fear of retaliation.

“Professor, the opinion you voiced earlier – that you support gay marriage, but not transgenderism – was the standard opinion among America liberals ten years ago,” I told him. “Today, if you stood in an American classroom and said it, you would probably be fired, and you would never be allowed to teach in academia again. This wouldn’t come from the state, but from the institutions themselves. So you tell me, who is more free?”

My point to the professor was that LGBT activists and progressive ideologues never stop with gay marriage. There is no point in which they can say, “This far, but no further.” The professor is right that there is no necessary connection between homosexuality, which depends on the gender binary, and transgenderism, which obliterates it. But that is not how LGBT activists have acted. They have insisted on the T, without apology or exception.

In America, I’d say, most people didn’t see this coming. When, in 2015, the US Supreme Court declared that gay marriage was a constitutional right, a majority of Americans agreed with them. People like me who warned that this was opening the door to far more radical changes than activists admitted were called alarmist. And now, only six years later, I am starting to no longer recognize my country.

Back then, if you had said that one day soon, American states would reserve the right to seize children and subject them to transgender medical treatments over the objection of parents, liberals would have accused you of alarmism. But that is now what is happening in some of America’s most progressive states. As journalist Abigail Shrier reports:

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatient and outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

Lest you wonder whether there is some madcap elixir polluting the groundwater of Washington State alone, in 2015, Oregon passed a law permitting minors 15 and older to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries at taxpayers’ expense—all without parental consent. In 2018, California passed a similar bill for all children in foster care, age 12 and up. The California state senate is now considering an amendment to the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that would bar health insurers from disclosing medical information to parents about their dependents, on pain of criminal liability.

So, Americans have children’s media, children’s schools, and even children’s breakfast cereal, propagandizing their children to accept transgenderism from an early age, and then in some states, if a child as young as 13 decides that he is trans, the state can take the child away from parents and start the process of transition.

This is evil. And this is where the Left wants to take all of us. Don’t believe them when they say otherwise — whether they say it in English, Hungarian, or whatever. In America today, there is no meaningful resistance to this, and everyone is terrified of being taken out. If you resist, you get targeted by a multibillion dollar industrial complex that has the full support of the US Government,, high and low culture, the legal establishment, the courts, etc. This is the world I talk about in Live Not By Lies. It’s here. Few people are going to fight back in the US now, because doing so will cost a lot. Will conservatives take care of their own when they are cancelled? No, they won’t. The Republican Party seems to exist mainly to ratify whatever the Democrats were advocating about five years ago.

When I was interviewing the former anticommunist dissidents of Eastern Europe, they told me I shouldn’t imagine that there were many of them; most people, they said, just wanted to keep their heads down and go along to get along. Now I better understand why.

I am a strong believer in free speech principles behind the First Amendment (which they don’t have in Hungary, but never mind), but there have to be common sense limits when it comes to children. Several years back, the Orban government defunded and withdrew accreditation from gender studies programs at Hungarian universities. A decade ago, my view would have been that I don’t like gender studies, but the state should stay out of the way universities run themselves. Today, though, I fully support what the Orban government did. Gender studies (and Critical Race studies too) are malignant poisons that are destroying society. Liberalism of this sort is a suicide pact.

In conversations around Budapest, with both supporters and detractors of the Fidesz government, I hear a growing sense that a change is coming with the 2022 election. When I ask people who plan to vote for the opposition why they will do so, the answer is always the same: we are tired of corruption. I’ve talked to two different small business people lately, and they complain that the money the EU voted to help Hungarian small businesses survive the Covid crisis never made it to them. The belief is that it was pocketed by government cronies.

I am just a visitor in Hungary, so I have no idea to what extent the claims of corruption are true or false. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they are largely true. How does that compare to the threat from progressives and gender ideology?

What was once on the fringes of progressive thought — I’m talking about gender ideology — is now thoroughly mainstream, and being institutionalized throughout the US government. Why? Because elites have already absorbed gender ideology, and American social norms are rapidly changing around it. There is still significant resistance to the Left on trans issues (see this recent Gallup poll), but  I don’t expect the resistance to last. How could it? The American people face relentless propaganda in schools, in workplaces, and in the media, both news and entertainment. You can escape this stuff by turning off your television – but how many Americans are going to do that? My wife and I raised our children without this kind of garbage, but it was difficult, and most of your children’s friends will have seen it, and had their minds formed by it. Besides, institutional elites are going to enforce this ideology. That’s a nice middle-class career you have there; sure would be a shame if something happened to it, bigot. 

Corruption can be fixed with determined executive and legislative action. It should be fixed, because it’s unjust, and because corruption undermines people’s confidence in the government. Whether true or false — again, I don’t read Hungarian, and haven’t been around here long enough to know how true it is — the Fidesz government at the very least has a big problem of perception, and needs to change course.

But corruption, as regrettable as it is, is within the bounds of the normal. Gender ideology, by contrast, is grotesquely abnormal, and will destroy families and society. These are different kinds of corruption. Nobody defends financial corruption as a moral good. To define something evil as a moral good is a far, far worse kind of corruption. Hungarians should know that once the virus takes root in their country, they won’t be able to get rid of it easily. They are fortunate to live within a constitutional framework that allows the state to protect their children like this, and to have a government that is willing to do so, even though it makes them hated by elites in more decadent countries. Hungarian voters can be certain that a government headed by the likely opposition candidate Gergely Karacsony, the leftist pro-LGBT mayor of Budapest, will open the doors to gender radicalism — doors that will be very, very difficult to close again.

Hungarians should learn from the bitter experience of social conservatives in the US. We are governed by what I call the Law of Merited Impossibility, which describes the sleight-of-hand leftists use to get us to put our guard down. Whenever we accuse them of doing something extreme that will lead to harmful consequences, they say that’s outrageous and alarmist, and that the bad thing will never happen. And then when it eventually happens, the Left says that it’s only right to fight “hatred.” So, the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

This is why you cannot trust the Left not to sexualize children for the sake of Progress. The Blue’s Clues Pride Parade for children is part of what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera calls the Grand March. He describes it like this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

The dictator of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftists is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

They are Leftists, and though they are also Hungarian, inevitably they will integrate the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade — by which I mean LGBT propaganda aimed at kids — into the Grand March. They’re already doing it with Black Lives Matter and Pride. Earlier this year in Budapest, a district mayor of Karacsany’s party engineered the temporary erection of a BLM/LGBT Pride statue, telling journalists that BLM’s goals are just as valid in Hungary as in America.

See what I mean? The Left can and will integrate any other country’s problems into the kitsch called the Grand March. That’s what makes them Leftist. If they have to compel little children to confront transgenderism and homosexuality, well, that’s what Progress requires.

Here’s the bottom line: If you don’t like Viktor Orban, whatever his faults, then you had better be prepared for your kids to join the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade, and all the disorders that follow. Because it’s coming from the West, hard and fast.

UPDATE: A classic job from the media. Politico Europe reports on the legislation, allowing activists to characterize the new law as “hate-mongering” without challenge. Example:

András Kádár, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a Budapest-based rights watchdog, said “the provisions banning the ‘promotion or display of homosexuality’ fit into the trend of hate-mongering policies this governing majority has adopted over the past years against various social groups.”

“Provisions like these should not be adopted or implemented,” he added. “They are harmful, shameful and violate fundamental rights.”

Despite growing concerns about anti-LGBTQ laws and rhetoric, rights groups did celebrate a small win over the government in March, when the Hungarian Constitutional Court ruled that the law prohibiting individuals from changing their gender in legal documents cannot apply to ongoing proceedings.

The Hungarian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Orbán has previously described his country as “tolerant.”

“We can safely say that as regards homosexuality Hungary is a patient, tolerant country,” the prime minister said in an interview last October. “But there is a red line that must not be crossed, and this is how I would sum up my opinion: ‘Leave our children alone.’”

That’s quite sensible. Nobody is saying you can’t talk about LGBT issues. The ruling party proposes that you cannot do this in material aimed at children and minors. The Left, on the other hand, says that if you don’t want the Blue’s Clues Pride Parade airing on children’s TV, then you are a hater. This is all they have: spurious accusations of “hate” against anyone who disagrees with them.