Much of Wokeness Fueled by The Sexual Revolution

Written by Robert Knight

The flame of wokeness — intolerance in the name of tolerance — wasn’t lit recently. It has been smoldering under the flag of liberalism for the past 100 years or so.

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1928. At the time, moral relativism was already making its long, slow march through the institutions that impart cultural values, including liberal church denominations.

By the 1950s, propelled by the severely flawed sex studies of Alfred C. Kinsey and the rise of the pill and the Playboy empire, the sexual revolution was in full swing.

Today, virtually every attack against Christians comes not from litigious, self-identified atheists but from sexual revolutionaries masquerading as victims of bigotry.

In Seattle last week, black-clad, masked activists protesting “Fascist Family Values” attacked a Christian group holding a prayer and praise rally. The Christians had wanted to use a different park, but officials directed them to what Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell called “Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood.”

Police arrested 23 protesters, who were obviously the aggressors. Nonetheless, the mayor, a Democrat, blamed the “far-right” Christians for the melee. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said the agency is investigating possible “targeted violence against religious groups.”

In Tennessee, a girl who “came out” as a lesbian in a social media post in April is suing a Christian prep school that suspended her. Tennessee Christian Preparatory School officials said the girl posted a “disparaging remark” about the school community, citing a repost of her “coming out” message that includes this: “I have some ruthless trump supporting ‘Jesus’ mfs on there.”

Does that sound to you like a Christian school graduate in good standing?

This is about far more than one student challenging the powers that be. The final outcome will reveal much about the courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent First Amendment record is checkered. The court did rule in favor of Colorado Christian baker Jack Phillips not being forced to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex ceremony, and on May 20, the justices reinstated Maine state U.S. Rep. Laurel Libby, whom Democratic legislators had silenced and prevented from voting for posting photos of a boy who had won a girls’ pole vault event.

However, the justices last week rejected an appeal from a Massachusetts boy banned from class for wearing a T-shirt that read, “There are only two genders.” According to the boy’s petition, the school had proclaimed that “sex and gender are limitless, based on personal identity, and have no biological foundation.” Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. would have heard the case.

Free speech, it seems, is for only some on this issue. Massachusetts schools have long encouraged students to wear LGBTQ pride clothing.

The situation is different in Tennessee. If the plaintiff gets her way, she will have used the public legal system to bend a private institution to her worldview.

Parents who shell out hard-earned money to send their children to this school do so because it imparts their faith and shields them from public school wokeness and mediocrity. The school handbook explicitly states that “God wonderfully immutably creates each person as male and female” and that sexual intimacy is only for marriage.

If a student publicly flouts the moral code and suffers no consequences, the standard becomes meaningless, which is, of course, the whole idea.

Liberal activists want to strip Christian institutions of their meaning. By redefining biblical morality as a form of bigotry akin to racism, they deploy the powerful civil rights legal apparatus to punish dissidents.

It comes down to: Bend your knee to Baal or go out of business. Better yet, get off your knees and start pushing what we’re selling. This is why leftists and LGBTQ activists have worked for decades to gain influence within the church.

Years ago, they took over Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth, which began as Christian seminaries and are now bastions of wokeness. Many other elite colleges have joined the herd of independent minds. Smith College, which was founded to educate women, recently awarded an honorary degree to Rachel Levine. A married father of two, Richard Levine decided in 2011 that he was really a woman and underwent various treatments.

The bespectacled bureaucrat with the long, curly locks was Pennsylvania’s secretary of health during the COVID-19 pandemic and named by President Biden as assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. He was also appointed a rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

The Smith honor is more than odd because Mr. Levine has championed biological men in women’s sports, pushed gender ideology (which has the effect of canceling women) and promoted government programs aimed at recruiting sexually vulnerable children, including girls. As Tyler O’Neill wrote recently in the Daily Signal, “The ‘gender-affirming care’ Levine championed involves experimental hormone injections and surgeries, seeking in vain to make men appear female and vice versa. These interventions — God forbid we refer to them as ‘care’ — leave kids stunted, scarred and infertile.”

I wonder what it will take 10 years from now to garner an honorary degree from Smith.

As the culture war grinds on, it’s important to retain perspective, like this gem from G.K. Chesterton:

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.