Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   4/05/2022

Can’t we all agree on something?

A bit of whimsical nostalgia: April 1 marks 38 years since a young man and young woman showed up at the Longhorn Saloon in Canoga Park, San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, for country/western dance lesson night. He only expected casual mixing with ladies, and learning some dance steps; the women were shown their moves, as were the men.

Told to grab a partner, everyone else did, leaving Barbara Biettchert and Don Polson staring at each other across 10 feet of dance floor. Dancing ensued, followed by a drink and chat at a table. Two lives changed as she wrote her (real) phone number on her card; she didn’t know I had hair under my cowboy hat until our date the next weekend for horse-riding.

My horsemanship being little better than my dancing, it might have been chalked up as wasted effort on her part until I took her to a lookout spot with a pond near a neighborhood by the Santa Susanna Pass. That neighborhood was where she grew up at one point; that pond was where she and her sister played.

We climbed a tree, got to know each other and began planning hikes in the Southern California hills and mountains. Dancing and hiking our way through decades and states, before limbs and joints said otherwise, our fateful meeting on April Fool’s Day has helped lighten the mood of life and left us ending days sharing a smile.

We’ve never—in decades of meeting, dancing, camping and conversing with other couples and folks we met—discussed what anyone does in their private, intimate moments. It would be unwelcome and, frankly, creepy. Laws governing the once-penalized practices of a minority of relationships have fallen away as irrelevant. Thankfully, not so for child abuse and pornography, or sex trafficking.

Has tolerance exceeded propriety? Has acceptance of abnormal, aberrant or even abhorrent behavior accomplished the liberation that proponents proclaim? Or has it produced a degenerating pattern where, without any real debate, the “anything goes,” “if it feels good, do it” standards silently corrode the cohesion of positive social outcomes?

In the most obvious of decades-long patterns, we should all agree on the deleterious results of poverty, school dropouts, gangs, drugs and violent criminality that have flowed from a rising rate of births in fatherless homes, to single mothers. Is it an evolving standard to have no objective analysis of such social trends? Will advocates construe it as criticism of the single-mother “victims,” as opposed to the best interests of children?

Society has “divorced,” so to speak, love, passion, intimacy and the natural process of birth, from the millennia-long traditions of marriage and two-parent child-rearing. It hasn’t really worked out so well, has it? When you consider the likely vociferous, even hysterical, objection to using social pressure and education to move us back to that “nuclear family” arrangement—upon which so many successful, productive societies have flourished—it’s probably is a hill too steep. However, shouldn’t we try? “For the children”?

It should be a respectable debate and agreement that introducing sex, sexual topics and graphic representations to children is inappropriate, even diabolical or fiendish. Polling confirms that most folks support the text of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill; there’s overwhelming support by Republicans, Independents and even a majority of Democrats. Sadly, many Democrats disagree, perhaps out of ignorance.

Based on the nearly inexplicable choice by the Walt Disney Company to oppose Florida’s or other states’ efforts to protect children from the sexualization mentioned above, this column recommends severing ties to Disney, and all its subsidiaries. I’ve cancelled our paid Hulu subscription and will forgo watching Disney+ and the college bowl games on ESPN. The Walt Disney Co. includes Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20^th Century, and Searchlight Pictures studios; ABC, FX, National Geographic, streaming services, theme parks and cruise lines.

For Disney and others adhering to the demented belief that there is such a thing as “transexual,” or LBGT-inclined children needing liberation and protection from parents and parental oversight and guidance, I say “Go to Hell.” We should pray for your misguided intentions and souls. Beyond that, the least you—who sickeningly adhere to that fringe, hedonistic and exploitative view of children—could do is to confine your advocacy to your own children. For the sake of childhood purity, at least don’t oppose those who cherish it.

Roger L. Simon: “It’s hard to conceive how twisted and immoral Disney Studios—where I once worked on two feature films—has become…” but how else to put it when a company meeting, dubbed the “Reimagine Tomorrow Conversation Series,” is described by Chris Rufo, of City Journal:

“In a featured presentation at the meeting, executive producer Latoya Raveneau laid out Disney’s ideology in blunt terms. She said her team was implementing a ‘not-at-all-secret gay agenda’ and regularly ‘adding queerness’ to children’s programming. Another speaker, production coordinator Allen Martsch, said his team has created a ‘tracker’ to ensure that they are creating enough ‘canonical trans characters, canonical asexual characters, [and] canonical bisexual characters.’ Corporate president Karey Burke said she supported having ‘many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories’ and reaffirmed the company’s pledge to make at least 50 percent of its on-screen characters sexual and racial minorities.”

“The regressive corruption of Disney is so much worse than we thought,” by Peter Pischke, says it all. It's no stretch to say that Walt Disney would “roll over in his grave.” I suspect Supreme Court nominee, Judge Jackson, would be just fine with all of this if litigation reached that court, based on her leniency towards child pornography.