Tonight I read my daughter a book that had been a favorite of mine when I was her age. This book is 60 years old and no longer in print, and I had searched far and wide a few years ago to find the precious copy I now have.

The story itself is a true one, concerning a little girl and her family who lived around 1800 in the unsettled territory of Pennsylvania. It came into startling relief, as we finished the book, the contrast between life in that story and our life today. Not the differences between housing, plumbing, food abundance, or transportation, but something much more fundamental and human.

What leapt off the page was not the harshness of their life, but the harshness of ours.

Our society today is far more uncivilized. It may be shiny, digital, sleek & exciting, mind-blowing in its advanced capabilities and comforts, but we should not be misled. Our culture is downright savage.

The most hated thing in our culture today is not a political opinion, or an ethnicity or race, or a class or status, or any “group.”

It is innocence. Innocence and purity, sweetness and goodness. It is childhood itself. Today our culture doesn’t simply laugh and dismiss such things as old-fashioned and uncool, it actively despises them and ruthlessly seeks to destroy them.

The Adults in Power Hate the Innocence of Children

I say the culture but, of course, the culture is people, so I really mean the adults in power. The adults in power are ruthlessly seeking to destroy innocence wherever they find it.

Children are not permitted to be innocent anymore. No one may, but especially not the children.

Less than 10 days into June and already we have abundant images and video clips (thanks to our advanced technologies) of the most shocking and disgusting things happening around our nation in the name of “Pride.” Virtually all of them involve the presence of children. Things too filthy for decent adults are now shoved at kids.

Mostly naked grown men, in leather bondage get-up, simulating homosexual acts in public, on parade, at “family-friendly” Pride events. Little children saw a practically naked man being humped and whipped by another man wearing a spiked dog collar.

The normalization of pedophilia is nearly official. “Minor-attracted people” are the latest to gain a new sympathetic “identity” among the disordered sexual appetites of our time.

In the most heart-stopping image I’ve seen yet, two models styled as young girls are shown in clearly sexual positions with adult men. One is being sodomized as she is bent over a large audio speaker. The other girl is sitting on the groin of a man laying down on the floor. This image is apparently part of some artist’s new album called The Sex EP.

Why Do We Allow Drag Performers to Have an Audience With Children?

The revolting phenomenon of “Drag” and all its public displays and political maneuvers is everywhere. Politicians are now having press conferences and photo ops with creeps in garish drag get-up. Yeah, creeps. Drag isn’t costume or art; it’s a perverse sexual fetish.

An online friend recently shared that in his rural area, a library was hosting some trans/drag person and admission to the event was tight so you could only get in if you brought a child with you.

Why does an adult male in freakish, sexually-provocative garb demand an audience of children? Because drag is a predatory beast.

Since when is it normal, good, or safe for a little girl to crawl on the belly of a strange man dressed in drag? Or for a little girl to have a man expose his penis to her while he grinds his hips just inches from her face? Should little girls be taught how to dance suggestively in front of adults who give her dollar bills for her “performance”? In a sane society, such perverts would be lucky to fall into the hands of police.

Not so long ago, mothers would never have allowed open predators near their kids, but astonishingly, today moms and dads are clapping along as their children are feasted upon by degenerates.

Children Should Not Know About “Pride”

The coup de grâce against innocence is the irrational, destructive trans-ideology. What could possibly be more evil than to brainwash our children into thinking they are living in the wrong body, and then literally mutilate their bodies, turning the entire charade into a billion-dollar industry?

Every moment of their lives now is sexualized and then perverted. The goal is to smash through their natural, protective, innate sense of propriety and morality until they no longer resist the violation done to them by sick, abusive adults.

When and why did we abandon our duty to safeguard the innocence of our children? Children are entitled to their latency, their purity, their oblivion of things inappropriate for them. It’s pure wickedness to snatch away their childhood by filling their eyes, ears, and minds with sexual images, “identities”, actions, and language.

It should not need to be said out loud, but I will. Children should know nothing at all about drag. They should never see adult men or women in such freakish or depraved costumes. They should know nothing at all about “Pride.” Before adolescence, their vocabulary should not include words like “queer” or “trans” or “drag” or “non-binary” or even homosexual.

It is a burden too heavy for them, and it’s a sinful thing for us to lay that weight upon them.

A Burden Too Heavy for Them

In her book The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom tells of an event that took place when she was 10 or 12 years old as she traveled with her father on a train from Amsterdam to Haarlem. She had stumbled upon a poem that had the words “sex sin” among its lines:

And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sex sin?”

He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but, to my surprise, he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.

“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he asked.

I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.

“It’s too heavy,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”

Children are entitled to their full, uncorrupted latency and innocence. We are obligated to protect them in this way. Instead, ours is an age full of cruel, perverted thieves who are celebrated, protected, and applauded.

We are savages because the ones who draw the scorn and punishment of our society are those who refuse to applaud the violation of children by sexually deviant adults.

There surely aren’t enough millstones to go around.

Jennifer Hartline is a senior contributor to The Stream. You can follow her at @jenniehartline.