OPINION: GUEST COLUMN: America's Latest Fake Morality Crisis

Sep. 7—Watching America's self-appointed morality police leap from one supposed crisis to another is like watching a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad — always looking for something new.

A decade ago the threat to America was gay marriage. Legalizing it would undermine the institution of marriage itself, we were told. Then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Constitution protects same-sex marriages and most people in America decided that opposition to it was just outdated bigotry.

So the morality police marched on in search of new battles.

Two years ago, crazy leftists cancelled our beloved Dr. Seuss. In the real world what actually happened was Dr. Seuss' heirs decided to stop publishing a few very old books that included outdated and offensive caricatures of Black and Asian people. These were just images they no longer wanted to parade in front of the nation's first graders.

Nonetheless, Tucker Carlson warned ominously on Fox News, "If we lose this battle, America is lost."

The Cat in the Hat{/em} survived the leftist assault as did Horton the Elephant and all the others. And the morality police went off once more in search of a new outrage.

They settled on men getting dressed-up as women.

Across the country local communities and politicians have suddenly sprung into action. Officials in Chattanooga, Tennessee, prevented a high school production of "Shakespeare in Love" because it includes a few boys dressed as women — just as many of Shakespeare's original plays did. Moral hazard.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is trying to use the winds of culture war to win the nation's presidency, so he has to be even more extreme to get attention. DeSantis has considered having state authorities investigate parents for "child endangerment" if they bring their children to a show where men are dressed in women's clothing.

This crisis here is not an actual crisis. It is just one more strategy cooked up by pundits and politicians looking for viewers and votes. The real message underneath all this: Men dressing as women is actually a recruiting tool to make our children gay.

Here I feel compelled to make a public confession.

My 1975 high school yearbook includes a very large photo of me dressed as a rival school's homecoming queen. It was not a pretty sight. It was also not my idea. The cheerleaders made me do it for a school pep rally. I was a nerdy teenage boy and completely incapable of saying "no" to cute girls who otherwise ignored me.

I can also say with certainty that not a single other teenage boy that afternoon looked up at me on stage and thought, "Oh yeah, I think I might be into dudes now."

I have known a lot of very wonderful gay people and not a single one of them became gay at the sight of a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a man. People are gay because they are gay.

But what happens when young children are exposed to men dressed as women? Here I have a second confession to share.

One night in San Francisco my wife and I and our six-year-old daughter accidentally collided with the city's famous annual drag queen parade. Convertible after convertible carried waving men dressed to the nines as women, all of them looking fabulous.

Our daughter, Elizabeth, loved it. She thought we had stumbled upon a genuine parade of princesses! She was in awe and afterwards for five Halloweens in a row she insisted on dressing up only as a princess. I should note that the princess influence here is probably more likely to have been Disney than drag queens.

Soon enough those who seek to be our national nannies will milk this crisis for what it's worth and will move on to another. But the real damage in all this is that it keeps us from focusing on the actual threats to our children in this time.

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among our children and teenagers. Our children face a deep learning and mental health crisis, a leftover of the pandemic. This summer's horrible wild fires and smoke, the record heat waves, the disastrous flooding — all this is just a mild preview of the climate destruction we are leaving behind for our children and theirs.

If you don't want to take your child to a drag show or a Shakespeare play, then by all means don't. But let's stop pretending that the biggest threat to our children right now is men in dresses.

I have three children and they have watched the movie Mrs. Doubtfire multiple times. I have four grandchildren and I am going to watch it with them too. We will watch a film that for two hours openly flaunts the spectacle of a man, Robin Williams, dressed as a grandmother.

What effect will it have on them? I am betting they will laugh and love it, as their parents did. Because children, unlike the morality police, are not fools. They know what dress-up looks like when they see it.

Jim Shultz, an occasional CNHI columnist, is the founder and executive director of the Democracy Center and a father and grandfather in Lockport, New York. Reach him at jimshultzthewriter@gmail.com.