When Ideology Is a Cover for Child Abuse

Even in wars, there are standards. The United Nations defines “war crimes” as “violations of international humanitarian law (treaty or customary law) that incur individual criminal responsibility under international law.” By way of analogy, culture-war crimes constitute horrors done in the name of advancing some ideological agenda that would shock the conscience of any morally sane person, regardless of his or her political bent.

For instance, there are plenty of voices on the left (as well as on the right) who maintain that it is wrong to chemically castrate a child, stunt his natural growth, and risk his health and mental well-being by deceiving him about a fundamental aspect of his nature, i.e., his biological sex. And further, that it is wrong to subject a child to clinical experiments that will sterilize him and impair his sexual function, all because a widely contested and incoherent ideology demands that this be done.