Squires: How Americans are 'tenderized' to abandon truth and swallow destructive ideas

Some people believe applying the term “groomer” liberally to teachers and Disney executives who believe it is their right to introduce queer sexuality and gender ideology to children does a disservice to children who are targeted by sex predators and physically harmed by child molesters.

It’s hard to take these criticisms seriously when the people most likely to make them dismissed legitimate questions about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s pattern of leniency toward child sex criminals. Most Democrats spun questions about her record during her recent nomination hearings as an unfair attack on a historic nominee. Even prominent conservative commentators like Andrew McCarthy and David French took Senate Republicans to task for daring to ask a judge to explain her sentencing philosophy.

The left loves to police language. This is why they are trying to make the use of “groomer” a greater offense than the people and behaviors it describes. Thankfully, there is another way of thinking about how the ruling class forces conformity to unpopular and unnatural beliefs.

What we are seeing in changing norms around sexuality and gender identity is an attempt to “tenderize” a culture to get people to see tectonic shifts as the positive signs of cultural evolution.

Tenderizing meat refers to the use of a process or substance to break down connective tissue and make it easier to chew and, ultimately, digest. Each of the three major methods of tenderizing meat – pounding, braising, and marinating – has an analogous strategy in the cultural sphere.

Pounding a steak with a hammer or mallet uses the highest degree of force to soften tough muscle fibers. In the culture war, pounding is the use of law and policy to force people to comply with social change. A recent example is the Biden administration warning Alabama and other states that they may be violating federal civil rights law if they don’t allow doctors to treat gender-confused minors with hormones or genital mutilation.

Pounding is also what Jack Phillips has endured for years. Craven activists in Colorado have been trying to drive the Christian baker and his Masterpiece Cakeshop out of business using frivolous lawsuits because the owner refuses to use his creative gifts to bake cakes for same-sex weddings or transgender affirmation parties. His case was ultimately brought before the Supreme Court, which issued a 7-2 ruling stating the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated his right to freely exercise his religion.

Braising is a form of cooking that uses heat and moisture over an extended period of time to soften a tough cut of meat such as a pot roast. The introduction and normalization of using personal pronouns, including “they/them,” is what braising looks like in the culture war. So is the insistence that sex is assigned at birth by doctors. Slow-cooking ideas that are a tough sell for the average person requires constant reinforcement and correction over a long period of time.

Marinating is the tenderizing method most familiar to the average cook and the preferred cultural method for anyone trying to reach children. Disney executive producer Latoya Raveneau admitting she intentionally adds “queerness” to content and is advancing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” is the equivalent of using pineapple juice to marinate chicken breast.

Marinades smell good during the tenderizing process and impart flavor to the meal. This is why they are such a powerful tool for shaping the minds of the next generation. Nickelodeon used "Blue’s Clues" to introduce toddlers to non-binary fathers and trans mothers in a Pride Parade video. "Good Morning America" promoted an 11-year-old “drag kid” called “Desmond is Amazing” to millions of viewers in 2018.

The reactions to Florida’s parental rights law, inaccurately called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, simultaneously revealed the depths of tenderization children have been getting for years and the fact that parents are starting to wake up.

But it is important to know that adults are also being tenderized. Malik Yoba played Detective J.C. Williams on the '90s police drama "New York Undercover." His embodiment of black masculinity, especially as a father, was an effective counterbalance to the gangster rappers who promoted violence and degraded women with their lyrics.

Yoba was playing a different role when he appeared on "The Breakfast Club" in 2019 to discuss his LGBTQIA+ allyship with two trans activists and David Johns, the former executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under President Obama.

At one point Yoba referred to “naturally born” women. That was a big mistake on his part. What followed was the clearest example of re-education in real time I have ever seen. His fellow guests stopped him mid-sentence and made him repeat phrases like “assigned female at birth” and “for whom that is consistent with how they identify” in a cadence similar to someone learning a foreign language. At one point he noted the difficulty of remembering the wording. His guests reminded him that he chose to be an ally and told him to “do the work!”

Yoba’s journey from hero cop to activist parrot is what awaits all who allow themselves or their children to be tenderized. This is part of the reason my wife and I decided to homeschool our children in a manner that acknowledges God as the center of all knowledge. This model is the perfect antidote to an education system steeped in secular humanism and moral relativism. It also is in stark contrast to the students today who are being taught that the common meanings of well-defined terms are constantly changing, arguments are justified by feelings and experience rather than facts and evidence, and minds are changed by coercion rather than persuasion.

At the crux of our culture wars is the battle for truth. The attacks on the truth look exactly like what is recounted in Genesis. God creates and says His creation is good. Satan’s subversion starts by introducing doubt (“Did God actually say ...?"), moves on to denying the consequences for rejecting God’s truth, and culminates in convincing rebellious hearts that God wants humans to enjoy what He has already forbidden.

The first family was given the tree of life, attempted to gain the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and lost both. We are following the same catastrophic path. We think we know what will lead to a fulfilled life and have evolved in our knowledge of science, but we are being tenderized with ideas that only lead to death and destruction.