The latest addition to “intersectionality” is “adultism,” defined as the “[s]ystemic/interpersonal exclusion of youth from decisions that impact their lives.” You see where this is coming from, right? Transgender activists want children to be able to decide to sexually mutilate themselves without parental or government interference, once they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by their teachers, peers and the news media into believing that changing genders like socks makes one happy, healthy and wise.
I had somehow missed the latest toxic substance the mad Left had begun leaking into the culture. It’s exhausting keeping up with this stuff; it is like an existential game of Whack-A- Mole that never ends. The longer society gives allows these calculated corruptions to sink in and pollute minds, the more damage they do, and the harder they are to beat back.
University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) professor Josefina Bañales told a panel last month that “adultism” “excludes youth from the opportunity to speak about their own racialized experiences, their own ways that they’re navigating the world” because psychology was developed by “white adults.” Picking up on the concept, Professor Julie Maslowsky, who works in the School of Public Health at UIC, recently made the assertion that abortions are essential because, without one, a woman is left with an “economic hardship and insecurity which lasts for years.” This came during in a presentation on “Reproductive Justice.”
Displaying news headlines regarding laws that restrict abortion access and “gender-affirming care” for adolescents, the public health expert described them as “threat[s] to the bodily autonomy of young people.” Maslowsky referred to the problam as “adultism,” or the “prejudice and accompanying systematic discrimination against young people.”
I disregard the opinions of “experts” who show themselves to be devoid of any functioning ethics alarms or legitimate ethical analysis methodology. Her statement literally means that taking a human life to avoid future economic hardship is a necessary societal norm. Embracing the new attacks on “adultism” Maslowsky argues that children should be allowed to make life and death decisions that they have neither the cognitive skills nor the experience to make competently.
Her presentation came as part of UIC’s “Epidemics of Injustice” lecture series. Academic freedom properly holds that even irresponsible, outrageous and despicable theories and ideas can be advocated and discussed in an educational setting. Taking the position, as it is tempting to do, that some ideas are so culturally insidious that the extreme ones have to be suppressed as a matter of societal survival opens the door wide to the kind of ideology-based censorship and suppression of dissent we are seeing at our universities. Yet the “adultism” insanity also greases a slippery slope to societal Hell as well as to cynical power-motivated political schemes, like lowering the voting age to 16…or 10.
And while Bañales and Maslowsky are allowed to make their deadly arguments in front of respectful young audiences unaware that their brains are being reprogrammed, those who would point out these professors’ fallacies are likely to be shouted down.
As adults, we should be able to devise an ethical way to address this problem.
So far, I can’t.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m sure these professors and experts also argue that prosecuting anyone under, oh, say, thirty-five is unacceptable because young peoples’ brains aren’t sufficiently developed to make decisions regarding right and wrong. And of course, right and wrong are white supremacist concepts. These are the same people to whom Travon Martin and Michael were just children (My Baby!) when they were murdered. So, children should be able to make all decisions but should not be held accountable for anything. Good plan.
I think we’ve seen this coming for a while. I saw signs of it years ago in, of all places, kids’ shows on Nickelodeon. Many of them – nearly all of them I listened to with the grandkids – characterized parents as either non-existent or as existent but be-clowned with witless buffoonery. I say “listened” because that is exactly what I did. To watch the shows was to get engaged in all the spectacle, the constant camera-angle changes, and the ads for My Little Pony that numbed the mind to the dialogue.
Ah, but to listen – to listen with back turned in the kitchen – that was a revelation. The scripts generally had the following:
1. Kids talking down to their parents, being disrespectful of their parents, and generally disobeying them.
2. Parents completely absent from the set.
3. Parents present on set and completely helpless to properly raise, discipline, or assist in any meaningful way the rearing of the kids.
4. Parents totally oblivious to their childrens’ problems and generally unable to help except to do the wrong things for the sake of the laugh track spinning off-stage.
I can’t tell you how many times we either told our grandkids to change the channel, or explained to them that real-life parenting doesn’t work like TV…and parents (in many instances) aren’t imbeciles.
So it should be no huge surprise that now, having been told over and over that parents are at best the lumbering butt of jokes, the idea is to make them a hinderance to a child’s development. “Adultism”…it’s an ism and generally all isms are evil. We’re are very close to seeing parents called “evil”.
Chris Marschner brought up the point a while back and I’ve never forgotten it: if children can make decisions about their sexuality, then pedophilia is nothing more than a decision made by a child to express his/her sexuality preferences with an adult. It’s sickening and it’s disgusting, but Chris is right: that’s precisely where this leads.
Children don’t have the ability to think long-term and to understand consequences, so they have no business making these decisions.
I would contend that Ms. Josefina’s and Ms. Maslowsky’s ideas aren’t belched from the depths of “The Great Stupid”. Rather, they are vomited from a much hotter pit.
I agree. They are tossing ideas about children into a pot of water and slowly heating it up so that no one notices what they’re actually advocating. By the time this type of thing is normalized, it’s too late.
I rewatched “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” a while ago. Still hilarious but for the first time I was struck by how uniformly hideously all the parents (and adults) were portrayed in the movie. Which I found kind of annoying given they were my contemporaries.
The figurative construction of the sacrificial altars to and statues of Moloch has already begun, and the literal versions cannot be far behind.
Wouldn’t an adultist be someone with an irrational hatred of adults? Their terms don’t even make any grammatical or semantic sense at this point. It would make more sense if the word was childist.
Children are stupid. They don’t know anything yet. If you let them they would eat ice cream and candy for 3 meals a day, never go to school, play in the middle of the street and jump off roofs with plastic grocery bag parachutes. They are not qualified to make any serious decisions.
My only take away from this is that the left has run out of adults stupid enough to brainwash and are looking for new demographics to use in their quest to destroy the world. If the leftist radicals have reached peak dumbass saturation there might be some hope for the world yet.
Comment of the Day, NP. Thanks for that little burst of insight and humor. I wonder though whether there are any free-range kids these days to do the things we would have done given the opportunity as you describe. I think current kids would just play video games on their phones until they died from malnutrition?
The crazies are winning this fight. Two years ago, when I was looking at middle schools for my son, every single one touted its commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “anti-racism” and “the principles of Black Lives Matter.” For many of the schools, that was the first issue that they discussed at parent meetings.
This year, I’m looking at high schools. They’re all still talking about race, but now most of them have added a discussion of their commitment to “helping students explore their gender identity and gender expression.” And parents are going along with it. At one school’s parent orientation, every single school official and parent who spoke used the phrases, “male-identifying student” and “female-identifying student,” instead of “boy” and “girl.”
These are schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so I assume the rest of the country is not quite so crazy yet, but I fear it’s headed that way quickly.