Here’s a fantastic essay from Gary Lucia, a gay Disney employee who says he’s sick of the lies surrounding the Florida law, which he supports. Excerpts:

The purposely misleading nickname“Don’t Say Gay” was a Trojan horse. It drew people in and got them all fired up because they thought the bill was attacking gay people. In a headline or quick soundbite, it seemingly told you all you needed to know. This was done intentionally—there has been an outcome of support and acceptance from the public at large since Gay Marriage was made legal, so those fighting the bill knew any attack on gay people would be met with outrage. The detractors of the bill used this to lure you in, but they wanted to hide the gender ideology part of the bill, which is what people should really be concerned about. The public was being played, and gay people were being used as pawns.

Any gay adult man who felt a kinship with that little boy dressed as Tinker Bell should be made aware of this: It is a very different world from the time you grew up—even from the world ten years ago. In today’s culture, that little boy would not be told it is OK to be gay; he would be led to believe he is ‘really a girl’. Across the nation and the world, gender non-conforming boys and girls are being pushed into believing they are trans. THIS is what is at the core of teaching ‘gender identity’, and it is a form of CONVERSION, just as contemptible as those religious groups that attempt to ‘pray the gay away’.

As a gay man and employee of Disney, I support the Parental Rights in Education Act and feel the need to go on record that I do NOT agree with the Disney ‘LGBTQ+’ leaders and groups that purport to speak on my behalf. I also feel the need at this time to make a statement that I do NOT consider myself a member of your ‘LGBTQ+ Community’ and I object to any assumption that I am included. I REJECT this ‘community’ and refuse to participate with or be subjected to any of its declarations.

Why?

He explains his reasoning, then talks about the big online Disney “community” meeting — the one leaked to Chris Rufo, with all the damning quotes from Disney executives about how they’ve been queering children’s programming for some time. More from Gary Lucia:

We were promised a conversation in which Disney would ‘get real’, but I watched the event and did not hear a lot of reality being discussed. I did not hear the biological reality of sex mentioned. I did not hear any acknowledgment of the social contagion currently happening in which there has been an astonishing increase in the number of teenage girls who are identifying as trans. I did not hear any acknowledgment of adolescents who are gender-nonconforming and identify as trans that eventually desist and go on to be gay and lesbian adults.

I did hear the word ‘queer’ thrown around a lot. I heard from an ESPN contributor about the support for Lia Thomas and trans athletes in women’s sports (which I do not agree with). I heard the bill being called ‘hateful and discriminatory legislation’. I do not believe this is true.

I didn’t hear any discussion about the impact of social media and how that is likely a contributing factor in the increase in kids identifying as non-binary, trans, queer, etc.

I didn’t hear any discussion about woke homophobia among today’s youth, in which ‘cis gay’ is used a slur and being a lesbian is not ‘cool’. If you have teenagers in your life, go ask them how many kids they know who identify as gay or lesbian compared to how many identify as trans, non-binary, queer, pansexual, or one of the multiple other ‘new’ and ‘unique’ choices.

I didn’t hear any honesty about what is meant when people say ‘LGBTQ kids are being denied gender affirming healthcare’. Here is what the phrase ‘gender affirming healthcare’ means: A child learns about the world of gender identity and decides she is really a boy. She tells her doctor/psychiatrist/therapist she is a boy. This is ‘affirmed’, no questions asked. No discussions, no talk therapy, just affirmation. She is treated like a boy, with a new name and new pronouns from then on. This can lead to breast binders and puberty-blocking drugs. All of this can happen at school with school administrators, keeping the parents completely in the dark. Which is why this bill is so important. I believe in protecting children and that begins with making sure their parents can be their protectors from this abuse. Detractors who have pounced on the idea that the bill will not protect kids from potentially abusive parents have missed the point—what this bill is attempting to do in Florida is protect kids from an already abusive ideology they are being exposed to in schools throughout the country. If your concern is parents who are abusive to their kids, there are already laws in place requiring teachers to respond to that. And it is the job of ALL OF US, not just teachers, to report any abuse we think is happening to kids from relatives, coworkers, and neighbors. (You know, ‘it takes a village’ and ‘see something, say something’?)

This guy is brave. Very brave. He’s taking a real risk. More:

In short, the Conversation did little to reassure me that the situation at Disney was going to get better. Rather, it ignited a fire in me to speak out because I could see it is going to get much much worse. It was made clear to me that Disney is planning to go even HARDER with gender ideology. And the more Disney pushes gender ideology, the more I am going to push back. I have been advised by people close to me to keep my mouth shut; just go along with it; it’s like this everywhere; this is the world we live in now. But I just can’t accept this. I feel really disgusted with what is happening.

One more word from Gary Lucia:

I’m writing this for anyone who feels like the world has gone crazy and they don’t know what is up and what is down anymore. You are not alone.

I’m writing this for my conservative coworkers at Disney, who feel silenced. While we have often disagreed on issues, on THIS issue of safeguarding children, I am in agreement with you. I want you to know YOU have allies in a lot of gay people, as not all of us have drunk the Gender Ideology Kool-Aid. Disney should be a place for EVERYONE to enjoy, and you should make your voices heard.

I’m writing this because I have been monitoring this for a few years and I see the writing on the wall, and the writing is getting bigger and more aggressive every day.

Read it all.  Thank you, Gary Lucia, for your courage. May you inspire much more of what you are showing in this essay.

Y’all, we have got to speak out. If you want to know why, read Lucia’s entire piece. This stuff is poison. This might be our last chance to do something meaningful about it. The same culture industry that manufactured consent to all kinds of woke priorities is working on this (again, Disney executives openly admitted, and even boasted, of how they’ve been trying to queer the minds of children). Most people are uncomfortable with gender ideology now, but a generation or two raised on woke Disney, and all of woke Disney’s allies in the Cathedral, will likely have been tamed, co-opted, and groomed.

If you don’t think so, explain why not, given what we have seen over the past decade?

Remember that cultural change doesn’t happen because the masses accept a new way of thinking. Cultural change happens because elites and elite networks come to agree on a new framework, and make accepting it the cost of admission into those same circles. If you wonder why so few Republican politicians have been willing to take a firm stand on this stuff, it’s because they too want to be part of those circles. You can be in favor of regressive economic policies, and nobody in the Cathedral cares. But if you are wrong on racial or sexual issues, you will never penetrate the Inner Ring.

You know what would stop Disney? Not a boycott, which won’t do anything. Going after its copyright exemption would. Disney’s lobbying of Congress protected its copyrights on characters that should by now have gone into the public domain. 
They’ve gone after our children; we should go after their copyright protection. There’s no reason Disney should have been given this by Congress, other than it paid a pretty penny in lobbying fees. Disney has proven itself hostile to the interests of American families. Mickey Mouse is a groomer. Make Disney pay, and thereby send a message to all Woke Capitalists that you cannot socially engineer children. Making Mickey Mouse pay for having his hands down the figurative pants of our children would be a successful rallying cry for populist politicians.

The Left is very, very good at playing hardball with corporations. The Right is terrible at it. Any wonder that Big Business sides with the Left time and time again?

If the Republican Party doesn’t mount a serious effort to attack Disney’s copyright protection, giving how the entertainment giant is abusing its unparalleled authority in an effort to corrupt the imaginations of American children, then what good is it? If we don’t want Woke Capitalists screwing with the minds and morals of our kids, then we have to hit them in the only place they’re vulnerable: their economic bottom line.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence, who, as Indiana governor, backed down in the face of Woke Capitalist threats in 2015, has released his “Freedom Agenda” ahead of announcing for president in 2024. Yawn. Tax cuts, strong defense, “spreading American values,” the usual. There’s almost nothing here that George W. Bush, circa 2000, would have disagreed with.

UPDATE: A great comment by a reader explains why I’m not going to back down on using the term “groomer” to describe these people:

I see some folks on this comment thread saying that calling this behavior “grooming” isn’t right, and that this isn’t an appropriate response to it.

I’m a Boy Scout leader. Every year I have to take Youth Protection Training. And it sucks. We hear stories from adults of how they were taken advantage of as kids. You hear gut-wrenching stuff. It’s awful. The case studies are cringe-inducing. We send the kids off to watch a video (Star Wars Rebels is great!) while we sit through the class.

One of the key points they make in that training is that one of the strategies that abusers use is to expose kids to sexuality at an age before they are emotionally ready to deal with it. And another is that they tell kids to hide abusive behavior from their parents. Offering access to pornography to underage children is another desensitization strategy.

Every one of these behaviors that our gracious host (rightfully) calls out in the trans ideology is characteristic of predators grooming children for abuse. And while the Disney and the school systems Rod points to may not be intending to do so, they are creating a culture and a system within which abuse will flourish because they are enabling them.