The New American Inquisition: Opinion piece in the style of Christopher Hitchens:

The New American Inquisition: Opinion piece in the style of Christopher Hitchens: 

In these darkened days of resurgent puritanism and anti-intellectualism, I cannot help but detect the fetid stench of tyranny in the air. Under the righteous guise of "protecting children," forces of repression and superstition are marshaling to extinguish the light of free inquiry and stamp out dissent. 

Make no mistake, this is an inquisition. Though its leaders lack the honesty to don Dominican robes and employ the rack and thumbscrew, their aims are no less malign. Like Tomas de Torquemada, they seek to enforce an orthodoxy through coercion and fear. Any who challenge their rigid dogmas will be smeared as heretics and subjected to figurative (for now) pyres. 

The foot soldiers of this crusade are groups with names like "Mothers for Liberty" and "Alliance for Freedom," benign-sounding fronts for a hateful authoritarian agenda. Their leaders talk piously of "values" and "decency," even as they work feverishly to dismantle secular education, banish books, and inject religious myth and bigotry into schools. 

Of course, their primary targets are the usual bogeymen - LGBTQ people, racial minorities, freethinkers. In their eyes, simply acknowledging the existence of such groups, let alone respecting their basic human dignity, constitutes "grooming" and "child abuse." To them, a transgender teacher reading a book about tolerance is akin to Satan himself indoctrinating children into perversion. 

So they crusade against diversity and inclusion programs. They press schools to remove literature with "controversial" themes. They harass and threaten educators who decline to propagate their noxious beliefs. They whip parents and politicians into frenzies with lurid tales of "gender confusion" and "child grooming." Some even engage in literal book burning, gleefully incinerating tomes deemed insufficiently pious.

It goes without saying that actual grooming and abuse, abhorrent as they are, provide convenient pretexts for this moral panic. The credulous confuse rare incidents with epidemic threats. Demagogues seize on isolated outrages to tar entire communities with spurious associations. Thus, LGBTQ rights become "pedophilia." Discussions of racism morph into "white guilt indoctrination." Acknowledgement of systemic injustices becomes "Critical Race Theory." 

Of course, no campaign of dehumanization would be complete without invoking existential threats. So these culture warriors, like McCarthyites of old, portray their enemies as not just deviant or misguided, but positively satanic - literal agents of Hell bent on corruption and ruin. At school board meetings and right-wing rallies, exorcisms targeting imagined demons are common. Signs decrying "Satan's grip on public schools" abound. To disagree with their aims is not just wrong, but diabolical.

This is dangerous profanity masquerading as piety. Yet cowed politicians bow before it. Spineless school boards cede to book-banning demands. Across the land, curricula are being cleansed of any reference to America's ugliest sins - racism, sexism, genocide of natives. Today's youth must be shielded from the harsh truths of history, lest they develop empathy for the oppressed.

But today's censors are not content with mere erasure. Having expunged the inconvenient past, they now seek to impose their sanitized history and social vision by fiat. "Patriotic" curricula mandating nationalistic indoctrination are ascendant. Growing calls demand public funds be diverted from secular schools to sectarian religious academies via voucher programs. And the previously unthinkable idea of breaking down the wall between church and state gains mainstream traction.

These developments should alarm any friend of freedom, just as they hearten authoritarians. For the goal of this crusade is not to broaden minds or liberate children to think for themselves, but precisely the opposite - to circumscribe inquiry, enforce conformity, and infect young minds with the mind-closing dogmas of the old. 

Were these zealots content to indoctrinate their own offspring in their creeds, it would be their prerogative in a free society. But they will not rest until your children are denied exposure to any ideas they deem forbidden. They will not stop until schools teach only the sanitized history, literature and science they find compatible with bronze-age myths. They will not relent until they've infused the educational system with sectarian superstitions and erected (figurative) crosses in every classroom. 

I reject the notion that exposing young citizens to the full rainbow of human diversity amounts to "grooming." I deny that teaching accurate history and promoting tolerance makes one a "Satanist." I refuse to cede the mantle of "decency" to book-burning bigots. I repudiate the perverse inversion of values that holds enlightening children to be "indoctrination," while filling their heads with religious dogma is not. 

This reactionary crusade, waged by modern-day Torquemadas against the forces of pluralism and reason, must be opposed at every turn. Compromise with tyranny never ends well for free thought. Secularists and progressives must find the courage of their convictions. Educators must be willing to lose their careers rather than submit to these oppressive orthodoxies. Politicians must reject the easy path of appeasement. Parents must stand against indoctrination - whether by church or state. 

Should the forces of repression prevail, dark days lie ahead. Trust in faith over fact, enforced cultural uniformity, mass censorship, diversion of education funds to religious coffers - all will be the order of the day. Like Inquisitors of centuries past, these new crusaders will tolerate no dissent as they march society backward into ignorance and unfreedom. 

But their victory is not foreordained. Ours is still a society where many value liberty over tyrannical security, free minds over dogmatic ones, empirical truth over inflexible creeds. But preserving these principles requires vigilance. It demands that people of conscience speak out against incipient theocracy. It means supporting those targeted for their identities or ideas by modern puritans. 

In the final analysis, the torch of reason remains our best antidote to corrosive orthodoxies. Evidence, not zealotry, should guide public policy. No single sect can be permitted to hijack the educational system to serve its parochial agenda. Children should be taught how to think, not what to think. Facts must trump folklore. Truth must prevail over superstition. Real grooms belong in prisons, not schools. 

This is the vital perspective defenders of an open society must bring to these culture wars, lest darkness descend. Fanaticism is always present in man's affairs. Its victory requires only good people failing to halt its advance. But its final triumph is not inevitable. With vigilance and courage, free thought may yet carry the day. We have only to kindle the flame within ourselves - and pass it forward.