While so many of us here in America are rightly lamenting the devastating emotional effect this repulsive regime is having on girls and young women, we’ve only been getting half the story.
In the unrelenting storm of Conservative’s legislative assaults on body autonomy, their withholding of the unredacted Epstein files, and their coronation of a court-adjudicated rapist to the highest seat of power in the nation, we’ve forgotten something critical: our sons have been watching and listening, too.
They are being irreparably altered in real-time by the men they are being raised by, look up to, and taught to revere.
My heart breaks open when I think about the kind of young men being created right now, the collateral damage of these days on the boys in the Right’s collective care.
I grieve deeply when I consider what so many of MAGA America’s sons are likely to grow into:
men with a dangerous sense of entitlement when it comes to the bodies and wishes and wills of the women around them,who believe they will get rewarded for their sexism and moral filth, because they’ve watched it happen for their entire lives.men who are physically incapable of apologizing and morally allergic to accountability.men who believe that money, power, and their penises give them license to do whatever they want.men for whom violent, hateful, objectifying words about women are considered normal, even admirable.men who are violently threatened by any expression of manhood that falls outside of the tiny, rigid sensibilities they feel secure within.men who inherit a religion that tells them that women should defer to them, yield to them, and blindly obey them.men for whom the very idea of consent is irrelevant.men who grow to have no value for gentleness, sensitivity, and empathy.men who think a weak, needy, fragile narcissist like Donald Trump is a man worth emulating.
Just before the 2016 election, I remember my then 11-year-old son coming home and asking me what Donald Trump had said about women in the audio that had been unearthed and was being talked about at school. I did the best I could to relay it all without using the actual words, because to use the actual words Trump used would have meant subjecting my son to the kind of vile vulgarity that isn’t normal and shouldn’t be normal for 11-year-old boys—or to men of integrity of any age.
The fact that a man with such a vast and sickening resume of depravity soon became the political messiah for so many professed Christians, and remains a decade later, securely seated on the throne of their unwavering devotion, should prompt effusive repentance within faithful followers of Jesus, and be cause for national mourning among every decent American.
We should all be collectively sick to our stomachs right now, watching an entire political party dismantling the rights and devaluing the worth of women and realizing how poisonous this all is to the hearts and minds of the boys who will emulate these assaults in the trenches of their private and professional lives.
There is a terrible trickle-down inhumanity flowing from the white House, the Supreme Court, the halls of Congress, and the pulpits of megachurches, and into the homes and hallways where young boys are having their brains rewired, their morality renovated, and their roads redirected.
I have better dreams for our sons than this.
I want them to know that girls and women, that all people, are worthy of respect and decency.I want them to know that dehumanizing a woman is never normal: not in a locker room or a campus party or a board room or a bedroom or a court room.I want them to know that another woman’s body is not their jurisdiction.I want them to know that a woman’s outward no is louder than their internal yes.I want them to know that there is a huge difference between being male and being a man, in being a gentle man.
I believe all our sons deserve better than this fragile, fraudulent MAGA masculinity that will surely keep them in the same suspended state of undeveloped humanity their fathers are permanently trapped in.
They deserve a higher definition of what it means to be a man than the ratified sexism and legislated subjugation of the Republican platform.
They deserve a morality that isn’t as pliable as their Evangelical parents, politicians, and pastors have made theirs in order to accommodate the moral cancer of their profane, perverted, spray-tanned savior.
As a young father, I dreamed that my son would become a man who recognizes women as valuable, equal, and worthy of respect. To my great joy, he has. But I want that for every boy and young man who calls this place home.
Because of that, I’m going to do everything in my power to shout down all the voices that dehumanize and devalue women, even if those voices come from the men sanctifying sexism in the pulpits of their churches, berating women in beligerant press conference rants, or sitting at the kitchen table talking over the women across from them.
At this point, opposing a movement of misogyny and aggression shouldn’t be seen as an act of tribalism, but this is where we are.
There shouldn’t be an alternative side to raising men of character and compassion, but sadly, tens of millions of Conservative men have chosen it.
Right now, millions of bright and beautiful boys with big hearts and bigger questions are watching and listening. In these moments, they are asking the kind of men they should become.
The MAGA movement and its surrogates are failing them.
The rest of us must not.
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