Op-Ed: Thanks to Disney's Perverse Agenda, Childhood Will Never Be the Same
Being a lifelong conservative, I’ve gotten used to losing my favorite things to leftism — TV shows, movie franchises, trusted brands, and even a few close friends.
But this time, it’s really personal. Disney has gone full woke, and my heart is broken.
The Disney name used to be synonymous with childhood innocence, but the company apparently no longer believes that ideal should even exist. Instead of keeping to the family values of its eponymous founder, the Walt Disney Company is indoctrinating children in a destructive ideology crafted specifically to tear at the fabric of society.
This fact is hard to deny in light of recent events that have placed Disney on the wrong side of the culture wars.
The company unapologetically opposed Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law meant to protect grade schoolers from being evangelized into gender confusion and sexual perversion.
Leaked video clips from internal meetings revealed that one executive producer boasted about sneaking her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” into children’s content. Another executive, 20th Century Fox’s general entertainment president Karey Burke, similarly bragged that the subsidiary she heads is “the home of really incredible, groundbreaking LGBTQIA stories.”
And Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, which once churned out a slew of sweet and sentimental gems, decided that “Lightyear,” an origin story for Buzz Lightyear of the “Toy Story” franchise, will now feature a same-sex kissing scene previously set to be cut.
Though Disney has been inching toward this agenda for some time, it seems the company has finally crossed the rainbow Rubicon.
In the name of the inclusion of the infinitesimal portion of the population who identify with one of the letters in the LGBT alphabet soup, Disney has forsaken its privileged place in the realm of wholesome entertainment.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if Disney were just another movie studio, streaming platform or amusement park. I’d take my lumps and simply transfer my business somewhere that hasn’t been poisoned by the left.
But it’s devastating this time because of what this company has meant to me and so many others like me.
My family didn’t have much money growing up, but every couple of years my parents would scrape together whatever they could to take us to Walt Disney World. Those trips to Central Florida were without a doubt the happiest days of my childhood.
Then, when my son was diagnosed with bone marrow failure at age 3 and granted a wish trip in 2017, we were delighted to spend a magical week in that same place making a lifetime’s worth of memories.
It was the only destination that guaranteed a respite from the darkness of battling a life-threatening disease — not just for my son, but for the whole family. And indeed, all the pieces of childhood innocence he and his two sisters lost during extended hospital stays, emergency room visits and missed holidays were recovered at the Magic Kingdom.
Countless families make the same pilgrimage with their sick children every year — sometimes for the very last time with those who will die — because it offers a break from the ugliness and heaviness of the real world.
There is no other place on the face of the earth that can do that, and now I fear there never will be again.
Disney has willingly turned itself into another battlefield in the culture wars, forcing parents to either cede moral territory or cut off another corner of an already shrinking world.
In its pursuit of a woke paradise of inclusion and unity, in its striving for a utopia built on the post-modern “ideals” of sexual confusion for all, Disney is dismantling something that was already quite close to perfection.
The stewards of Walt Disney’s dream have embraced their self-appointed role as the new evangelists of woke dogma and in the process alienated my family and the millions of others like it.
The deepest tragedy is not that they’re destroying a beloved brand, but that they’re robbing the world of a truly unique and special place — and childhood will never be the same.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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