If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people “gender-affirming care,” don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood — about God and man, men and women, adults and children — and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this: Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too. They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions. They want the poison apple, without the worm.

J Budziszewski