Dr. Morse and Father Rob Jack discuss the disgusting “health recommendations” Teen Vogue gives to its audience of young teen and pre-teen girls. They discuss how we can fight back and enable faithful teens to avoid the heartbreak and negative health consequences of following Teen Vogue’s advice.
Please note that transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.
Transcript
Father Rob Jack: With us now is Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, and she heads the Ruth Institute, which is an interfaith, nonprofit organization helping defend the family and repair the damage of the sexual revolution. Her most recent book, which is really a primer on the whole issue, is called The Sexual State How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives. Dr. Morse, it’s great to have you back.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse: Thanks for having me. And I’m really glad to be back and join you. I understand my colleague did a pretty good job last week and.
Fr. Jack: It was very good about the demographic winner because this is, again, part of this whole issue of, as you said, the sexual revolution, trying to now depopulate the earth, which is really what they’re trying to do. And I don’t understand the reasoning behind that. But as you said, Don did a very good job of helping to explain these things.
But, you know, it’s like anything else. You go away from a week and everything kind of goes nuts. And not that they haven’t been less nuts lately, but it’s just always something. And the last time we were talking, we were talking about the fact of the the progressive movements trying to get rid of the fact that we’re using the word grooming when we talk about people being educated and the homosexual and the LGBT kind of stuff, we call that grooming because it is and of course they’re up in arms because somehow we are maligning this innocent group of people who just simply want to tell everybody what it’s all about.
Dr. Morse: Well, you know, the thing is, they they they’ve upped their ante, okay. So last time we talked, we were talking about the fact that some of the social media giants have been banning some of the conservative influencers and conservative groups for using the word groomer or they or they’re they’re sending the robots out to find the word groomer.
And, you know, either flagging those accounts or banning the posts or banning people altogether. Now, since we last talked, I’ve found an article published on Teen Vogue, which is kind of an open letter calling on all journalists to behave responsibly, by which they mean they want all journalists to do it their way, you know, and whenever they see the word groomer to to flag it somehow or, you know, do do whatever.
But but in any case, this is a it’s a long, longish article with a bunch of signatories at the end, most of whom are, you know, pro LGBT groups, explicitly pro LGBT groups. And they’re basically saying, we want, you journalists to be monitoring the use of the word groomer and we want you to interpret it the way we want you to interpret it.
And, you know, I’m in the process of writing something about this because I think, honestly, what they’re doing here, the sleight of hand that they’re doing here, the misuse of language here, is something that people on our side really need to be paying attention to and monitoring.
Fr. Jack: Well, I mean, it makes sense. They don’t know what a woman is and they don’t know what a recession is. And so now I have the article you mentioned right in front of me and says the way they wanted to describe grooming says grooming for the teen vogue crowd means something specific and serious. It’s a secretive process by which someone built false trust with a child they’re intending to abuse.
But then the very next thing it says, LGBTQ plus representation and acceptance is life saving for young people questioning their gender or orientation and age appropriate, comprehensive sexual health education both gives youth skills to recognize and disclose abuse, and it helps reduce the perpetration of sexual abuse. But by giving this information, it is grooming. I’m sorry. I mean, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, it’s a duck.
Dr. Morse: Well, what what they’re doing, if you look at the definition that they’re using, they’re saying, let me say it again. It’s a secretive process by which someone builds false trust with a child they’re intending to abuse. That’s true. That’s part of what grooming is. But grooming can also affect people around the child. And you and I have talked about this over at the institute.
We have interviewed numerous victims of sexual abuse who will tell you that the perpetrators groomed the entire community. And that is what is missing from this account here when the parents are upset about the contents of sex education, that’s the part they’re upset about. They’re upset about the fact that they’re creating an environment, an atmosphere where the parents are excluded from knowing what is going on.
That is always a red flag for grooming, as their father has been saying about it. Right. Right. So we, excluding the parents, were specifically, in some cases driving a wedge between the parents and the child. And so now the child is more vulnerable than they would be if they had contact with their parents. Right. So that’s one one big problem.
And the other problem is some of the things that are going on in sex ed now that people that parents are particularly concerned about are things that would never ordinarily enter the mind of a child unless somebody placed it there. So the idea that you could grow up to be the opposite sex of what you were born, that is not an idea that will come into the mind of a ten year old.
It might come into the mind of a six year old who thinks who is in the fantasy stage of his life. Right. When little kids believe in Santa Claus, they believe Superman’s really fine. You know, they believe they might be able to fly if they jump off, if they have a cape on and they jump out of a tree.
You know, small children have fantasies. Okay. And to tell the child that that stage of development, gee, it’s just as likely you could turn out to be a boy is to be a girl. And it’s up to you what you choose. That is not appropriate to be saying to a small child. It’s simply not. And you’re planting an idea in their mind that would not go into their mind otherwise.
And that is the sense in which this is grooming. Okay. And then to then cut the parents, deliberately cut the parents out of the whole discussion process. I mean, that just sounds like, you know, that that is that is grooming. And so the parents who are upset deserve to be heard. They deserve not to be dismissed in the way that this kind of article and this kind of rhetoric dismisses them.
Fr. Jack: It’s rather strange, you know, looking again at this article from Teen Vogue, it says The extremists who uses harmful rhetoric again of using grooming in its proper and complete sense are not keeping anyone safe. They do not support or speak for survivors. To the contrary, they’re muddying the waters of language, trivializing the suffering of survivors, gaslighting the public and making it increasingly impossible for children to name when they’re experiencing harm from abusers.
I mean, they’re describing themselves. They’re not describing us.
Dr. Morse: Isn’t it amazing? It is that we talk about projection, talk about projection. Right. I mean, so this father in Loudoun County who was upset that his daughter was raped in a bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt, who gaslit who in that situation you tell me who is gaslighting whom in that situation. Right. I mean, it’s just it’s it’s crazy.
And the thing that needs to be said here, in my opinion, is that the parents who are concerned about this, the parents are not saying and are not accusing the school board members of, quote, wanting to have sex with their child. Okay. So with this definition that they choose to use. Right.
Fr. Jack: Right.
Dr. Morse: Build building false trust with the trial they’re intending to abuse. The parents do not think the school board members are intending to have sex with their kids. That’s not what. That’s not the sense in which they’re using the term grooming. They’re using the term grooming in the sense of creating a social environment in which something that would ordinarily not be acceptable becomes acceptable. And therefore, it’s harder for the child to say, well, gosh, I didn’t really I didn’t think I was confused about my sexual identity.
I didn’t think I was confused, you know, but now I am. So I guess it’s okay that I’ve become I guess these things are okay now. That’s what’s going on here and that’s what the parents are upset about. And that needs to be taken seriously. So, yeah, I just that there is no understanding in this article, anywhere in this article that there can be and frequently is a social and communal aspect to grooming because as soon as they admit that, then all of sex education is called into question because we have to ask this question, is it really appropriate for strangers to be teaching children about human sexuality in an environment where their parents are not present, in an environment where they’re surrounded with other kids of their own age? Right?
But no one from their immediate family. Is that really appropriate? In my opinion, that has never been appropriate. It doesn’t matter what the content is. It’s right. This is sensitive, intrinsically value leading information. Okay. You cannot say this is neutral information or just science or anything like that that is that’s that’s once again, diversionary tactic to keep people away from looking at the fact that it is intrinsically value related to be talking like this. Right?
And so it raises the question, is this something we should be doing? And a lot of people don’t even want to think about that question. Right. But now parents are thinking about it. Now they’re asking, why have we allowed this to go on for so long? We certainly don’t want what is going on right now. We certainly don’t want that going on.
And they’re starting to rethink. Well, maybe we did what maybe we didn’t really need any of any of this. Maybe teaching fourth graders to put condoms on bananas. Maybe we really shouldn’t have turned a blind eye while that was going on, you know?
Fr. Jack: We’re speaking with Dr. Morse. Can you stay with us over the break and we’ll continue our discussion?
Dr. Morse: I’d be glad to, Father. We haven’t. We’re just getting started, you know?
Fr. Jack: Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is talking to us today about an article in Teen Vogue, which is trying to tell us that when we use the word grooming to refer to the societal attempt of certain groups to make children more acceptable of the LGBTQ+ culture that we’re somehow being extremists when in fact, that is far from being the case in our opinion.
Dr. Morse, thanks for staying with us.
Dr. Morse: I’m glad to do it, Father. There’s so much to talk about here. And you know, the people who are trying to resist the trans ideology in the schools, these are people who deserve our support. Okay. Because what is going on in the schools, including, sadly, some Catholic schools. You know, it’s really it’s it’s very scary and it’s very dangerous.
And the people the parents who are fighting this stuff, they deserve our support. That’s the thing that I just I just can’t say that enough.
Fr. Jack: Well, and the thing is, is now, because parents are actually taking ownership of their children’s education, they’re being seen as enemies themselves.
Dr. Morse: Yes. Yeah. Yes, that’s exactly right. Now, you know, one of the things that really upset me about this, this it’s kind of an open letter, you know, with about I don’t know, it looks like 20 or so different organizations signing on to this document that they published on Teen Vogue. One of the things that bothered me about this is that a few years ago, teen Vogue ran an article which at the time was considered appalling, and it was a classic example of cultural grooming.
Okay. It was an article about a and I don’t know if you remember this, and I’m not going to say it explicitly. I’m going to let the adults read between the lines to say what this was about. It’s about a certain sexual act that is favored by it tends to tends to be favored by gay men and tends not to be so interesting to women.
Okay. Shall we just leave it at that?
Fr. Jack: It’s good enough.
Dr. Morse: There may be kids in the car and people are driving along. Teen Vogue had an article. An article about this. What you need to know about this particular sexual act. Okay. It was a whole, you know, description of the act. And, you know, what you should do and how you should do it. And it’s really okay. And it is not your cup of tea, but it’s, you know, don’t worry about it. Here’s how you do it if you want to do it and so on and so forth.
People were appalled by that article and and I was and we commented on it at the time. It’s been about five years since it first appeared in what it was doing was normalizing a sexual practice which would not ordinarily occur to a teenage girl.
Okay. A teenage girl is not normally going to be thinking about that. It’s a thought that has to be placed in her mind. Okay. And a lot of girls are upset about this because because of the prevalence of pornography, their boyfriends are asking them to do this. And they don’t really want to do it. They don’t really want to do it.
Okay. So here comes Teen Vogue piling on, basically saying, oh, this is perfectly fine if you’re into it, here’s how to do it safely and so on and so forth. It was a kind of cultural grooming and people said so at the time, you know, this is not what we should be promoting to 13 year old girls, which is part of the audience.
I mean, I can’t tell exactly who the audience of Teen Vogue is, but, you know, they had an event recently called their summit and kids as young as 13 were allowed to come without their parents. Okay. So that’s part of their audience. How big a part? I don’t know. But, you know, a 13 year old girl doesn’t really need this information in order to be safe.
What she really needs to know is that it is absolutely okay for her to tell her boyfriend to buzz off no matter how much pornography he has consumed, you know, and how much he wants it. And that’s that’s not really what this article was about at all. Right. At all. So it’s particularly galling to me that this coalition of people would choose Teen Vogue to be the place where they come out with their anti-grooming rhetoric document whatever you want to call this manifesto of theirs, you know, because it’s just that that is exactly what this magazine did five years ago.
And they never back down. There were there was a lot of pushback about it. And, you know, they basically said, no, this is what we meant to say and this is what we mean and we’re proud of it and we’re going to stick with it. You know.
Fr. Jack: Doctor, that’s simply because their advertisers are going to support this whole agenda, because the advertisers know that’s where the money is. And so, you know, magazines are only stay in print if you have advertisers willing to pay for it. And as long as they got that willing to pay for it, they’re going to write whatever they want. And you we can try all we want to, you know, have boycotts and all those kind of things. They’re not going to listen to us. I mean, the only way to do this is really to begin to do what we’ve had in Cincinnati. A lady by the name of Anne Goodlatte has begun a new magazine called EmBody, which actually talks about the theology of the body. And and it’s both for men and for women, but the last issue had a predominantly female focus.
And so, you know, the only thing we have to learn to do, one of the things is we got to fight fire with fire by bringing out alternative journals and magazines that these we can then insert into the Catholic schools and give these young ladies simply the truth and the beauty of who they are. Because this thing I mean, Teen Vogue is very, very much anti it’s abusive of young girls.
It’s it’s taking away their inherent dignity and it’s telling them they have to be what men want them to be, which is just certainly contradictory to anything that a normal person would say.
Dr. Morse: Yeah. And, you know, they’re they’re justifying what they’re doing by saying that kids need information in order to protect themselves from abuse. And I just don’t see the proof of that. You know, I’m still waiting to see somebody really convincingly prove that. And the idea that it’s it’s okay as long as everybody consents. This is the this is the primary message of our sexual culture.
Well, we as Catholics know perfectly well that what McCarrick did to his seminarians did not involve consent in a meaningful way. You know, the whole need to movement. And we’ve got our little version of that, right? You know, there’s a Hollywood version of it and so on. But, you know, these are adults who who had things done to them that they didn’t really want and they didn’t really consent to.
And so we should be able to understand that consent is not enough. Consent is necessary, but it’s not sufficient because it’s not meaningful. It’s not always meaningful. And when you’re dealing with minors, there should be a presumption that consent is questionable. Right. Particularly if there’s any age difference between between the parties.
Fr. Jack: Dr. Burke, just a lot here. I want. We’re out of time. I’m sorry, Dr. Morse, but thank you for being with us today. And I look forward to seeing this article that’ll be coming out. I’m sure. I’m sure soon, probably in the National Catholic Register or wherever you’re going to put it. So thank you for being with us. If people want to find out more or or listen to your Dr. J show, where can they go?
Dr. Morse: Go to the Ruth Institute dot org. And that will introduce you to all of the Ruth Institute properties, all of our various media programs that we have.
Thank you very much for being with us.
You’re very welcome, Father.
About the Ruth Institute
The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
To get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.
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