Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar / Not in entire forgetfulness / And not in utter nakedness / But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

— William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”

When I first read this poem in 11th grade, I was profoundly touched by the imagery it evoked.

I was already pro-life at that point, but it seemed as if Wordsworth were telling me that life is a continuum that circulates between the heavens and this Earth.

This column is not about abortion. But it is about children, and what they mean to us in a society that pretends to care about their needs but really only cares about our own.

Years ago, I wrote about the controversy involving the Boy Scouts in Philadelphia, and the city’s attempt to evict them from a building they had built and occupied for almost a century.

The reason for the threatened eviction was a Boy Scout policy not to allow openly gay scouts or scoutmasters into the organization. There actually wasn’t a policy, it was simply understood that sexuality should not be an issue when trying to teach 8-year-old boys how to tie square knots and win merit badges.

As it turns out, the Scouts sued, and won in federal court, because it became a First Amendment issue and the city was trampling on the Boy Scouts’ right to freely assemble and associate.

Sadly, the crusade to exploit children continued. In fact, it’s become more vicious and more toxic almost 20 years later.

There is the push for Drag Queen Story Hour, which is nothing more than an attempt to normalize what we used to call “transvestism” and would now fall under the large umbrella of “gender fluidity.”

I’ve also written about libraries that warmly invite men in spangles and spandex to come and read fairy tales — pun not intended but unavoidable — to toddlers.

In defense of the program, progressive activists and the mommies who date them say that it’s all about fantasy. They don’t talk about sex and it’s a lovely opportunity for children to hear classic stories told to them by wonderful actors.

When you reply: “Why do those actors have to be impersonating Dolly Parton,” they don’t have an answer, other than to call you a bigot.

If wanting to keep children suspended in wonder and the purity of childhood amounts to bigotry, then sign me up.

But I’d even concede that although it is troubling to expose kids to drag queens who make questionable fashion choices — because, after all, they’re drag queens — it is far worse to exploit them in advertisements that depict sadomasochism as a legitimate form of interpersonal communication.

Balenciaga recently ran an ad campaign with photos of kindergarten-aged children positioned front and center in scenes that would make a porn star blush. There were images of bondage, of brutality, of blood and sexual perversion, mixed in with wide-eyed innocence and teddy bears.

It is sick, and it is vile, and it is an outgrowth of society’s refusal to recognize that evil and immorality exist.

The moral relativism of “tolerance” has bled into the idea that what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms is no one else’s business.

Guess what? When that consensual activity becomes part of a societal transcript for what is cool and acceptable, it is our business.

That’s because it helps coarsen discourse, which inevitably blunts our ability to recognize perversity, makes us unwilling to be called bigots and prudes, and threatens our children.

There is nothing more despicable than adults who care more about their credibility with the woke than the welfare of their children.

This is why the whole gender fluidity movement has achieved respectability. Like the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” there are some people who are afraid to point out the obvious: there are two biological sexes, and two genders and all the rest is psychological confusion.

The studies and the so-called clinical research into how a girl can actually be born in the body of a boy is nice cover for a social crusade to blur the lines and give us complete autonomy over our identity.

While I find it bizarre and toxic, adults are free to do what they want, and I am free to give those adults the widest berth.

But they have no right to use children in their diabolical attempts to erase reality.

Children are not property.

We are the custodians of their glory, guardians of their welfare, and bystanders to their wonder.

Our only obligation is not to destroy, with our own narcissism, that miracle.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com