Seattle’s left-wing activists may be surprised that Bible-believing parents don’t want their children indoctrinated with hypersexualized, biology-denying propaganda, but that doesn’t make their position “extreme,” “right-wing,” or “national,” as Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell (D) alleged. It’s right there in the name: “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” is “an irrefutable statement” because “nobody wants anybody to mess with their kids,” said Christian Rosas, a father of four who helped launch the movement back during the Obama administration.

“This is something that’s been going on for some time,” Travis Weber, vice president of Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, explained on “Washington Watch” of the “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” movement. “This goes back to an event in Peru in which the people of Peru pushed back against the infiltration of Peru by far-left radical ideologies, gender ideologies that are not consistent with God’s design for the family.”

Sudden Adoption of Pro-LGBT Laws

On January 6, 2017, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski published Legislative Decree No. 1323, which amended existing non-discrimination laws by adding the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity (known by the acronym SOGI). Unlike most civil rights laws in the U.S., these Peruvian laws carried criminal penalties, including years of jail time, even for relatively mild psychological offenses.

In Peru’s constitutional system, legislative decrees issued by the president (“decretos legislativos”) have equal weight to laws passed by Congress, although Congress must specifically delegate the president the authority to issue such decrees.

In this case, Kuczynski based his decree on Law No. 30506, in which the Congress of Peru had granted him broad latitude for 90 days to make decrees that would boost the economy and fight crime (an important suburb of Lima, Peru’s capital city, had been under martial law for nearly a year in response to drug- and gang-related crime). The Peruvian Congress published the law on October 9, 2016, which means Kuczynski’s SOGI decree came only a day or two before his mandate expired.

The Peruvian government approved other pro-LGBT measures around the same time, including a legislative decree authorizing gender transition procedures for trans-identifying inmates and pro-LGBT additions to the public school curriculum (which came in late 2016). Rosas recalled nine such measures, which had the combined effect of “introducing gender ideology without debate,” he said in an interview with The Washington Stand.

“At this moment, the clergy of the Catholic Church, the pastor — we were under attack, literally facing jail time,” said Dorcas Hernandez, Rosas’s sister, but “we did not have any knowledge of this.”

Lima Declaration

Yet, in God’s providence, their father, Julio Rosas, was a member of Congress, and he did detect the subtle changes to the law, which would have such sweeping effects. After 33 years as a pastor of the Christian Missionary Alliance (a small Presbyterian denomination best known for producing A.W. Tozer), the elder Rosas was recruited to run for Congress, where “he realized that his main hot points that he was going to defend [were] family and life and religious liberty,” said Christian.

Earlier in 2016, Congressman Rosas had led the opposition to efforts in Congress to recognize SOGI classifications in Peruvian law. He was then dismayed to see the president enact the very same language through Obama-esque means — using nothing more than his pen and phone.

The Rosas family then “summoned all of the church leaders we could: Pentecostal, charismatic, non-denominational, Baptist, even Roman Catholics from different orders — Opus Dei and others like Saint Augustine’s — and so forth to the Christian Missionary Alliance main temple.”

There, inside a Christian place of worship, this eclectic group of Christians launched a movement that would bring about the fall and rising of many in Peru. “We signed a declaration known as the Lima Declaration,” Rosas related, “a renewal of commitment of Christians as individuals to defend and raise their voices, to defend the following truths: sanctity of life, marriage, and religious liberty.”

This declaration, not to be confused with the international statement of concern over deteriorating conditions in Venezuela, was modeled on the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, in which an ecumenical group of Christian leaders pledged “that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence” on matters touching “the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion.”

“For the first time we’ve ever seen in the history of our nation of Peru,” Hernandez reminisced, “the priests, the Catholic Church, the evangelicals, the pastors … were able to come together to work together, not to get in a conflict of discussions of theology. … We were just taking a full stand on … being persecuted for speaking and preaching the truth” about human nature.

After this meeting, a trans-denominational alliance was born. The coalition decided on the slogan, “Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas” (literally, “With My Kids, Don’t You Meddle”), the Latin American forerunner to the slightly less emphatic (though smoother in English) slogan, “Don’t Mess with Our Kids.”

Don’t Mess with Our Kids – Peru

“The citizens and the believers of Peru took a stand quickly and faster than we could ever imagine,” said Hernandez. “We were able to gather 1.5 million people in the public square to tell the government at the time that we are not going to back down.” In 2017, Peru’s population was around 31 million, which means that nearly 5% of the nation’s population turned out to protest on March 4, 2017. For proportion, try to imagine any cause in America that could draw out 17 million protesters on a single day. This was “only by the power of God,” Hernandez confessed.

The most remarkable feature of “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” was its decentralization. “We never established an NGO or anything formal. So, we only had Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts” and “registered the trademark,” Rosas related. “We didn’t establish a bank account, so nothing economically was centralized.”

The group — more properly called a movement than an organization — was forced to adopt this expedience due to their lack of funds. The “headquarters” — such as there were — consisted of an office, a few computers, and a team that made social media memes, said Rosas. He personally supported the entire office “with the income I had on a secular job” as a gold mining consultant.

Yet this forced decentralization also worked to the group’s benefit; the government couldn’t pull any dirty tricks. Their lack of a bank account meant “there was no way they could either notify us or investigate us for money laundering or whatever,” said Rosas. Since “we didn’t establish a formal entity, they couldn’t send us notifications of any kind [such as subpoenas, or investigation notices] because we officially didn’t exist.”

What “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” did have was a true grassroots network, where a “very engaged community,” which willingly decided to “take time off [from] their jobs, [from] their busy agendas, to take a full day, to take a stand in front of Congress,” added Hernandez.

Rosas compared the movement’s tactics to guerrilla warfare. “If the Christians were really wanting to support and help,” he would tell them, “‘this is the colors, this is the banners, this is the date; you know what to do.’ So, we would give them the design. And each church on its own [would] print the billboards or the signs.” This did not prevent churches from cooperating together, with large denominations providing materials to smaller ones. But it did mean the movement would never have gained traction without the full participation of the churches.

Among the church leaders who opposed the LGBT agenda in Peru was Robert Prevost, Catholic Bishop of Chiclayo, who recently took the title and name Pope Leo XIV. In late 2016, he declared, “the promotion of gender ideology is already confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist, since God created men and women, and trying to confuse the ideas of nature will only harm families and individuals.” Hernandez said Prevost “was very active, taking a stand to the non-indoctrination of the gender ideology in the school and the public system.”

Changing Laws, Changing Officials

Pro-family forces in Peru were eventually able to overturn all nine laws, Rosas recorded. But “in order to do so, we had to oust the education minister, the prime minister, and we had to impeach the president himself.”

This remarkable series of victories was aided by the disorder and corruption plaguing Peruvian politics. A Wikipedia page titled, “Peruvian political crisis (2016-present)” runs on for 79 pages with 445 footnotes — and even that small book likely tells only a partial story.

On December 15, 2016, the Congress voted to impeach longtime Education Minister Jaime Saavedra, the man responsible for overhauling the nation’s education system, including the insertion of transgender ideology. While world media stood aghast (The Economist called Saavedra’s impeachment “a small act of national suicide”), 52% of Peruvians approved.

Saavedra was succeeded as education minister by Marilu Martens, who defended Saavedra’s new national curriculum, refusing to make changes to the content. After hauling in Martens for questioning, the Congressional majority decided on September 13, 2017 to bring a motion of censure against Martens. In response, Prime Minister Fernando Zavala, who chose the cabinet of ministers, demanded a vote of confidence in his government. After seven hours of debate, the Congress voted 77-22 to reject Zavala’s motion of confidence. Under Peru’s constitution, this vote of no confidence forced Zavala to resign and resulted in a whole new cabinet.

President Kuczynski hung on a bit longer. In 2017, he was implicated in a Biden-esque influence-peddling scheme with a Brazilian construction company. He survived an impeachment vote in December 2017 only because removing him from office required a massive two-thirds majority (the vote was 78-19 against him with 21 abstentions, but 87 votes were required). As Congress prepared a second impeachment vote in March 2018, Kuczynski’s supporters were caught on video trying to bribe lawmakers, and he resigned on March 21.

The removal of these officials — through related and unrelated means — enabled lawmakers more friendly to the “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” movement to overturn the pro-LGBT policies.

International Impact

“The magnitude of what took place is only by God’s miraculous hand,” Hernandez concluded. “He took an obedient heart, an obedient group of pastors and faith communities … and here we are. The years have passed. The grassroots movement overflows to other nations in Latin America and Europe.”

Several years ago, Rosas was approached by American pastors who read about the impact of his movement in a left-wing academic paper and were looking for tips on how to engage on gender issues. “Our strategy is upfront, blunt,” Rosas told them. “Preach the word. Fear not. Embrace the kingdom. Break the law purposely, politely, nonviolently, and be steadfast.” It almost sounds like Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

“They were really shocked and, I guess, inspired by the attitude of the movement,” Rosas recalled. “And they asked me if they could bring it to the United States.” Don’t Mess with Our Kids held its first major U.S. event at the Oregon Convention Center in July 2023, and “an LGBTQ activist that infiltrated our event at the Oregon Convention Center … became a Christian throughout the event,” said Rosas.

In October 2024, Don’t Mess with Our Kids held a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. that “drew 400,000 attendees in-person, with another million people who tuned in online,” he continued. At that point, Jenny Donnelley and Russ Johnston, the U.S. organizers of Don’t Mess with Our Kids, planned their Mayday tour, with rally stops planned in New York City, Miami, Houston, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

“We were not aware that [in] Seattle [we] were going to encounter this much opposition. But we did,” said Rosas. “So they didn’t back down. They actually raised their voice higher. And they actually went to another rally at the city council.”

“I could not believe how hard and difficult it was to see those scenes,” Hernandez reflected, “because I’ve seen it … you know, developing third world nations, but never in America.”

In response to the violent counter-protest encountered at their Seattle rally, Don’t Mess with Our Kids published a document titled the “Seattle Proclamation.” In it, the movement declared its “defense of family: the sacred and life-giving union of one man and one woman. This holy covenant is not a cultural construct but a divine design established from the beginning of time.”

“In every place we go,” it continued, “we carry the message of salvation not because we are better than others, but because we have experienced mercy and want others to encounter that same grace.”

Hernandez hoped this Peruvian movement, which has now come stateside, can “encourage others to go and be present in the school board meetings.” Even if parents don’t have any other resources for political involvement, “your presence alone in those meetings is very powerful, because we are giving a message to a school board … that we the people, the voters are watching their actions.”

“Parents and people of common sense around the country — even around the world — are saying we want to protect our kids” from transgender ideology, Weber summarized. “We don’t want these ideologies finding their way through public school systems … harming our kids, and interfering with our kids, and being promoted to our kids behind our backs.”