Groomers vs. Gamers: ‘Call of Duty’ Gets the Pride Month Treatment

Press “F” to pay respects — yet another franchise has fallen on the battlefield of Pride Month. Last year’s intense backlash against incessant Pride Month propaganda caused many corporations to tactically reconsider their allegiance to the LGBT agenda and scale back their noxious promotion of rainbow-themed everything. But others, despite having witnessed the financial carnage brought on by boycotts against Target and Bud Light, decided to step on the Pride landmine anyway. Now, the beloved “Call of Duty” video game franchise (published by Activision, in case you’re wondering who to boycott) has been felled by the rainbow brigade.

To celebrate Pride Month, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III” now features a free downloadable bundle allowing players to decorate their guns in Pride flag colors, transgender flag colors, and a whole host of other LGBT-themed colors. Perhaps most shocking of all is the inclusion of transgender flag-colored bullets. Given the rise in violent school shootings perpetrated by those who identify as transgender, featuring pink-white-and-blue machine gun rounds seems worse than insensitive: it’s callous.

Video games have, of course, featured LGBT content in the past, but the fall of “Call of Duty” is an especial blow as the franchise has been a staple for boys for over 20 years, a proving ground where young men could pit their skills against each other and make believe, at least for a little while, that they were soldiers. War is an inherently masculine activity and for centuries, boys have played at war. Whether it’s turning every single stick and branch found on a hike into a sword, pitting a legion of little green army men against a motley battalion of Lego cops and knights on the bedroom floor, declaring a Nerf war with the whole first floor of the house as a battlefield, or 360 no-scoping Nazi zombies on a screen, boys begin training for war at a young age — it’s practically inevitable.

More than just inevitable, though, it is noble. Men are inherently designed by God to provide and protect and have an innate desire to risk their lives in defense of something worth risking their lives for. This is why films like “Braveheart” and “Saving Private Ryan” are so successful and so impactful: they depict a man risking or even sacrificing his life in war for the sake of something worth dying for. A common internet meme denotes this same theme: men only have two fantasies — one is raising a family and maybe owning a farm, while the other is loading a rifle and holding off the enemy in a final stand, giving others a chance to escape and survive.

The ultimate example of this, of course, is in the person of Christ. As powerful as it is when Mel Gibson’s William Wallace cries out, “Freedom!” on the executioner’s block, as moving as it is when Tom Hanks’s Captain Miller whispers, “Earn this” with his dying breath, these are but echoes of Christ’s all-encompassing sacrifice on the Cross. J.R.R. Tolkien, himself a World War I veteran and the author of the mythological war novel “The Lord of the Rings,” encouraged his sons to look to Christ crucified for inspiration. “There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth,” he wrote.

The masculine desire to fight for something worth fighting for and die for something worth dying for — and, indeed, the desire to triumph in the face of insurmountable odds — is itself a yearning to be like Christ. This fact also is evinced in the games that boys play. In an effort to increase its share of the girls’ toys market, the Lego Company conducted a series of studies several years ago, examining the differences between how boys play and how girls play. In one experiment, groups of boys were asked to build a castle, and separate groups of girls were asked to do likewise. Upon completing their castles, the boys immediately began staging a war, explaining that they saw the castle as a mere “backdrop” to their combat. The girls, meanwhile, began examining the castle and finding ways to improve it. To boys, combat was the heart of the endeavor.

Another experiment found that when boys play with a toy — a Batman action figure, for instance — they try to become more like that toy; they learn all that they can about Batman, they try to imitate his voice, they try to be him. The experiment found that girls, on the other hand, try to make their toys more like themselves. None of this, of course, is to disparage the way that girls play — the way that girls play is beautifully and wonderfully suited to their God-given feminine identity. The point is simply to emphasize the unique way in which boys play.

When boys play at war or combat — whether with wooden swords and trash-bin-lid-shields in the backyard or with high-tech automatic rifles on a screen — they are doing more than just relaxing or “having fun,” they are training themselves, modeling themselves, shaping themselves into something else. With the invasion of the venomous LGBT agenda into boys’ games, it is less and less likely that boys will grow into men modeled after Christ crucified. No, they may now be riddled with transgender bullets and grow into some grotesque caricature of men — modeled after the groomers who took over their games.