Politics & Power Quote by Maggie Gallagher

Gallagher’s line is a moral gut-punch dressed as cultural common sense: it recruits “Black America” as both witness and authority, then uses that authority to indict “the sexual agendas of adults.” The phrasing is doing two moves at once. First, it elevates Black communities into the role of expert on social fallout, implying hard-won knowledge earned through history rather than theory. Second, it narrows that history into a single causal story about adults’ sexual behavior and children’s suffering, a framing that conveniently sidesteps economics, housing policy, incarceration, and the broader machinery that has actually structured family life in the U.S.

The subtext is less about listening to Black Americans than about deploying them. “Knows better than anyone else” functions as a rhetorical shield: disagreeing can be cast as denying Black experience. The quote borrows the credibility of racial injustice to lend force to what is, at base, a critique of adult sexual freedom (often read, in Gallagher’s broader oeuvre, as a defense of traditional marriage norms). “Sexual agendas” is deliberately vague and politically loaded; it turns complex debates - about divorce, abortion, LGBTQ rights, sex education - into the language of plotting and self-interest. Adults are no longer people making contested choices; they’re agenda-havers. Children become the uncontestable moral currency.

Context matters: this kind of argument thrives in culture-war moments when “think of the children” becomes a universal solvent for nuance. The line works because it sounds empathetic and protective while quietly rerouting public responsibility away from institutions and toward private morality.