Let's play devil's advocate for a moment — not to weaken the case, but to make it iron-clad.
Begin by granting the strongest version of the opposing case. Many people who experience same-sex attraction report that it is not chosen, that it may emerge early in life, and that it ought not be met with hostility or coercion. Within Christian thought, one can acknowledge this while still maintaining traditional moral teaching: every person bears the image of God and is owed dignity, whatever their struggles or inclinations. Let that be conceded at the outset.
Even so, a separate question remains, and it does not disappear once those concessions are made. What, exactly, is being affirmed when infants are associated with the symbols and language of adult sexual identity?
At the level of basic developmental facts, the answer is not ambiguous. Infants do not possess a developed concept of identity in any meaningful sense, let alone categories such as sexual orientation or ideological affiliation. Early childhood is characterised by dependency, sensory engagement, and the gradual formation of self-awareness. The capacity for abstract identity — social, moral, or sexual — emerges much later, typically across late childhood and adolescence. Even accounts from adults who identify as same-sex attracted place the earliest awareness of attraction well beyond infancy.
That gap matters. When symbols tied to adult identity categories are applied to infants, the meaning of those symbols cannot be located in the child. It resides entirely with the adult who selects them. Whatever is being expressed, it is not the child's self-understanding. It is an adult statement, made using the child as its medium.
That alone should give pause. It does not require hostility or moral panic to recognise a simple asymmetry: one party is capable of assigning meaning; the other is not. The practice is therefore not an affirmation of identity, but a projection of it.
Defenders might respond that parents routinely make expressive choices on behalf of their children. That is true. Parents choose clothing, environments, and forms of upbringing that reflect their values. But there is a difference, one that is too often blurred, between general cultural formation and the assignment of specific identity markers that presuppose capacities the child does not yet possess. To collapse that distinction is to treat all forms of expression as interchangeable when they are not.
The question, then, is not whether adults may express their values. It is whether it is appropriate to attach to infants symbolic markers drawn from domains, such as sexual identity, that are developmentally and conceptually inaccessible to them. Once framed in those terms, the practice is difficult to justify on its own stated grounds. If orientation is something that emerges over time, there is no developmental urgency to symbolise it in infancy. The gesture anticipates a stage of life that has not yet arrived.
From a Christian perspective, the concern becomes more pointed. Childhood has long been understood as a distinct and protected phase of life, not merely a preliminary version of adulthood. Scripture treats the care of children with seriousness, emphasising both formation and protection (Matthew 18:6; Proverbs 22:6; Ephesians 6:4). The underlying assumption is that there is a proper order to development, and that part of responsible parenting is not collapsing that order prematurely.
To introduce into infancy the symbolic language of adult identity debates — whatever one's position on those debates — is to blur a boundary that has traditionally been regarded as meaningful. It is to import categories into a stage of life where they have no internal anchor. That move may be culturally encouraged, and it may be socially rewarded, but neither fact resolves the question of whether it is appropriate.
There is also a wider cultural dynamic that should not be ignored. In contemporary society, visible alignment with particular values or causes often functions as a form of social signalling. Corporations respond to this by producing and marketing goods that allow such alignment to be displayed. Parents, in turn, participate in this expressive economy. None of this requires assuming bad faith. It is simply how modern consumer culture operates. But recognising the mechanism clarifies what is happening: the child becomes a vehicle for adult expression within a broader system of social signalling.
That clarification sharpens the issue rather than softening it. If the practice is not about the child's identity, but about adult expression, then the justification must rest on the permissibility of using early childhood as a canvas for that expression. That is a much narrower claim, and one that is open to reasonable challenge.
The central point is not complex. Infants do not yet inhabit the identity categories being symbolically applied to them. To acknowledge this is not to deny anyone's dignity, nor to contest the reality of their experiences. It is to recognise a basic fact about development and to ask whether adult frameworks are being introduced at an appropriate stage.
A society that takes childhood seriously will be cautious about such introductions. It will recognise that there is value in allowing early life to unfold without the imposition of categories that belong, if anywhere, to later stages of reflection and self-understanding. That caution need not be hostile. It need not be ideological. It is, at bottom, a recognition that not every meaningful concept in adult life is meaningful at every stage of life.
Grant every premise one wishes about orientation, dignity, and respect. The conclusion still follows. The application of adult identity symbols to infants does not express the child's reality. It expresses the adult's. And that, at the very least, is a practice that deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives.