We live through an intense culture war. The aim of 1 side is to overwhelm our Christian civilisation, upon which a lot of our human flourishing depends. The determination of the opposite is to defend it. The chosen battlefield by the progressives has turn out to be sex, and particularly the sexualization of our kids.
The strategy behind this slow, careful technique to corrupt our kids will likely be to appeal to our pity and compassion for people supposedly marginalized by their erotic preferences.
This worked thoroughly for some time. But as all observers of ideological movements from the Left will know, the method begins with a plea for inclusion, after which turns rapidly into an exercise of power, enforcing compulsion.
Which is where we are actually with LGBTQ+ ‘rights’. Those who don’t subscribe to them currently face a serious range of sanctions from social excommunication to unemployment and de-banking. Who is being bullied now?
One of the few organisations and philosophies to withstand that is the Catholic Church. So it’s no surprise that each time a Catholic diocese or school has the effrontery to decide on to show and preserve its own values in a way that’s consistent with the religion, the stormtroopers of DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion) – or as it will be higher to seek advice from it, DIE – take to the streets to intimidate them back into line.
And this is precisely what has just happened in Nottingham.
Bishop Patrick McKinney recently broke ranks with more quiescent episcopal colleagues, and directed his board of education to supply clear guidance that Catholic schools were under no compulsion to inflict the celebration of ‘Pride month’ on their children. The guidance even discouraged the self-identification of youngsters affected by gender dysphoria. It disallows children who want to alter their gender from insisting on their preferred pronouns in almost every instance, insists they wear uniforms consistent with their biology, and refuses them access to the opposite sex’s changing rooms, showers and toilets.
As you may expect, the National Educational Union immediately ordered a picket and an illustration outside the diocesan offices.
Hoping that nobody would notice the entire reversal of power relations, they offered a loud public lament – a type of velvet glove designed to cover the iron fist.
David Pike, their regional officer, claimed, “This guidance has banned Pride, massively restricted the role of LGBT student groups and reduced the support teachers may give to essentially the most vulnerable. I went to a really religious school as a baby and was bullied for being gay – my teachers did nothing about it.”
Any bullying is to be called out and lamented, but Mr Pike’s personal history, sad because it is, doesn’t help us in our must formulate a policy for helping children negotiate the complexities of sexuality during adolescence.
The people who find themselves most vulnerable today are in truth parents who resist the sexualisation of their children by the hands of a state promoting a propaganda that sets out to reveal children even before adolescence, and inflict an unquestioning obedience to a worldview of relativism and hedonism.
Anyone following social media will know that ‘coming out’ as gay not courts victimhood but has turn out to be a badge of social honour. Anyone claiming the status of ‘trans’ today attracts immediate affirming attention.
Councillor Cheryl Bernard, Nottingham City Council’s cabinet member for kids, young people and education, warned she would write a letter to the diocese to demand a change. It’s value considering her arguments, equivalent to they’re.
“Nottingham is attempting to be a child-friendly city that listens to what children want and makes sure that LGBT+ children are recognised, in addition to being included as equals,” she said.
But it is just not ‘child-friendly’ to withdraw the moral teaching of familial faith and the culture our civilisation has been built on. It’s not child-friendly to go away children in a vacuum of ethical principles that promotes sex as a recreation without consequences. It’s not child-friendly to show to the abortion of conceived children within the womb. It is in truth harmful to children.
In what other areas of life can we simply ‘take heed to what children want’ and do it without query? Adults, parents and teachers must play a job in protecting children from themselves, where their appetites, judgement and experience present a danger to their very own wellbeing. The abandonment of guidance, guidelines, moral teaching and limits constitutes a type of reprehensible abandonment of adult responsibility.
And in fact, the stance is wholly hypocritical. If a Christian child preferred to keep up Christian morality and Christian ethics, the Left-wing teaching occupation would abandon this pretense of neutrality in favour of ‘what children want’ and suddenly turn out to be aggressively absolutist in pursuit of their demands for conformity to their ethical preferences.
The plea to treat LGBTQ+ children as equals is one other example of pleading victimhood where it doesn’t exist. Apart from anything, Catholic teaching couldn’t be clearer that each one human beings are made within the image of God and all categorisations of preference are to be wholly resisted.
Ms Bernard protested, “This a regressive step that has been kept away from any consultation in any respect.”
Postponing the query of what constitutes progress and decadence and who decides it, this shows profound disrespect for Catholic culture and identity. No one is forced to decide on a Catholic education for his or her children. The Church doesn’t must ‘seek the advice of’ atheist teachers about its values. But it represents a way of shock that a Catholic bishop decided to defend Christian ethics and the kids entrusted to the care of the Catholic educational vision.
Ms Bernard continued, “The pope himself is less hardline than what the bishop has said on this guidance. This leaves children with no person to seek advice from if they can not seek advice from their parents, as teachers are frightened they may be sacked in the event that they say anything. Children’s mental health and wellbeing is at an all-time low after the Covid pandemic and this is just not going to assist LGBT+ children in any respect.”
Leaving aside for a moment the anomaly and difficulties that Pope Francis’ public (in Catholic ecclesiology ‘fallible’) pronouncements have caused, and what constitutes ‘hardline’ reasonably than faithful, the threat that children haven’t any one to seek advice from “if they can not seek advice from their parents” and that “teachers are frightened they may get sacked in the event that they say anything” is wholly misleading.
Not celebrating ‘Pride’, whose marches are celebrations of unrestrained adult rampant sexuality, is unlikely to cause a sudden and devastating repression with nobody to seek advice from. Instead it would provide children with a bit extra space than they may otherwise have had, freer of the propaganda of hedonism and aggressively suggestive sexual anarchy. If they selected to reveal themselves to Pride, they’d accomplish that because their parents support it and that will be their business. But it is just not the business of the state or of left-leaning unions to overturn Catholic ethics, virtue and vision to implement their very own decadence.
At the guts of this conflict lies two wholly different assessments of how our culture manages and pertains to sex. The progressives relegate it to recreation and assume that practising sexual intimacy has no consequences for either children or adults. Catholics, particularly with their ethical stance on contraception, see sexual intimacy as flourishing best inside the everlasting context of marriage between a person and a lady, with having children together featuring centrally.
One preference results in decadence, and the opposite results in stable, flourishing family unions. Each of us ought to be free to decide on which we prefer for ourselves, our schools and our kids, without being bullied.
