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At the same time the Andrews government is removing religious instruction from the school curriculum there can be no doubt it is pushing a radical cultural-left agenda about sexuality and gender on Victoria’s school children. This shouldn’t surprise, as Premier Andrews is a key member of the ALP’s Socialist-Left faction and one of the policies his party took to the 2014 election stated that an incoming Labor government would “improve the health and safety of same-sex-attracted and gender-questioning (SSAGQ) students by ensuring schools and health services effectively address homophobia, including content of sexuality education”.
While all accept that bullying and unfair discrimination are wrong, the reality is that what Premier Andrews supports is more about advocating a radical lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) lifestyle than making schools safer. As acknowledged by Roz Ward, the Marxist academic at La Trobe University who helped to establish the controversial program, the program is not about stopping bullying.
Ward admits, “Safe Schools Coalition is about supporting gender and sexual diversity, not about stopping bullying”. She goes on to say it’s about “sexual diversity, about same sex attraction, about being transgender, about being lesbian, gay, bisexual” (watch the video below).
When justifying the program Ward also argues, “Marxism offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinary new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today”.
The reality is that the cultural-left LGBTQI activists are determined to impose their radical gender and sexuality agenda on schools and innocent children. And the Safe Schools Coalition program is not the only resource being employed. A second program funded by the Victorian Government, titled Building Respectful Relationships, also pushes a radical, cultural-left view of sexuality and gender.
In both programs students are being indoctrinated with a neo-Marxist view of gender and sexuality that many parents would find unacceptable. LGBTI advocates tell young children that gender is fluid and limitless, that it’s OK if boys self-identify as girls and girls self-identify as boys, that parents don’t have to be told if their teenage children want to have a gender reassignment.
In this brave new world of Marxism and postmodern theory, calling children ‘he’ or ‘she’ is forbidden and activists believe that separate boys and girls toilets, school uniforms and changing rooms are unfair because, as argued by Ward, “everything is divided into these two limited gender items”.
Parents should also realise that while the Safe Schools program claims approximately 16% of students are LGBTQI, the facts prove otherwise. One of the largest surveys analysing sexuality and gender found that 97 per cent of Australian men and women identify as heterosexual.
A second survey discovered that only between .05% to 1.0% cent of couples identify as same sex. If it’s true that 16% of students are LGBTI then it is also true that, as they get older, heterosexuality is the norm.
Christopher Akehurst: Schools That Are Safe For What?
The Respectful Relationships progam, intended to “educate secondary school students about gender, violence and respectful relationships”, tells Year 8 students that “gender is not fixed and that as young people they can resist traditional notions of what it means to be a young man or woman in today’s society”. Gender is presented as a “social construction” and students are told “Gender roles are learnt. They are not innate or natural. In fact, almost everything that males can do, females can also do. And almost everything females can do, males can do”. As a result students are told they must use the gender-neutral description “partner” when discussing relationships, as descriptions like ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ exclude gay, lesbian and transgender partnerships.
The Building Respectful Relationships program presents “traditional notions of sexuality between boys and girls” as always negative, with boys and men portrayed as domineering and violent while girls and women are passive and at risk.
One of the criticisms of the Safe Schools Coalition program is that the material is not suitable for young children. Well, the same can be said about the Building Respectful Relationships program. Examples include Year 8 students reading personal ads like “Lustful, sexually generous funny (and sometimes shy) Tigerb1962 seeking sexy freak out with similarly intentioned women” and “Slim dark-skinned older guy (looks young and fit) seeks guy 25-40 who likes love and affection, kissing etc”.
Other examples include asking Year 10 students to “deconstruct the gendered nature of sexualisation and explicit sexual imagery” in pornography and discussing statements such as “All men have very large penises”, “Heterosexual sex almost always includes anal sex” and “Women orgasm easily from whatever men do to them”.
Parents can quite rightly ask: why is this radical sexuality and gender agenda being forced on schools? One reason is that cultural-left teacher unions, academics and professional associations have long argued that the school curriculum must advocate LGBTI lifestyles.
In a 1995 English teachers’ journal an academic argued against the traditional view of masculinity, as it supposedly imposed a “monolithic category within the field of psychoanalytic and gender theory”. The 2003 policy on LGBTI people endorsed by the Australian Education Union argues “homophobia and heterosexism” must be included in teacher training and that “homosexuality and bisexuality need to be normalized”.
Nor is Victoria alone. Across the border in South Australia, official guidelines have presented gender as a “societal construct” that enforces male domination and heterosexuality. Keep that emphasis on re-engineering human sexuality in mind the next time you read that Australian schools have slipped another notch or two in the international rankings for mathematics, science and language.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of Dumbing Down
“One of the criticisms of the Safe Schools Coalition program is that the material is not suitable for young children.” I cannot see that it is suitable for anybody or that we need government funded programmes to peddle this ideological rubbish. The claims to being marxist driven are unjustified: there is nothing that I can remember in Marx that justifies this reinventing of sexuality and I cannot see that any of the Marxist-driven régimes, no matter how appalling, that have been in place around the world have ever supported this kind of ideological fantasy.
As an aside, yesterday I looked at an interactive tool in the Sydney Morning Herald (there’s an admission for you!) and at the start you have to indicate whether your gender is male or female. What do the other 70 or so (the figure is growing every day and the “Safe Schools” programme will help it to do so) gender identifications do? Most thoughtless, from such a progressive publication.
I am extremely right wing, but I see absolutely NOTHING wrong with teaching children about LGBTI lifestyles. These lifestyles are real, they exist, they are part of the rich tapestry of human sexuality. Why do you care?
What does ‘right wing’ mean, let alone ‘extreme right wing’? I believe in free markets and freedom in general, and I resent my taxes being used in schools for teaching things other than the mainstream education items such as maths, science and English etc. All the civilisation changing/destroying ‘lifestyle’ matters DON’T belong in the class room, and most certainly not in taxpayer funded class rooms. If you wish to teach your children such things you should be free to do so, but I should not be forced to pay for your whims.
So now being gay is destroying civilisation? This is the sort of hubris I would expect from the extreme left. And being gay ISN’T a lifestyle; it’s simply how some people are born. I see nothing wrong with schools making students aware of the rich tapestry of sexuality. It is just as worthy a subject as English or mathematics.
And further, following the horrid attack in Florida last night, I would do my best to distance myself from the homophobic beliefs of Muslims as much as possible. If this means teaching children that being gay is okay, well I’m all for it. I’m for anything that Muslims hate.
I just read at the Foundation for Economic Education that the problem is the core teaching and assessment itself. As opposed to giving kids the tools of knowledge itself. Australian kids excel at chasing down problems until they succumb. Indeed – we are seeing the most astonishing, confident and beautiful generation ever. If their nascent philosophising is amusing – that of our own youth was dismal in retrospect.
But I want to that 97% of Australian men and woman identify as heterosexual. I think it’s bullshit. So I did a Kinsey Scale Test to see where I fitted in. The Kinsey Scale recognises 6 shades of grey – well it was 1948. I got an ‘F’. Go figure.
F – The test failed to match you to a Kinsey Type profile. Either you answered some questions wrong, or you are a very unusual person.
Truth to tell – there seems a much bigger problem in our young than kids floundering about trying to understand their nascent – obviously my word of the day – sexuality.
“A quarter of sexually active students reported ever having experienced unwanted sex. Young women (28%) were more likely than young men (20%) to have experienced sex when they did not want to, a gender difference that has remained stable across since 2002. There were no significant differences in rates of unwanted sex by year level. Most students reported having wanted to have sex at their last sexual encounter. Females (8%) were more likely than males (5%) to report that their last sexual encounter involved unwanted sex. There has been a substantial increase from 2008 to 2014 in the reasons behind unwanted sex. Students cited being too drunk (49% up from 17%) or pressure from their partner (53% up from 18%) as the most common reasons for having sex when they did not want to. Over a quarter of students (28%) reported being frightened as the reason for having unwanted sex. Gender differences in the reasons for unwanted sex were obvious with a larger proportion of males (22%) than females (9%) having unwanted sex because their friends thought they should and a larger proportion of females (34%) than males (15%) having unwanted sex because they were frightened. This highlights the importance of education on communication skills, peer pressure, consent and ethical behaviour in regards to sexual activity.” http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/…/sexheal…
We are talking about year 10, 11 or 12 kids – so most have had some experiences. Regardless of whether it is gay or straight – or somewhere in between.
“When responding about their most recent sexual encounter, the majority of sexually active students (55%) reported their most recent sexual encounter was with their current steady girlfriend or boyfriend. A smaller number of students (37%) stated that they had sex with someone that they have known for a while, up by 10% from the previous survey and 8% of students reported having had sex with someone that they had not met before. A larger number of males (12%) than females (5%) reported their most recent sexual encounter was with someone of the same sex. Of most significance is the steady incline for males having a same sex encounter at the most recent sexual experience up from 2% in 2002, to 8% in 2008, to 12% in 2014.” op,cit.
Where will it all end? Some 4% in a UK survey Identified as gay. Is that what we mean? It is not a strong argument.
“Taken as a whole, 72% of the British public place themselves at the completely heterosexual end of the scale, while 4% put themselves at the completely homosexual end and 19% say they are somewhere in between – classed as bisexual in varying degrees by Kinsey. Of the people that do place themselves in this 1-5 area, the majority incline away from homosexuality – 15% are closer to the heterosexual end, 2% directly in the middle and 2% are closer to the homosexual end.”
Some 49% of 18-24 year olds identified as being in the middle. Attitudes are changing and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that sexual identity is no big deal.
I would insist that there is still a far bigger problem of fear and coercion going on. And ending this doesn’t depend on slotting kids into any sexual identity at all.
Didn’t Stalin attempt to destroy families in an early purge – claiming gender roles to be counter revolutionary? (after the experiment led to chaos .. he re-established the family ? )… certainly the communists of all flavours have attempted to impose a ‘sameness’ couched in the terms of ‘equality’ of the sexes – in all their manifestations. If it is not Marxist dogma .. then it has had a mongrel birth through some other demented socialist mind …. If ‘Gender Theory’ or ‘Queer Theory’ are not sourced from Marx (and this rings true to me … I cannot imagine that such a misogynist alcoholic as Marx would have been at all interested in deconstructing gender) … then where does it come from? Who invented ‘Gender Theory” ???
Niall Ferguson, when asked this question in a recent SOH lecture, said that he thought all these courses in universities – where this stuff is disseminated – are under threat. He speaks from experience inside academe and said it was getting harder and harder for universities to get bums on seats for these kinds of courses now because the cost of degrees is just so high now. People need to earn a decent living to pay down their debts!!
So, in answer to your implied question; my theory is that this stuff was promulgated in Australia with the ‘free’ Whitlam university degrees up to the late 80s.
Ferguson seemed to think that political correctness, Queer studies and safe spaces would eventually eat themselves up. We can only hope.
I wonder whether this might be underestimating how much this stuff has infiltrated the University. You are not just taught Gender Studies when you do Gender Studies. Sociology, Economics and other faculties also promulgate this. It comes in as topics of “discussion”, in which only the politically correct version is expected to be spoken, when you study languages. I hope that you might be right but I have doubts about how easy it will be to rid ourselves of this nonsense.
It is important to bear in mind that debating these issues is no more useful than if someone were to go to ISIS or Taliban controlled territory and try to use debate and reason to sway those in charge of the education agenda there. No, the correct mindset is that our society is under attack in an all-out war waged by an undeterrable enemy. What needs to be applied is not debate but whatever weapons remain available in areas such as lawfare and brute force campaigns (e.g. the $20m campaign by Clubs Australia that beat the odds in derailing otherwise well-supported gambling reforms). The first step is a change in mindset.
A vote for the Australian Labor Party, their Greens or the LNP – Liberal National Party is a vote for mandatory penis tucking and unsafe schools while further dumbing down education.
You may be right, but what is your alternative?
Private schooling – or Catholic schooling – and activism in the Parents & Friends movement. If the parents won’t have a bar of this stuff in individual schools it won’t fly. End of story.
Perhaps, though I imagine that the activists will long since have colonised and captured the P&F movement like they control everything else, by sheer persistence beyond normal people’s power of resistance. Meetings with healthy and diverse quorums at the start will be filibustered and extended until the wee small hours when the controversial motions will be put and passed unanimously by the few activists that remain after the sane majority have long since gone home to feed their kids and get them to bed.