Dumb, Sodomy and the Cash

The founder and coordinator of the Safe Schools Coalition Australia (SSCA) is an avowed Marxist who lives in a fantasy world where communism supports free love and LGBTI lifestyles. The ascension of Roz Ward (left) to the position of sexuality commissar for Australian schools is therefore an unforgivable indictment of federal and state governments. Her rise to power reflects very poorly on both Christopher Pyne and Simon Birmingham — two Liberal Party progressivists — under whose stewardship as federal ministers of education this destructive ideological juggernaut was smuggled into the national school curriculum.

Indeed, it appears that Australia is entering into a Brave New LGBTI World dominated by orifice politics, courtesy of a federal Coalition government so desperate to suck up to the progressivist elites that it is happy to sacrifice the physical and mental health of a generation of young Australians.

Ward is at the core of a coalition of organizations seeking to radically subvert the most intimate areas of social and personal relationships in the name of Marxism and LGBTI ideology. With funding since 2010 from the Victorian government, Ward set up the Safe Schools Coalition Victoria, which was a joint initiative of the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) and Gay & Lesbian Health Victoria. This became the basis of the SSCA. It has since received $8 million in federal funding and is now convened by the FYA, which boasts of 93 supporter organizations and 515 member schools; it claims also to have trained 15,102 staff and have access to 403,392 school students. Under its auspices SSCA now has branches in every state and territory, and its campaign is to be rolled out to all schools in the country, aimed at 12- and 13-year-old children. Its services are to be delivered by diverse sexual-health, family-planning, and AIDS organizations. In Victoria it is delivered by Gay & Lesbian Health Victoria at La Trobe University, where Ward is based.

Despite her power and influence, Ward’s academic qualifications are very basic. She doesn’t possess a doctorate or any qualifications in medicine, but holds only a BA (Hons), and an MA in Gender Studies from the University of Sussex in the UK. According to its website this MA focusses on the contribution of feminist theory to analysing sexual identity and the social construction of gender; gender as an embodied social relation and experience; and the political aspects of gender and feminist research. It appears to offer little or no training in conventional medicine, psychology or psychiatry, preferring the study of such subjects as Feminism and Film; Queering Popular Culture; The Cinematic Body; Race Critical Theory; and Embodiment and Institutionalisation of Violence.

This academic concentration on feminist theory and cultural studies, rather than on medicine and psychology, was reflected in the construction of the Safe Schools campaign, which quite avoided consultation with child psychiatrists and paediatricians, and other professionals who possess expert medical knowledge of sexuality and gender-identity issues.

In Australia, Ward became a member of the far-left Socialist Alternative organization, giving full expression to her Marxist-LGBTI ideology in her address last March to the 2015 Marxism Conference in Melbourne (her full sermon can be heard here). As several commentators have observed,  this speech puts the Safe Schools program into its ideological context as part of a far-left strategy to initiate a sexual revolution within Australian schools. It is therefore, “extraordinary that politicians have not examined the ideological context of the SSCA program”, given the immense sensitivity of the issues at stake.

In her address on “The Role of the Left in the Struggle for LGBTI Rights”, Ward followed the standard Marxist line in blaming all social and personal problems on capitalist exploitation, arguing that capitalism promotes a ‘myth’ that there is a biological basis for gender identification and imposes arbitrary cultural and moral constraints on sexuality that inhibit sexual freedom. It does this, she says, to facilitate the exploitation of the working class (with which Ward absurdly identifies):

To smooth the operation of capitalism the ruling class has benefited, and continues to benefit, from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Consequently, she claims in paranoiac fashion:

LBGTI oppression and heteronormativity are woven into the fabric of capitalism [and] push to fit people into gender constructs that promote heterosexuality … Alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia both serve to break the spirits of ordinary people, to consume our thoughts, to make us accept the status quo …

According to Ward, capitalism makes us “keep living or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families”. There, she complains, “we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in those units” – a diabolical presumption apparently.

By way of relief, Ward insists,

Marxism offers the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today.

To support this claim Ward cites sexual policies introduced in the Soviet Union after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. These included the use of gender neutral language and the abolition of any fixed age of consent, amongst many other anti-family measures designed to achieve a collectivist utopia.

It is at this point that Ward’s argument and the entire Marxist-LGBTI ideology plunges into fantasy and absurdity. In fact, as the historical record shows, the utopian plans of the Russian communists that Ward so admires brought only tragedy and disaster. It all began with Lenin, as Orlando Figes describes in A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (1996). Frustrated by his inability to create a communist paradise, Lenin had called upon I. P. Pavlov, the infamous scientific expert on programming animal behaviour, and demanded that he extend his methods to the entire human population:

“I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking … There was too much individualism [and] communism does not tolerate individualistic tendencies. They are harmful. They interfere with our plans. We must abolish individualism”, Lenin declared.

“So”, asked Pavlov, “you want me to standardize the population of Russia? Make them all behave the same way?”

“Exactly!” replied Lenin. “Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be”.

Consequently, as Geoffrey Hosking explains in A History of the Soviet Union (1985):

“In the 1920s the regime tried to weaken the family as a ‘bourgeois institution’ [by passing new laws according to which] any stable cohabitation … could be considered a family … Abortion was available on demand [and] a partner to a marriage could obtain a divorce simply by requesting it”.

The result was an astronomical increase in the number of broken homes and abortions (in 1934 in Moscow there were only 57,000 live births compared to 154,000 abortions), while large numbers of women died from botched procedures. Meanwhile, the number of orphans skyrocketed, and they roamed the streets, starving, dying of disease, and forming criminal gangs that attacked people and stormed apartment blocks.

Very quickly, this anti-family policy combined with the demographic catastrophes of the Great Terror and Great Famine to decimate the workforce and cripple Soviet society, forcing a policy reversal that leaves present-day Marxist-LGBTI fantasists high and dry. Suddenly, Soviet propaganda broadcasts declared that:

The state cannot exist without the family. Marriage has a positive value … So-called ‘free love’ is a bourgeois invention … Moreover, marriage receives its full value for the state only if there is progeny, and the consorts experience the highest happiness of parenthood.

The institution of marriage was once more promoted, divorce was made very difficult, abortions were prohibited, and there was no tolerance for LGBTI issues. Indeed, in the schools, the revolutionary cultural obsessions were dumped from the curriculum and the focus returned to teaching skills. School uniforms were reintroduced and pigtails made compulsory for girls. Indeed, right throughout Soviet society there was a return to traditional values and educational topics and methods, as the regime realized that it could not survive if society disintegrated under the impact of dysfunctional Marxist theories.

Nevertheless, vast numbers of single mothers and fatherless children were produced, and this situation was greatly exacerbated when the Great Patriotic war with Germany wiped out much of an entire generation of young men. Women were particularly oppressed as they struggled as single mothers while also working full-time and living in often pitiful accommodation. Ultimately, Soviet society never fully recovered (and hasn’t to this day) from what became a major demographic deficit caused by the communist policies presently advocated by the principle architect of the Safe Schools campaign. All of this happened because the Russian people became the tragic victims of the “engineers of the human soul”, as Stalin approvingly called the fanatical progressivist ideologues who imposed insane Marxist policies on the Soviet population.

Now Australia has its own Marxist-LGBTI engineers of the soul, like Ward and her comrades. Fanatically committed to promoting the sexual interests, values, and behaviours of a tiny minority, such apparatchiks look forward to nothing less that the transformation of society into an LGBTI playground populated by the children of heterosexual folk who choose to marry in the traditional fashion and procreate. In this brave new LGBTI world our new progressivist masters can reign supreme and run amok, promoted and generously funded by state largesse, and protected by draconian laws promulgated, to its eternal shame, by a Liberal government.