I was on my way to a conference in London.

Called ‘What Are They Teaching The Children?’, it was an education conference based upon the book of the same name published in 2016 by Wilberforce and VfJUK.

As my coach pulled into Victoria, I had just finished Professor Glynn Harrison’s riveting article ‘We Need A Better Story’ in the April issue of en. His exploration of soft power, and its ‘ability to get what you want through attraction’, which is ‘the secret of the sexual revolution’ was especially insightful. The revolution offered ‘flourishing and fairness’, authenticity, freedom and life. Sounds great!

Echoes

Harrison’s approach echoes my own personal concerns and approaches. My seminar for parents, ‘Sex-proofing your kids’, incorporates biblical and psychological truth on the goodness of sex: Talking Point #1: Sex is Fab! Also included are Simone Weil’s important insights on the differences between ‘boring’ imaginary good and the delights of ‘real good’, and of course her classic, ‘All sins are attempts to fill voids’.

Echoes of Christopher West’s excellent work on the Theology of the Body also came to mind while reading Harrison. Both emphasise the life-affirming message of God’s design for human sexuality. So far so good.

Cognitive dissonance

Because of a late coach, I arrived during Baroness Cox’s presentation at the conference. She was recounting personal experience in the 1970s of coercion, threats and violence, and I thought she must have been set on by the wrong crowd while lecturing in some banana republic university. But no, silly me, it was only the then Polytechnic of North London. As Head of Department of Sociology, Cox found 75% of her staff were either far left or Communist Party members.

As Cox’s chapter, ‘Holding the Line’ in What Are They Teaching The Children? (WATTTC?) explains, horrific incidents of a criminal nature were ignored by those in authority. Their passivity, resignation and retreat, even collusion, ensured institutional takeover.

But what about now?

Cox’s Polytechnic is now the London Metropolitan University. Though we were not told, given the state of higher education in general, things are probably grim. Conservatives in academia and the professions appear reluctant to challenge the dogmas of the sexual revolution.

The rare breeds who will engage tend to be hung out to dry, while those who actually agree with the brave ones (privately) absent themselves from the fray and engage elsewhere. And where are the voices of those whose job it is to protect everyone’s views?

Glyn Harrison’s ‘wrath of the twitter mob’ (Better Story) is a relatively trivial form of a tragic reality.

Parents speak

During the conference, I heard various accounts of the takeover of the education profession by sexual revolutionaries (in fact if not in name) who, like Baroness Cox’s crowd, give no quarter.

Perhaps the worst case I heard was of a girls’ secondary school (for 12s+) in London with a strong LGBT ethos. Girls were groomed by lesbian staff to explore their sexuality. Gay was ‘best’, and sympathetic adults and the local sexual health clinic could advise. And it was working, if the numbers of butch haircuts and demeanours were anything to go by.

The nadir for this mum and her 13-year-old daughter came in a citizenship (!) class. The latter was near someone who had mastered the sex lesson rather well. ‘Show and Tell’ inspired ‘Go and Do’, and she started masturbating in class. The teacher said nothing. This episode upset the daughter so much that the mum protested.

This incident led to the mother being reported to the social services and harrowing trials of various sorts. A Christian former magistrate (and one of a handful willing to help) simply said at the bitter end she was fortunate her daughter had not been taken into care.

Types of response

A recurrent theme of the day was how children are marinated in all things LGBT from nursery while the local church ducks and remains distant. Too busy with new building programmes, Alpha, Christianity Explored (or whatever), churches sit this one out. Indeed, ignored parental concerns are not untypical of what I hear elsewhere.

Because of the human propensity to shoot the messenger and insist upon extenuating circumstances which excuse the System, another response is dismissal. As I have just come across two other and independent accounts of such doings, I listen.

Lucky you

If the school your child attends is still run by those with some common sense and humanity, lucky you. But increasingly that is not the case, and when older, wiser heads retire, you may well have to deal with younger, ‘progressives’ who view you as a nasty Neanderthal and who pity your poor sexually-repressed child.

Several hundred schools all around the country had signed on to Stonewall’s Champion School programme at last count (a couple of years ago) and since then various other LGBT programmes have been launched. Many other schools just do their own thing: the rainbows (from bracelets to banners) remain the same. WATTTC? has more examples.

More recent news

Princeton has just announced that high-flying US evangelical Tim Keller will not receive the prestigious Kuyper Prize after all. Though Keller had shunned the culture wars and cultivated a wide and positive remit (the urban poor; apologetics; the right ‘tone’), he is still deemed unfit, as his allegedly toxic views hurt LGBT people and women. In fact, he holds to a traditional Christian sex ethic and has complementarian theology. Kuyper himself would not now be eligible to receive his Prize.

After the terror attack in Westminster, Jayne Ozanne, lesbian leader of gay ‘evangelical’ Anglicans, wrote: ‘So let me be crystal clear – any teaching that undermines the intrinsic equal worth of LGBTI people is homophobic. Any theology that teaches that LGBTI couples in committed same-sex relationships are immoral is homophobic. Any practice that bars LGBTI Christians from serving in their church is homophobic.’ ViaMedia.News, 23 March 2017

Given how Ozanne’s views are spreading like wildfire among even the devout, what is the writing on the wall?

Leaders appear to do little while the CofE institutionally endorses LGBTI rights – ‘radical inclusion’ – bit by bit, talking point by talking point, diocese by diocese. The similarities to the Episcopalian Church in the US increase by the day. Anglican Mainstream keeps track of the latest: http://anglican-mainstream.org/new-direction-responses/

Totalitarianism

We do need to tell a better story with a winsome positive vision, but, given all we are up against, we need to do far far more. Sexual revolution is one of the fronts of cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School, with its ‘long march through the institutions’. We are living through a social, cultural and political revolution of the first order, and yet what is the response?

Recently Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali warned of the spread of a pernicious totalitarianism, and I have to agree. Sociologist Gabriele Kuby is one of the best here. See her Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

The LGBT lobby is coming for our kids. Is that okay? If not, please can we find a better story for them, which includes tackling the pernicious Born Gay, Once Gay Always Gay myths? Mike Davidson of CORE Issues Trust helps increasing numbers out of homosexuality. His film Voices of the Silenced will be premiered later this year. Many view their homosexuality as a curse and blight they would do anything to change. What of them?

And if our kids are heading into gay sexual relationships, don’t we need to know what is in store? ‘Committed’ does not mean exclusive. Mass Resistance’s excellent The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What the Medical and Psychological Research Reveals (2017), is eye-opening. Our kids deserve so much better than this.

If our ‘better story’ needs to be a story of fairness, freedom and flourishing – and it does – we also need to hold up a mirror in society to ways that the use of ‘hard’ power in support of ‘progressive’ values imposes unfairness, lack of freedom and restrictions on flourishing upon many.