Carys Moseley comments on how we can learn lessons from the health risks of sexual practices during coronavirus and apply them to our teaching of RSE.
Schools across the UK are going online due to the coronavirus crisis, whilst children of healthcare and emergency workers continue to be educated in school buildings. As the new RSE curriculum is being rolled out early in ‘early adopter schools’ in England, now is the time to monitor its content and impact. For the reality of the matter is that basing the new sexual morality on consent will not work. Rather it will further erode society just as it has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic and is being forced to practice social distancing, which really entails ending promiscuity.
‘Human rights’ and the new RSE
Long-standing gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell promotes himself as a human rights campaigner and has gained a great deal of influence through being constantly quoted in the press and through his charitable foundation. He is one of the most influential campaigners for the new RSE, and in this respect, deals with all heterosexual behaviour as well.
In May 2019, the Peter Tatchell Foundation sent a letter to Damian Hinds, then Education Secretary, calling for revision of Sex Education in schools. This was co-signed by four other activists including actor Stephen Fry and Ellie Barnes, CEO of LGBT charity Educate and Celebrate, which aims to ‘smash heteronormativity’ in schools. On 21 February this year Tatchell gave a talk in London outlining his recommendations for the new Relationships and Sex Education in schools in the UK. This talk was almost identical to the 2019 letter, except that it included more dangerous material, such as recommending that pupils aged 16 and over should be taught about practices most people find distasteful (see below).
Below is an analysis of his recommendations for RSE in primary and secondary schools, also showing how it stacks up against the current public health advice on preventing the spread of the Coronavirus across the UK. Let’s go through them. Bear in mind that Tatchell does not simply campaign for LGBT indoctrination but for normalising heterosexual promiscuity as well.
RSE for four-year olds
Tatchell wants RSE lessons from the age of four onwards, and on a monthly basis until children leave school. Clearly he believes there is an awful lot of new material that needs to be covered each month.
If he is sincere about what he says that sexual behaviour should only occur between those over the age of consent (16), then why start RSE from the age of four?
Making consent the highest moral value
As with most advocates of the new RSE, Tatchell elevates consent as a moral value above all others when developing sexual ‘morality’:
“A positive ethical framework for sex can be summed up in three very simple principles: mutual consent, reciprocal respect and shared fulfilment.”
Here is the reason he gives:
“The great advantage of these three principles is that they apply universally, regardless of whether people are married or single, monogamous or promiscuous or hetero, bisexual, homo, lesbian, trans or intersex.”
In other words, promiscuity is absolutely fine. No, it isn’t – and especially not in the age of Coronavirus. Note also that Tatchell never opposes prostitution, which is argued by its supporters to be based on consent on both sides.
Sexual Rights Are Human Rights
Tatchell says:
“RSE should be based on, and espouse, the principle that it is a fundamental human right to love an adult person of any gender, to engage in any mutually consensual, harmless sexual act with them and to share a happy, healthy sex life. These are the sexual human rights of every person.”
Such immoral advice, based on the idea of a ‘right’ to sexual fulfilment, can only be made possible if sexual behaviour is considered compulsory, which effectively entails normalising prostitution and treating it as normal work, which of course it isn’t.
Such advice looks grossly irresponsible in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is not enough for the likes of Tatchell to praise Pride parades across Europe for not going ahead. The problem is the root mentality of ‘sexual rights’, the sense of sheer entitlement to sex. This is why we are seeing a surge in online porn now that people are isolating themselves at home.
He then goes on to say:
“Providing behaviour is consensual, between adults, where no one is harmed and the enjoyment is reciprocal, schools should adopt a non-judgemental ‘live and let live’ attitude”.
Here’s a question such a shallow and promiscuous approach can’t handle. What about incest between consenting adults?
Undermining heteronormativity
Like all RSE zealots Tatchell wants all sexual orientations to be treated equally.
“While schools should not promote any particular sexual orientation, they should encourage understanding and acceptance of heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual and pansexual orientations – and transgender and intersex identities. This is vital to ensure self-acceptance by pupils with such orientations or identities and to help combat prejudice, discrimination, bullying and hate crime.”
By treating all ‘orientations’ equally what happens is that young people become estranged from their bodies’ God-given form and design. This can result in serious psychological, medical and behavioural problems.
Homosexuality and Coronavirus
Tatchell says:
“Sex education from the age of 16 ought to tell the whole truth about every kind of sex and relationship – including sexual practices that some people may find distasteful, like rimming and bondage.”
Recently Pink News admitted that ‘rimming’ (a particular practice among some homosexual men) increases the risk of infection by Coronavirus. This is as bad as encouraging sexual practices that heighten the risk of HIV/AIDS. LGBT activists should not dare to complain about this comparison – they know very well that the LGBT population is at higher risk of Coronavirus infection due to much higher rates of HIV.
Sexually-motivated choking and COVID-19
Above we saw how Tatchell recommended RSE teaching about ‘bondage’, in other words sado-masochism. At the end of last year there was mounting public concern about the rapid spread and normalisation of abuse and violence against women by men during sex thanks to violent internet porn now being the ‘heterosexual’ norm. Practices that have been normalised for people under 35 include men choking women. Some men can no longer be sexually aroused unless they do this.
COVID-19 is a respiratory disease. People who have it more seriously experience serious difficulty breathing, and even when they recover they may have reduced lung capacity, possibly for a long time. Should it not be obvious that ‘rough sex’ practices, which came from the noramlisation of sado-masochism, should be strongly discouraged in RSE (and in public health guidance) rather than being normalised?
What about public health concerns?
It’s very interesting that Tatchells’ ‘advice’ was published in late February this year, before the government had published its public health advice on social distancing. This may be the excuse fpr why he does not mention public health concerns as necessary criteria for evaluating his dangerous and anti-social ideas. Rather he zeroes in as always on ‘political, religious and cultural sensitivities’.
“Young people’s health and welfare must take priority over squeamishness and embarrassment about sex. Political, religious and cultural sensitivities cannot be allowed to thwart mandatory age-appropriate RSE in every school, from the first year of primary education onwards.”
Tatchell’s track record
In all of this it is vitally important to study Peter Tatchell’s track record, along with that of all other proponents of the new RSE. For although now he looks slightly more respectable, making the right noises about the age of consent being 16, this is not generally how he has thought and spoken. Just as with the discrepancy between the May 2019 and the February 2020 talk, we need to scrutinise what was said and not said.
The age of consent
Back in 1997 he interviewed a teenage boy called ‘Lee’, saying openly that his militant gay rights group OutRage! supported ‘a sliding-scale age of consent’. He advocated lowering the age of consent to 14 for everyone.
“In addition to supporting an age of consent of 14 for everyone (gay and straight), OutRage! argues that sex involving young people under 14 should not be prosecuted providing both partners consent and there is no more than three years difference in their ages.”
The reason Peter Tatchell has managed to paint himself as a respectable expert on RSE is that he no longer says this publicly.
Italian journalist Enza Ferreri has analysed his historical writings in this respect, and his links to the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s and through that to individuals active in the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.
Commissioner for Countering Extremism
Many more things could and should be said about Peter Tatchell and his fellow RSE activists, but the fact that he has been made a member of the board for the Commission for Countering Extremism shows just how low the government has sunk in listening to them all. Last year Sara Khan, the lead Commissioner for Countering Extremism, overstepped the mark when she implied that all parents protesting the new RSE in primary schools in Birmingham were guilty of ‘extremism’.
RSE is a public health emergency
The Coronavirus crisis shows up the moral bankruptcy of the more radical elements of RSE in a horrifying way. At the same time there is an amusing irony in that whilst Ofsted and the Department for Education as well as the Welsh Government have clearly been hostile to home schooling and independent faith schools, the practical reality is that everybody now is forced into the situation of homeschooling, in the sense of having their children at home all the time doing their school work. Who now is going to complain that the family is not the best place to learn about relationships and sex?
As I write the government is trying to push its emergency Coronavirus Bill through Parliament. It gives ministers powers to shut down events, gatherings and premisses in order to ‘prevent, protect against or control the incidence or transmission of coronavirus’ (section 50 and schedule 21). On these grounds the government should be abandoning the roll-out of the new progressive RSE which normalises unhealthy promiscuous behaviour.
