While we ignore the battles going on all around us, and the greater war these are a part of, the other side is tireless, committed, and determined to achieve its goals. And a primary way of doing this is to capture our children, and enlist them in their cause.
There are many ways this is being done, and I have documented this often on this site. Here I present two further case studies in how children are being targeted, and how the culture wars are being fought all around us. Fortunately in the second example, a good outcome transpired.
But these victories are few and far between. Everywhere we look the war against faith, family and life is making great headway. The first thing we must do to reverse this trend is to be aware of the battles taking place. Thus this article. These two recent episodes happen to be from North America, but plenty of similar examples could be found down under as well.
The first concerns a small North Eastern town in the US. It is simply the latest in a very long line of cases in which our children are being deliberately exploited and sexualised by our secular sexperts. An article entitled "With Liberty and Prophylactics for All!" describes the situation this way:
"A tiny town on Cape Cod has taken one thing off its back-to-school list: parental involvement. To the astonishment of most every media outlet in America, the Provincetown school board voted unanimously to pass out condoms to all students – starting with first graders."
So let's get that straight: condoms given to first graders. Just how many first graders need condoms? Just how many should even know what one is? This is sheer madness. Not only are kids not hopping into beds with each other as first graders, but how in the world would they even get a chance to do so in first grade?
Do they have little bedrooms set up next to the finger painting easels, if they start getting a bit too randy? Do they have a red light district next to the sandbox? They only thing that will even remotely get a first grader thinking about being sexually active is when some idiot school board decides to pass out condoms to them.
And this is not just some optional extra: "As if that weren't outrageous enough, school leaders won't allow parents to opt-out. The rule specifically states that Provincetown will not honor requests from moms and dads who want to keep their kids out of the distribution program.
"In fact, some board members argued that the new policy didn't go far enough. Committee member Shannon Patrick actually complained that students can't have private access to the stash of condoms. 'I don't like that students can't be discreet about this,' she told reporters. 'They have to go and ask for it. I'd rather them not have the conversation.' I suppose she would prefer baskets of free birth control at the elementary school doors?"
These guys ought to have some laundry detergent poured into their nasty, foul minds. Nothing is worse than adults seeking to sexualise young innocent children. And if young children do need information in these areas, it should come from their parents, not a bunch of secular humanists who are pretending they are teachers.
As the article states, "In most schools, kids can't even take a Tylenol without their mom's or dad's permission, but now it's okay to encourage six-year-olds to have sex without ever calling home? On matters that directly affect a child's health, it is imperative that families are central in the decision-making process."
The article continues, "Even parents who are supportive of condoms for older children should be warned that research shows they aren't effective. Greater access to contraception doesn't reduce teen pregnancies or abortion. David Paton, who has authored four major studies in this area, went so far as to say that 'It is clear that providing more family planning… has actually led to an increase [in conception rates]… It appears that if people have access to family planning advice, they think they automatically have a lower risk of pregnancy.'
"Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of 'health care' that this administration envisioned for every school in America when it passed ObamaCare. School-based clinics, free birth control pills, millions of dollars for Planned Parenthood – it's all in there. And when those fail, as even liberals expect them to, taxpayers will give free abortions to every woman who wants one. What a difference an administration makes. Under President Bush, kids learned about the real ABCs: abstinence, be faithful, and (as a last resort) contraception."
If folks are not yet convinced that the West is bogged down in a major culture war, this episode should remove all doubt. On the one side are innocent children, their parents, morality and common sense. On the other side are social engineers and radicals who are deliberately targeting our children and destroying their childhood.
The second example concerns a private school in Canada, which sought to exempt itself from some suspect ethics course. As one writer reports, "The case was initiated by Loyola, a private, anglo, Catholic high school located in Montreal. Loyola had requested an exemption from a provincially mandated ethics and morality course – Éthique et Culture Religieuse (ECR) – on the grounds that it provides its students with an equivalent program, albeit one imbued with the school's Jesuit pedagogical principles."
A Quebec court ruled that the school could not pull out of it. But the school did not stop there, but appealed the ruling. Thus on "June 18, Justice Gérard Dugré found that the government's decision to refuse Loyola's request was invalid because the refusal was based on the assumption that a confessional program could not accomplish the goals of ECR."
Barbara Kay provides more background to this important decision: "ECR begins in kindergarten and continues through to high school graduation (with one year off). The course is supposedly benign, a means of exposing children to a panoply of belief systems by inculcating in them 'absolute respect for every religious position.' But according to ECR materials, 'every religious position' includes pagan animism, witchcraft ('Wiccans are women like any other in daily life') and even the nutbar Raelian movement. In one of the high school workbooks, Catholicism is allotted 12 pages, feminism 27 pages.
"Religious activists opposed to the program see it as a blatant case of social engineering, a statist indoctrination of children into the ideology of moral relativism. Their quite reasonable fear is that the course will convince impressionable children that no religion is unique or has any superior moral insight to offer or is worthy of special reverence."
Most Christian schools do teach about other religions and worldviews. Thus they do not need some PC state-approved course muscling in on the territory. Kay concludes, "Absorption of a particular identity does not preclude learning about other religions and cultures, and students at religious institutions such as Loyola do that already. But ECR goes further, obliging religious institutions to treat many ethical approaches as morally equivalent. Loyola High School would be refused the right to teach that, say, deferred sexual gratification and fidelity to one's mate is a preferable ethical choice to hedonism and early sexual gratification.
"In his 63-page decision, Judge Dugré issued a surprisingly aggressive and even humiliating rebuke to the Ministry of Education: 'The obligation imposed on Loyola to teach the ethics and religious culture course in a lay fashion assumes a totalitarian character essentially equivalent to Galileo's being ordered by the Inquisition to deny the Copernican universe.' By insisting on rigidly secular guidelines for the teaching of religion, Judge Dugré said, the Quebec Charter of Rights had been violated.
"This is an excellent decision and sends a clear, strong message that secular institutions should stay out of the business of instructing children in how to think about religion. That's not to say schools shouldn't teach the objective evolution of various religions or religious wars and so forth in their history courses. But scientifically acquired knowledge is one thing, the inculcation of belief another. In a secular state's education system, evidence-based facts are welcome; in-your-faith brainwashing isn't."
Here, here: finally a bit of common sense in a world gone mad. But such good outcomes are all rather rare today. But this case does demonstrate that if pro-family and pro-faith forces are willing to stand up and fight for what they believe in, some victories will be had along the way.
Resources:
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WU10F19&f=PG07J01
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/22/barbara-kay-score-one-for-quebecs-religious-freedom/