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Safer schools or a radical Marxist sexual revolution?

By Pat Byrne - posted Friday, 19 February 2016


Publicly the person who set up the Safe Schools Coalition program says it’s to stop bullying and suicides, but she told a Marxism conference it was part of a wider Marxist strategy to radically change society.

Roz Ward, from La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex Health and Society, told the Melbourne 2015 Marxism Conference, “In 2010 … I was the person who set up Safe Schools Coalition in Victoria” (SSCV). This program has now been expanded to become the federally funded Safe Schools Coalition Australia (SSCA).

The public defence of the SSCA’s particular format has been that it’s necessary to stop bullying and reduce self-harm among LGBTI students and students claiming various sexual identities other than male or female.

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However, to the Marxism Conference, Roz Ward gave a Marxist analysis of how the ruling capitalist class imposed conventional notions of male and female, sex, marriage and natural family on society to “break the spirits of ordinary people”.

Like any ideology, sexual Marxism has its own language that needs to be deciphered.

Marxist doctrine says that the capitalist class (the wealthy owners of capital) has used all the main institutions of society – government, the courts, the churches and the culture – to oppress, subjugate and economically exploit the working class.

Ward says that as part of this process of exploitation, capitalists have imposed cultural and moral norms around sex, marriage and the natural family that inhibit sexual freedom.

“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.

“Both serve to break the spirits of ordinary people, to consume our thoughts, to make us accept the status quo and for us to keep living or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in those units,” she said.

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Ward argues that this capitalist social and cultural construct extends to every aspect of our society: “Apart from social stigma and discrimination, almost every single structure in society is set up to accommodate only two possible genders, male or female.

“Everything from the toilets we use, the school uniforms, changing rooms, all official documents, passports, the process is that you go through airports, everything is divided into these two limited gender options.”

Just as a political revolution is needed to liberate workers from capitalist economic oppression, Ward argues that a sexual revolution is needed to liberate everyone from capitalist sexual oppression. Indeed, sexual liberation would loosen the capitalist bonds on the culture and the economy.

So what is Ward’s solution to capitalist sexual oppression?

Marxism is her solution. “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 extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today, because Marxism has a theory of social change,” Ward says.

To this end, Ward lauds policies of sexual liberation introduced by the Soviet Union after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. This included the introduction of “gender neutral language … something that transgender advocates today see as the key demand to the transgender and other advocacy movements.

“They [the Soviets] also removed the fixed age of consent…”

It’s in the context of a sexual revolution, in the image and likeness of a Marxist political and economic revolution, that Ward sees her SSCV program, which is now the Australia-wide SSCA program in around 490 schools.

This program gives its support to an array of sexual experimentation; it suggests young people can bypass school and other internet filtering systems to access sites that carry porn and sex aids; it presents as safe and acceptable hormone therapy and surgery to become transgender; it presents as acceptable dangerous female chest binding so girls can appear gender ambiguous; it encourages schools to allow for cross-gender students to use the change rooms and toilets of the sex with which they want to identify; and it provides links to adult gay organisations.

This curriculum is part of a strategy to make schools an essential element in the sexual revolution that Ward describes as necessary to liberate the whole of society, not just LGBT people, from capitalism.

There is one important line in Ward’s speech that makes this clear.

This line needs to be understood in terms of a core Marxist doctrine that says something like this: for workers to be truly liberated, it takes more than the creation of a communist state like the Soviet Union. For workers in the Soviet Union to be truly liberated, all workers around the world have to be liberated.

To that end, Soviet communism promoted and financed proxy revolutionary movements and wars around the world to create more and more communist states.

Echoing this classical Marxist doctrine, Ward paraphrases gay academic Dennis Altman, saying that “the homosexual cannot win liberation without a general sexual liberation.” In Marxist parlance, this means that LGBT people can truly be liberated only when all people of all sexual orientations and gender identities have open sexual licence after being liberated from capitalist-imposed conventional morality or biology.

Ward’s speech puts the Safe Schools Coalition program in the ideological context of a radical sexual revolution to be pushed through Australian schools.

It is extraordinary that politicians have not examined the ideological context of the SSCA program. Nor have they examined closely the questionable social research that is said to justify the program. Is it really true that 10 per cent of school age students are same-sex attracted?

Instead, two Victorian Labor governments and a Liberal government have backed the program. The Federal Coalition government continued to fund the program after Penny Wong provided funding at the end of the Rudd Labor government.

Will parents of Australian children in schools really give their approval to a program that, on the pretext of preventing bullying, is really about deconstructing the moral and social fabric of our society, including the family?

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About the Author

Patrick J Byrne is national vice president of the National Civic Council. He writes in the NCC’s magazine News Weekly on foreign affairs, economic, rural and social issues.

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