On page 14 of the draft SPHE curriculum for the senior cycle, published last week, the state says that students, having completed their studies, should be able to “examine how harmful attitudes around gender are perpetuated in the media, online and in society and discuss strategies for challenging these attitudes and narratives”
Nowhere in the document does it explain what a “harmful attitude towards gender” might be, let alone how we might examine a harmful attitude towards gender in the media. But we can surmise, I think from the rest of the document, and the panopoly of other documents produced on this topic by the Department of Education in recent years.
On page seven, for example, it says this:
SPHE thus contributes to building a cohesive, compassionate and fair society; one that is inclusive of all genders
“All genders”. Traditionally, we might have said “both genders”, but the official position of the Department of Education – which is alone on this amongst Government departments, and at variance with Irish law on the matter – appears to be that there are more than two genders.
Or consider this definition of gender, provided on page 18:
gender means the socially constructed roles, responsibilities, characteristics, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men. Gender is socially and culturally constructed, so understandings of gender differ across contexts and over time.
Do Irish parents agree, en masse, that “gender is socially and culturally constructed”, rather than being something innate and inherent to us? I do not think that they do. But that is what your children are to be taught.
It is, in other words, the stated objective of the Department of Education to teach your children things that most of us know to be entirely false. If you are wondering why 1,000 or so people turned up to the national boxing stadium on Tuesday night to hear me, and others, speak about this, then this is why.
Ask a politician why this is happening, and you will get – as my colleague Ben has proved on countless occasions – waffle. That is because most of them have no earthly idea what is actually in the document that Norma Foley is proposing should become the basis for leaving cert sex education. The entire thing was long ago subcontracted out to state funded, radical NGOs such as the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland, and BeLongTo. Those organisations do not exist to educate your child, so much as they exist to indoctrinate your child – and they have captured Norma Foley’s department wholesale.
The purpose of this curriculum, as I said at the event the other night, is not simply to educate and indoctrinate your children. It goes further than that: The long term objective is to make your own attitudes and thoughts and beliefs extinct. It is to create a society where everyone has been taught, from a young age, as fact, that there are five, or six, or seven different genders and that it’s simply a matter of picking the one that suits you best on a given day.
When you pair this curriculum with the other things we see in society – for example the hate speech bill – you should soon be able to put the bigger picture together. For all the fuzzy talk about tolerance and inclusivity, this is a full bore attempt to make beliefs that have been held for thousands of years disappear, through re-education of your children, and the active repression via law of anybody who objects to it too strenuously.
But there is no majority for it.
It is notable that almost all the groups campaigning for this kind of sex education are also the groups campaigning for hate speech. And it is further notable that almost all of them are state funded. For the very simple reason that they would not survive five minutes without taxpayer support. There is no mass movement in Ireland willingly giving of its time and its money to make this curriculum a reality. The entire thing exists only because at some point in the last two decades, Irish politicians decided that funding radicals was easier than arguing with radicals.
But just like the hate speech bill, all this insane curriculum really needs is a good kick, and the whole superstructure will collapse.
It will collapse, in the face of an effective campaign, because there’s no support for it. Bring these ideas to your local FF or FG TD, and I guarantee they’ll be hearing them for the first time. Ask them whether they support them, and I guarantee, half of them will not. But if they can get away with saying nothing and doing what they are told, then that’s exactly what they will do.
It really is up to parents: Whether this curriculum, full to the brim with nonsense, gets enacted is a matter entirely of how much parents care to stop it. My suspicion, on the basis of Tuesday night, is that there are enough of us to cave in the door on this one.
We should do so, as a priority.