Who invented sex education? Since we now have so much of it that we can hardly escape it, it seems like a reasonable question. This is even more important now that we know it doesn’t work.
Last week’s staggering numbers of cases of syphilis and gonorrhea—nearly the worst in modern times—proved conclusively that Sex Ed has failed to prevent the spread of sexual diseases.
Same goes for the massive abortion rate (remember when they said legalizing it would make it “safe, legal, and rare”? Not exactly). If it weren’t for the ever-increasing use of the morning-after pill, which hides rather than solves the problem, it would be even worse. Meanwhile, family life, as we knew it only recently, is disappearing from large parts of the British landscape.
Instead, the state is the primary parent. Lady Helen Brook’s 1980 prophecy that “from birth to death is the prerogative of the parental state to make important decisions – objective, unemotional, the state weighs what is best for the child” has virtually come true for millions.
I am endlessly amazed that so few people ever question why sex education – such an important feature of our schools – receives so little critical attention, especially since it clearly doesn’t work on its own terms. It has always been accompanied by a parallel campaign to make contraceptives available, first to the unmarried and then to any child without the knowledge of his or her parents. These policies also failed in their official purpose. Is it possible that the real target is not the declared target?
Who invented sex education? Since we now have so much of it that we can hardly escape it, it seems like a reasonable question
Sex education has virtually failed to achieve its official goals since it first spread here in the early 1950s. Yet the only response from its proponents is to say that we need more of it, at increasingly younger ages, increasingly explicit and radical, and almost obligatory at many ages.
Is it possible that it has a different purpose, one that it has successfully achieved? As far as I can tell, the inventor and pioneer was a Hungarian communist whose disturbing motto read: “Who will save us from Western civilization?” This zealot, Georg Lukacs (pronounced ‘Loo Catch’), is still much admired by many on the left. And he was put in charge of the schools in Budapest during the short but terrible Hungarian Soviet Republic, which rose and fell there in 1919.
Lukacs became People’s Commissar for Education and Culture and he knew exactly what he wanted. Special lectures and specially printed pamphlets were quickly introduced. Their goal was to “instruct” children about “free love,” not to mention “the nature of sexual intercourse.” But the classes also preached that traditional Christian family codes of conduct, especially lifelong marriage, were obsolete.
Religion was dismissed as an irrelevant nuisance that robbed humanity of pleasure. Children were urged to reject and mock the authority of their parents and the Church, and to ignore the accepted moral code. Lukacs and the rest were gone in months, but his time has definitely come again. The revolutionaries who failed so badly to build Utopia a century ago did not give up on their goals. They still know they’re right, and they try again. They just changed their methods.
No more barricades and street fights. Instead, they overthrow the ideas that once held Western civilization together. And they do it at a school near you.
Why is Julian Assange still in a maximum security prison? There is no justification for this treatment. In any case, we must refuse to extradite him, as the allegations are clearly political in nature. But there’s no excuse for keeping him in such conditions.
Should I be happy that my commute is fueled by recycled cooking oil (see right)? Will the country’s rail lines, tunnels and stations start to smell of old fish and chips instead of diesel? But if this stuff works, I’ve got an idea: steam engines powered by fatbergs dug out of sewers. Picturesque, green and a perfect way to avoid clogging up the drains.
The haze we should really be afraid of
When I first saw the eerie photos of New York City left in an orange smoky haze, I thought marijuana legalization had finally gotten out of hand there and the entire metropolis was hopelessly stoned. It turns out to be just wood smoke from Canada.
I know which kind of smoke worries me more…
A man talks on his phone as he looks through the haze at the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee
One man can end this wretched war
What is it about war that makes people so unimaginative and thoughtless? Now that the long-heralded Ukrainian offensive against the invading Russian forces seems to have begun, I notice that many media outlets write about it rather impersonally, as if it were just an event on a map far away. There’s no excuse for this.
Vast numbers of young men on both sides, terrified, will die a horrible death, or be horribly injured in a way that will affect them for the rest of their lives. I looked at newspaper archives of the great battle of the Somme in July 1916, also intended to repel the German invader from French soil. A report in The Times on 3 July stated: ‘All has gone well, our troops have carried out their missions successfully, all counter-attacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners have been taken.’
The main headline read ‘Forward in the West’ and the reports said (no doubt truthfully) that there were large numbers of enemy dead. I’m not mocking what these people wrote and what their editors published. No one, except the soldiers themselves, knew the ghastly horror of modern warfare when one huge army plunges upon another dug into strong defences.
They thought they were still writing about Victorian wars of impetuous attacks and noble battles. But there is now no excuse for such illusions. We know the truth. If anyone has any doubts about the horrific misery of modern war, read John Harris’ wonderful book Covenant With Death. While they were alive, Harris interviewed surviving veterans of the Somme and turned their memories into a novel of extraordinary power. No one reading it could ever choose to start or continue such warfare.
President Biden knows this war will end with negotiations. He said in June 2022: “At some point there will have to be a negotiated settlement here.” If he wants such conversations, he can get them without a doubt. Ukraine can only fight as long as Washington wants it to.
But a regiment of army-barmy politicians and teenage scribblers, who have never seen a corpse or heard a bullet fly, push for war to the end and the young men are ground into mud and slime, far to the credit of others. away.