Stop exposing children to sexual material
Progressivist political funding provides opportunities for the normalisation of exposure of children to sexual material.
A new theatre production received a little more publicity than expected last week. Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol is scheduled (at time of writing) to host ‘The Family Sex Show’, from 5th to 8th May 2022. According to its own publicity, the event will show “common stages of sexual development” to children as young as five, in order to support children “in their exploratory development, safely and comfortably”. Thisegg, the production company, claims this will be an alternative educational opportunity to encountering online pornography. The show will involve adult nudity on stage. Further performances will take place at Theatre Royal, Bath.
The tour is apparently commissioned by “Theatre Royal Bath, supported by National Theatre Studios, developed at Shoreditch Town Hall.” Tobacco Factory Theatres is supported by money from Bristol City Council and Arts Council England; Theatre Royal, Bath is also supported by Arts Council England.
The event has received widespread pushback. Many of the responders are angry that children will be subject to nudity and condemn those putting on the show. Whereas in the past, many people might have taken such performances as a well-intentioned but poorly-pitched event, aimed at alleviating children’s anxiety, that is no longer the case. Of late, there have been so many impositions and acts of bad faith in this area, that many no longer feel inclined to grant venues and casts the benefit of good will. Further tipping the balance against it is the outlook of the production company and theatre. When it is announced that this is not just an educational event but “a celebration of difference, equality and liberation”, we realise that this event is aimed at promoting minority sexual behaviour. The diversity agenda cannot simply acknowledge minority activity/demographics; it advocates for it as a moral good.
Individuals with sexual perversions come in all political outlooks but it is only the progressivist (and liberalist/libertarian) end of the spectrum that makes public allowances for paedophiles. That may take the form of social-constructionist sympathy for abusers (“they were in their turn abused as children and are compelled to repeat the pattern in their own lives, unwillingly”) or for certain minorities, which are seen as largely progressivist clients. For the latter, see the MP Crispin Blunt’s recent, though now retracted, defence of Imran Ahmad Khan MP, who was just convicted for sexually assaulting a boy, with Blunt using Khan’s ethnicity and sexuality to attack Khan’s conviction (here is a screenshot of Blunt’s statement). The right has its failings, but excusing child grooming is not one of them.
I am not suggesting that anyone involved in the production of ‘The Family Sex Show’ is a paedophile. What I am stating is that progressivist political funding provides opportunities for the normalisation of exposure of children to sexual material, which (hardly coincidentally) is advanced by paedophiles. We find all manner of events and actions that blur the lines between adults and children in sexual subjects: activists placing books with overtly sexual content in school libraries, defended by Democrat politicians in the USA, (and here); exposure of children to sexually explicit parades has also been defended by politicians and activists. Organisations such as Drag Queen Story Hour are invited to stage readings at libraries and schools, in “culturally inclusive family programming where kids can express their authentic selves and become bright lights of change in their communities.”
When people act against such encroachments, as in Florida’s anti-grooming bill (effectively and widely smeared as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill”), which forbids the discussion of sexual matters with children aged six to eight years old, it is presented as anti-homosexual, even though there is no mention in the bill of any sexual orientation. Leftist media outlets claim this is a moral panic: “The new red scare: The right leans into pedophilia accusations.” The problem with the parallel between the McCarthyite hearings regarding Communists and concern about child sexual grooming is that, subsequently, documents showed that many accused by McCarthy were Communist Party members or sympathisers. In other words, the ”moral panic” turned out to be well founded.
Quite aside from schools and educational organisations, we have seen ample evidence arts organisations and regulatory bodies have been compromised regarding child protection. It is no longer possible for people of good conscience to stand aside and delegate their moral judgements to expert bodies, for these expert bodies are now incapable of, or unwilling to, protect children. Unable to face accusations of excluding, judging or condemning sexual perversions by individuals who (in recent years) have identified as a marginalised community, these bodies have been effectively neutered. The very authorities designated to shield children from predation are now equivocal on the subject of child sexuality, which is used as a gateway by paedophiles to exert influence.
Now how has this come to happen? Here are some reasons.
A) The advent of the internet has allowed isolated individuals, who form a small minority and were previously guarded about their proclivities due to legal and social disapproval, to form online networks. This has given individuals confidence, allowed sharing of illegal images and otherwise encouraged individuals to take steps they would otherwise not.
B) The cult of victimhood is now so pervasive that any minority group feels able to leverage its “marginal status” in order to gain sympathy and (sometimes) legal protection.
C) The dissolving of common moral and social standards, mainly due to the collapsing observance of Christian teaching, the mass influx of non-Christians and the social acceptability of assertive atheism, means that it is harder for society to impose a common ethical standard hostile towards child abuse. Yes, it is true that in the past, instances – or even sub-cultures – of abuse existed, and were even tolerated. Such hypocrisy was at least actual hypocrisy; the majority of the population in Christian societies would have recognised child abuse as a contravention of shared ethical standards.
D) Encouragement and normalisation of the sexualisation of children, something which commenced in the late nineteenth century. We find such ideas first prominently presented in Freud’s theory of child sexual development. Such ideas regarding sublimated or latent sexual instincts in no way endorsed exposure of children to adult sexual predation, but they did open the door to liberal ideas associating sexual appetite and children.
E) Most essentially, it is a matter of temperament. Whenever a leftist sees a traditional barrier, they see it as suppression or constriction. The traditionalist knows that such a barrier – regarding sex and children, for example – performs a protective function and allows the ordinary person to make quick decisions regarding appropriacy of conduct. The leftist cannot bear convention, so is sympathetic to all transgressive behaviour, even when outcomes are dangerous and immoral. It is this last reason (above all others) that ensures a complicit (largely unacknowledged) pact between the paedophile and the progressive.
There are other reasons, but for the purposes of brevity these must suffice.
We must remember that Marxists – for many decades lodged inside academia and able to train future generations of the non-governing elite – have widely disseminated the idea that everyday activism within existing centres of authority can subvert (even invert) purposes for which these bodies were established. What is notable (though not surprising) is that now – when subversion is made plain – that there are so few people willing to act against it. We find no major politician, let alone established political party, willing to condemn or intervene. This is because all centres of power which might discipline or shame – the press, the police, the judiciary, the church, the political parties – have been just as subverted. Remember, the state is the enemy of both your morality and the welfare of your family; the state is a tool of progressivism and should therefore at every opportunity be ignored, mocked and resisted.
It may be a meme, but one cannot do better than mention the image of a bus driver indicating a sign that reads “It’s not rocket science, guys. They’re evil and they want to diddle kids.”
