In Passing: Ireland today – a deeper shade of blue

Now that Ireland’s recent general election has confirmed her to be more Blue than the bluest of American States, with most of its electorate saying that is the way they want it to be, we may be apprehensive about what the next phase of her cultural colonisation is going to bring. We don’t do politics at Position Papers but we do keep our eye on culture and how it is likely to impact on our social and moral values.

I spent about a month in California, in San Francisco, last Autumn – in the beating heart of liberal progressivist America. In the US there is no deeper shade of Democratic Blue than there. As I arrived from Ireland, I wondered would I be experiencing something of a culture shock, would I be falling out of the Irish frying pan of PC liberalism into the West Coast fire of ultra-liberalism?

San Francisco at first sight might make you think it was the City of God itself. It is not only that its very name suggests something of that. It’s that wherever you stand you will be within sight of some boulevard or street proclaiming the patronage of some angel or saint. Deep delusion, of course.

So, which is the frying pan now, which is the fire? Really, it’s hard to say. Is the nation once designated as the “Island of Saints and Scholars” now matching West Coast America’s distance from its faith-filled past? If not quite, it is well on its way to parity. It looks like little Ireland is now firmly in the vanguard of the forces leading all of us to the brave new world of ultra-progressivism.

In America, however, some cultural push-back on progressivism is evident, is public and has a medium. It is not to say that Ireland has no push-back, but the determination to make an alternative voice heard in the media or in the public square is much weaker. Where or when in Ireland has a voice like that of Ana Samuel, a young Texan mother made itself heard, challenging the socio-political platform of one of Blue America’s poster-boys, Pete Buttigieg? Buutigieg,  the former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was Bernie Sanders’ closest challenger in last month’s New Hampshire Democratic Primary.

Ana Samuel, a mother of six children, a graduate of Princeton University with a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, is a founder CanaVox, the family and marriage think-tank and social media platform.  She wrote an open letter to Buttigieg, who, like Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister for the past three years or so, is gay and happy to be so. The problem for a sizeable number of their fellow citizens, however, is that they cannot tolerate others holding a conscientious moral view that sexual activity is something properly exercised between men and women married to each other. Social progressives – whether US Democrats, Irish fellow-travellers like Sinn Fein, Fine Gael and most urban Fianna Fáil politicians – also subscribe to or are evolving towards the other standard elements in the pseudo-liberal canon: abortion, euthanasia, surrogacy and gender fluidity, to name just a few.

Samuel’s letter challenged Buttigieg’s right to demand her acquiescence on all these issues.

There are no amphitheatres now, no lions, but the demands of the Empire of progressivism is in essence the same as that of the Roman tyrants: worship our gods; we don’t mind if you only pretend to; just do not stand publicly against us.  Only on those bases will we offer you tolerance. The agenda of Social Justice Warriors is not just straight-forward tolerance for alternative life-styles; it is a campaign for an acceptance of an equivalence between the moral principles of radically different ways of life. To achieve that they want to change the moral codes and customs of society, they want to convert the minds and hearts of all members of society whose moral principles are different from theirs.

Ireland’s Junior school curriculum now has textbooks laying out before young teenagers the full Kinsey (remember him?) sexual menu, his categories of sexual preferences –  menu is what it amounts to. His categorisation of sexual preferences is presented – without any moral nuance. The message is this: this is the menu kids. Where do you fit in? Take your pick.

Kinsey Scale of Sexual Behaviour

0. Exclusively heterosexual behaviour.

1. Incidental homosexual.

2. More than incidental homosexual behaviour.

3. Equal amount of homo- and hetero-sexual behaviour.

4. More than incidental heterosexual behaviour.

5. Incidental heterosexual behaviour.

6. Exclusively homosexual behaviour.                                       

Kinsey’s scale, this text explains, is a simplified illustration of sexual orientation. Other modern scales reveal that sexuality lies in a continuum, not in separate boxes, and that it can flow and change with time. However, if a person’s sexuality changes it does not mean that sexual orientation is a “choice” or “preference” as it cannot be intentionally altered. Sexual identity is inborn, and you need not have had any previous sexual encounters to understand it.

It goes on to explain that it is just as acceptable for people to choose not to identify with or confine themselves to a single category. By accepting and embracing your and others’ sexual identity, it is possible to find common ground within a welcoming and supportive community of individuals who have similar feelings, backgrounds and stories. Recognising the differences can help validate the uniqueness of all sexual orientations.

This is the dogma of progressivism and this is straight out of Buttigieg’s handbook of sexual morality. Now Buttigieg is exhorting progressives like himself to  “push back” against those who refuse to accept their ideology.

Ana Samuel sprang to the defence of freedom of conscience and the rights of parents when she saw a tweet from Buttigieg with a sub-text which said that anyone who refuses to cheer for same-sex marriage or support the Left’s sexual ideology is a bigot—someone who is out to harm Pete and his family.

Buttigieg tweeted @PeteButtigieg: People will often be polite to you in person, while advancing policies that harm you and your family. You will be polite to them in turn, but you need not stand for such harms. Instead, you push back, honestly and emphatically. So, it goes, in the public square.

In other words, politeness won’t wash. Smiling and smiling while being a villain is how Pete Buttigieg reads the politeness, even the charitable demeanour, of those who disagree with his way. In Ireland, Leo Varadkar, Simon Harris, Katherine Zappone throughout their time in government have all been seeking to shame anyone who disagrees with them – or who cannot in conscience accept social policies which they have passed into law. Ante-diluvian was one of the less offensive categories with which they were labelled. Rational arguments showing these policies to be objectively immoral and harmful to individuals, the family and society, were countered with nothing more than gushing emotion.

Ana Samuel pointed out to Buttigieg that tolerance cuts both ways.

As a mother in touch with many mothers with traditional family values, she wrote, “I can tell you we are faced every day with people who are ‘polite to us in person’ but who advance and execute policies that assault our values, harm our families, and hurt our children.

“Enough Is enough”, she cried, as a parent demanding her natural human rights. She saw that behind Buttigieg’s self-pitying gauntlet-tweet was a whole agenda of sinister social programming. What these people want, on both sides of the Atlantic, is to undermine the entire heritage which all faithful Christians want to hand on to their children and on which, they conscientiously believe, their personal happiness, in this world and the next – as well as the well-being of our society, depends. While the motivation underlying this push-back by people of all faiths is spiritual and religious, the arguments for it are solidly rational.

Samuel wrote: “I’m talking about policies that undermine our parental rights and duties by seeking to indoctrinate our children in progressive sexual ideology without our consent and sometimes despite our explicit protest.” She asked him to consider just a few examples:

·         Public schools in my area are giving reading assignments which ask: ‘What is heteronormativity and how is it harmful?’ It is not unusual for the LGBT theme to find its way into history classes, foreign language studies, and even STEM courses. The explicit goal is to normalise LGBT lifestyles throughout curricula.

·         We have paediatricians who ask to see our teenagers alone and then push to prescribe them contraceptives or ask them about sexual behaviours that we find offensive. Our teens themselves bring these paediatricians’ inappropriate behaviour to our attention. One OBGYN slipped a prescription for oral contraceptives stealthily to a 14-year-old daughter of a Mexican friend of mine, after she had explicitly stated to his face that she did not wish to see her daughter on oral contraceptives.”

She cited numerous blatant efforts within the schools and health system to subvert their values, across such areas as

·         Sex education classes in which our kids are taught unproven Freudian-Kinseyan doctrines that “sexual repression” will cause neuroses,

·         Public library programming where unicorns, rainbows, gingerbread persons, drag-queen story hours, and other symbols of progressive sexual ideology make an appearance,

·         Trendy middle-school books (published after 2014) that appear to have fairly innocuous plots frequently feature an LGBT teen or gay couple, ever-so-gently normalising the ideas that are so conflicting to our consciences.

·         And finally, the latest round of violence against children: efforts to entice children to question the reality of their sex through school gender-transitioning ceremonies, pronoun-sensitivity training, and other transgender propaganda.

“Parents”, she pointed out, “have historically enjoyed the right to direct the education and upbringing of their children, under the correct presumption that parents—rather than school counsellors, psychiatrists, teachers, government bureaucrats, or any other persons—are best able to act in their children’s best interests. Now, activists are pushing courts to allow minors to receive puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones against their parents’ objections.

“Mr. Mayor, it is hypocritical for you to cry foul about policies that ‘harm you and your family’ while your side pushes for government intrusions into the parent-child relationships at the most fundamental levels.

“At some point, we say ‘enough is enough’. Toleration for You, but Toleration for Me Too.”

She challenged him on his slur that she and her kind were victimising him and his kind. Mothers, she said, tend to emphatically care about the welfare of all children, regardless of their family’s origin or current form. They also tend to emphatically care about every LGBT person— “recognising our common humanity even when we do not agree with their lifestyle choices. When we are polite to you, we are coming from a place of deep moral principle and authenticity. It’s not a superficial cover up for our true beliefs about you.”

Finally, she said, “please stop shutting us out of the conversation by the intellectually dishonest rhetorical expedient of implying or saying that we are bigots. We are the opposite of bigots. We are prepared to co-exist peacefully and tolerate a great deal of what you propose, but not at the expense of losing our own ability to practice and preach our own values and freedoms. We are happy to work side-by-side with you, to have you as our coaches, neighbours and friends, but don’t cross the line and tell us what sexual values to cherish and uphold.”

This formidable woman spoke these truths to a US presidential candidate. Her challenge was specific as to time and place, but it can today be applied to many places, not least to the Republic of Ireland, with its new deep blue elected parliament. It is very likely that the truths she spoke will need to be repeated often in that jurisdiction in the years to come.

Her open letter to Buttigieg first appeared on the website, Public Discourse (https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/04/51308/).