Child abuse 2.0

I once heard a panelist on Q&A say she’d had an abortion and didn’t ‘give a rat’s arse’ about the destroyed fetus. I often think of that brutally frank opinion and wonder if it truly represents her character. Was she as tough as she sounded? Surely something must press her buttons – the plight of whales, perhaps, or pygmy possums?

You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that de-humanising something is the first step to take if you want to destroy it. An army instructor at bayonet practice has no interest in reminding his recruits of the loveable personal qualities and happy home lives of their potential victims. It’s just a matter of sticking it up them, no questions asked.

So today most people don’t want to think about unborn babies. ‘Fetuses’ is a far more comfortable word. Even though we now know that such fetuses, at least in the later stages of their development, are sentient creatures, we prefer to pretend otherwise. Out of sight out of mind.

Breaking down the barrier between fact and imagination is a pernicious fruit of the relativism that nowadays corrupts so much of our thinking. Relativism – the denial of absolute truths – makes it possible for us to hold, simultaneously, dramatically contradictory opinions. Examples are abundant: vegetarians who wear leather, socialists who trade in shares and rental properties, pacifists who support regimes dedicated to the annihilation of Israel, atheists who despise Christianity but speak admiringly of Islamic, Hindu or Aboriginal spirituality. Like the Queen of Hearts, some people really can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

And perhaps the most extraordinary of all are the people who are justifiably angry about child sexual abuse yet are indifferent to, or even enthusiastic about, radical proposals to provide specific and detailed sex education to very young children in our schools. Imposing adult concepts on pre-pubescent school students and exposing them to unsettling ideas such as gender self-selection causes confusion and anxiety. It is not only irresponsible and inappropriate, it is abusive.

Meanwhile it’s springtime, and in garden and farmyard Mother Nature is going about her lawful occasions with increased gusto. Sexuality is rampant. Living creatures of every kind – furry, scaly or feathered – are coupling as if there were no tomorrow. Apparently there’s no uncertainty in our garden about gender identity, either. Rumours of gay roosters and effeminate bulls belong to the world of humour rather than the real-life roost or stud. Sex is entirely a matter of physical characteristics.

Surprisingly, the very people who insist that human beings are a mere sub-species in the animal kingdom, a kind of a blip on the continuum of evolution, a destructive breed with no better claim to life than any other animal, are the same people who implicitly believe in human exceptionalism. Hermaphroditism is rare in nature, and human nature is no exception. But advocates of early sexual education hold that humans can uniquely experience a sexual ambiguity unknown in other species. So we are a special creation then, are we? Such an opinion is completely inconsistent with prevailing doctrines about animal rights, but why let truth and logic interfere with a good story?

Only in our species, according to them, can males be trapped in female bodies, or females in male. And this is what they want to tell our children. The consequence will be disturbed and unhappy kids who are fed simple solutions (‘yes, I can be someone else!’) and prematurely eroticised by older people, just as an earlier generation was eroticised by the beguiling soft porn of magazines such as Dolly and Girlfriend. As a result of this mode of thinking, unprecedented numbers of young people are now questioning their gender and even seeking radical surgical remedies. Of course there are genuinely compelling cases of fundamental sexual dysphoria, but they are relatively rare, and it is irresponsible in the extreme to offer re-alignment of sexual identity as a general alternative to better understanding and appreciating the diversity of the gender to which nature has assigned each of us. All boys have a gentler feminine side to their nature: son, don’t be ashamed of it, let it out, be the person you want to be. Changing your sex, even if that were truly possible, is a step too far – and a betrayal of the range of potentialities in your own nature.

Any discussion of sexual identity must lead to the linked ideas implicit in the push for same-sex marriage. To date 21 nations have legalised it: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Holland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Uruguay. By no means coincidentally, preoccupation with issues of subjective sexual identification seems to have peaked in recent years in the same countries.

The list exposes an interesting fact. They are all, without exception, Christian countries. Few if any have practising Christian majorities nowadays, but all have their origins in the Western Christian culture. Why this should be so is open to question, but there is nothing coincidental about it. Some gay activists will resent such an assertion bitterly, but the most obvious reason is that Christianity more than any other religion has traditions of free enquiry, pity and mercy. Even when faith fades, these habits of the spirit live on.

When our politicians urge us to be ‘on the right side of history’ (preposterous phrase!) they are apparently unaware that they are treading a Western-oriented and exclusively post-Christian pathway, and that most of the world’s nations have no enthusiasm for such an agenda. We’re dreaming if we think otherwise.

There is a huge irony in all this. Activists who have a passion for radically reconstructing society by transmogrifying marriage and uncoupling gender identity from physical characteristics against the practical experience of humanity generally have a loathing of Christianity, even if they have learned to be discreet in expressing it. Yet it is only in post-Christian (or sub-Christian, as I would prefer to say) cultures that such impulses have taken root. The Christian ideals of marriage – monogamy, romantic love, and its beautiful associations – are the envy of the world. For many, sadly, they are objects to be smashed. Let Robbie Burns have the last word: