The Times has posted its latest culture war piece, in which parents are “shocked” by “graphic sex education in school”. Apparently “one mother says her son has ‘gone from finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist to being told about anal sex’’, which is definitely a thing that actually happened.
It’s a good piece to study if you’re interested in how culture wars are waged, though. The “graphic sex education” it talks about doesn’t exist, but the Times uses innuendo to suggest otherwise. The term “anal fun and frolics” that has The Times clutching its pearls is from a personal website written by an adult for other adults. The song about masturbation The Times refers to is from a different website, also by and for adults.
What The Times is doing here, and not in a subtle way, is trying to make you scared of the queers again. The article opens with a 12-year-old apparently having a panic attack because someone told her trans people exist; the body copy’s deliberate focus on anal sex is code for The Gays. And telling people that the queers and the gays are coming for your kids is what brought us Section 28, which Murdoch’s minions clearly want to bring back.
Update, 11 March
The source of the story was The New Social Covenant Unit, an evangelical organisation co-chaired by Miriam Cates MP and Danny Kruger MP whose director Imogen Sinclair works for the Conservative Christian Fellowship. To describe them as social and religious conservatives would be an understatement.
NSCU’s politics are stated in greater detail in their manifesto “12 propositions for a new social convenant”8. This manifesto is deeply socially conservative on the subject of marriage and family, claiming that marriage equality for same sex couples “removed [marriage’s] physical basis” and that the right of couples to end a marriage had “removed its emotional and practical basis, and voided the marriage vow itself”. The 12 propositions refer to the primary purpose of marriage as “regulation of baby-making”, implicitly valuing fertile, heterosexual couples over all other forms of families.
The 12 propositions rail against immigration and “globalism”, promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory9that “cultural Marxism”, purported to be an obscure school of political thought originating from largely Jewish academics in the 1950s, has infiltrated political and academic institutions with the aim of destroying the family and Western civilisation.