Miranda Devine: Safe Schools may be gone. But we’re not safe yet

WHILE the scrapping of Safe Schools is a step in the right direction, don’t be fooled, writes Miranda Devine. Because the program’s anti-family ideology lives on.

While Safe Schools will be replaced with anti bullying programs, we still have a long way to go. (Pic: iStock)

NOW that NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes has shown the testicular fortitude to replace the Trojan Horse of Safe Schools with a genuine anti-bullying program, Tasmania is reportedly following suit, and even Queensland’s Labor government may be having second thoughts.

It was obvious that a program about sexual and gender diversity was never about bullying, only about ideological brainwashing with its roots in a sick Freudian-Marxist philosophy popular with German Green revolutionaries of the 1960s.

Parents know that bullying occurs for all sorts of reasons, and it’s about time nerdy, bespectacled, unsporty, red-haired, pimply, fat, ugly and socially inept kids were catered for.

Teaching children respect for the dignity of everyone is the aim of the NSW government’s new anti-bullying program.

But don’t celebrate yet, because the ideology that underpins Safe Schools is a many-headed hydra that is like the monster of Greek mythology: when each head is cut off it is replaced by two others.

For instance already in schools is Building Respectful Relationships, a supposedly anti-domestic violence program which also attempts to change social norms about sex and “gender”. It has role-playing exercises for Year 9 girls to imagine themselves as older teenagers who are promiscuous, bisexual or lesbian.

There is the NSW Teachers Federation Gender and Identity kit which has been delivered to schools, requiring teachers to stamp out “heterosexism” and “heteronormative” language and eradicate “gendered” pronouns.

Bullying occurs for many different reasons. (Pic: Terry Pontikos)

Then there is the national Start Early program, rolled out at childcare centres and kindergartens last year in which, toddlers are taught about sexuality, cross-dressing, and gender fluidity.

In one online learning module on the NSW Department of Education website is a video about how to manage fathers of preschoolers who don’t want their little boys wearing dresses.

A woman who appears to be a worker at a daycare centre tells the story of one young boy, probably aged about three, who “did like to be Dorothy from Wizard of Oz. It was red shoes on as soon as he came in and putting on a dress.

“His dad wasn’t too keen on him wearing that dress in the environment and there were lots of discussions about how the father did feel about the child wearing the dress.

“The educators did a bit of deeper thinking and investigation around that and asked other fathers how they felt about that and they said, ‘well, I wouldn’t really like to pick up my child from childcare and see him in a dress all the time either’.

“That father did ask for that dress not to be provided to that child and when that did happen there was a change in that child’s behaviour because that dress in that environment was a connection to that child to that space and their way of being and belonging among those groups of children.

The wishes of parents should be respected by schools. (Pic: iStock)

“His identity when he did come into that space was ‘here’s your shoes, I’ve got your dress ready’… Once that dress was removed and the dad was not wanting the child to wear that dress [the child] did become quite upset and some of those behaviours was lashing out at other children… It did go on for a little while.”

The child care operators gave the parents a book about raising boys, but the child continued to misbehave.

“And obviously the father did not want his child to be unhappy and obviously it got to the point where the child was so distressed that he couldn’t wear a dress that he placed that dress in the toilet and tried to flush it away. So that was quite upsetting for him…

“So we did work through those emotions with him again and then the dad supported him back to wearing the dress and being allowed to have the shoes.”

As an afterthought she says that eventually the child’s attachment to the dress wore off.

But what a nightmare for the little boy and his family. This is what happens when toddler dress-ups become political.

If the father didn’t want his son to wear a dress and red shoes every day, his wishes should have been respected. Instead, Dad’s attitude became a problem that had to be managed by the “educators”, who shared the dilemma with other families.

This is the insidious propaganda that has crept into every nook and cranny of our education system.

Dressed up in misleading language such as “safe” , “respect”, and “wellbeing”, these programs have their ideological foundations deep in sexualised, anti-family ideology of the last century.

The godfather of this sexualisation of education is Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychiatrist and pupil of Sigmund Freud, whose 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism argued that the rise of authoritarianism could be tied to the “suppression of the natural sexuality of the child.”

He said the “authoritarian society” could only be destroyed when the “authoritarian family” was dissolved in the context of a sexual revolution, according to a 2001 article “Green paedophilia” by Hans Fingeller in the Austrian magazine Die Aula.

Reich inspired “anti-authoritarian” kindergartens in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s where children were preyed on by paedophiles and encouraged to masturbate and smear excrement on walls.

These practices were discredited but the ideology lives on.