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gaiatheorist · 5 years

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“Morality.”

“Should children as young as 5 be taught about sexual practices between consenting adults?” No, obviously, children are not adults, and have a disturbing habit of copying things they’ve heard or observed. I’m more concerned about A+E attendances to have foreign bodies removed than I am about children ‘learning’ to be anything other than heterosexual, though.

We’ve been here before, with Section 28 prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools. Imposed morality, ‘this’ is the right way to be, and nothing else exists. From 1988 to 2000, the only ‘acceptable’ family structure was a Mummy and a Daddy who loved each other very much, and sometimes had a special cuddle. In bed. With the lights off. Bonus points if the Mummy and the Daddy were married. To each other. Anything else was a ‘pretended’ family structure. Apart from the “It’s OK to say no.” booklets in primary school, I don’t remember any ‘sex and relationships’ education at all, the booklets came too late for me, and loaded on the guilt that someone had been doing things they shouldn’t have, and I hadn’t said no. Everything else was biology, insert-tab-A-into-slot-B, to quote the Manic Street Preachers “My idea of where life comes from, a childhood glimpse of pornography.” it really was the age of finding a ‘mucky book’ under a hedge back then. (Or a video tape with no label, and the tabs popped out, before satellite TV.)

As much as some of our Mums and Dads fucked us up, so did our schooling. The government’s decision that heterosexuality was the norm, and anything else deviant left some of us with ‘nowhere to go’, burying feelings, ostracised by the bullying of the ‘normal’ kids. Homosexuality isn’t illegal, discrimination technically is, and this ‘morality’ debate is a constructed nonsense that will impede the acceptance that love is love, in its many and varied forms. (Sticking with the ‘love’ angle, rather than the ‘sex’ one, the primary school lessons wouldn’t touch on the many ways to couple-or-multiple.) It’s tired but true, that children are malleable and accepting before they are exposed to prejudice. “Why does uncle Bob go everywhere with uncle Jim?” “They’re in love, like Mummy and Daddy.” “Oh, can I have a biscuit?” It really is that simple.

It doesn’t really matter which ‘moral majority’ has the pitchforks out, where there is a majority, there will be a minority, and that imbalance leads to oppression. Letting the kids know, at 5, that there isn’t only ‘one way’ will reduce some of the homophobic bullying at 7, some of the confusion at 13, and some of the self-loathing and suicide at 15. Some of it, not all, because the children don’t only exist in their classrooms and playgrounds. The refusal to acknowledge the ‘other’ choices is a backward step, and it will lead to harm, when some of those children realise that they are ‘other’, deviant, abnormal.

As much as we’re seeing some celebrities and ‘influencers’ openly-out, not only as homosexual, but a plethora of things we don’t even have tick-boxes for yet, we’ve also seen a return to death-by-stoning in Brunei. Good old family values, there, it applies to adultery as well as homosexual activity. “Oh, but that’s ‘The Muslims’ doing Sharia law, that’s not us!” Death by stoning. Lapidation is a word I never thought I’d need to learn in 2019, Pearl-clutching Christians take note, isn’t the one about not-killing quite near the top of the list of commandments? (I can’t even wrap my head around the ‘observed by’ angle to it, inflicting trauma on a whole group of people, as a means of keeping them in line. It’s barbaric, which is, I suppose, me making a moral judgement.)

My ‘morality’ is of the ‘harm none’ flavour, my sexual orientation is fluid. That’s not as difficult to reconcile as it might appear, because I don’t wish harm against the Sultan of Brunei, or the parents protesting in Birmingham. I pity them. I think they’re wrong, but still I pity them. By choosing to live by religion-imposed rules, they narrow their world-view, by imposing those views on others, they isolate and ostracise themselves. In the current fragile-fractured society in the UK, it wouldn’t take much for the UKIP contingent to correlate the Sharia stance in Brunei with ‘all Muslims’, if only it didn’t run the risk of them ‘catching gayness’.

‘Exposed to’ was one of the phrases used. I’m not infectious. My son is ‘pansexual’, whatever that is because he just IS, he had a hetero-normative upbringing, one ‘Mummy’ and one ‘Daddy’ with a marriage certificate signed and sealed long before he was conceived. (He called us ‘Mum’ and ‘My Mum’ for ages, amusing, but it didn’t stop him observing his Dad’s ‘Wahey, look at the tits on that!’ mentality, or his Granddad’s insistence that women were weak-and-feeble little things, that needed to be looked after. Hardly surprising that he never had a girlfriend at school, we must have seemed confusing creatures to him.) His Dad, for all his faults, wasn’t maliciously homophobic, he did have some gay and lesbian acquaintances, but he also engaged in the derogatory banter that’s ‘expected’ in the circles he moved in. Porn-lesbians were titillating, real-lesbians less-so for him, he had defended his gay friends growing up, but still used ‘bummer’ and such as insults.

Children do need to be ‘exposed to’ the undisputed fact that not all relationships are heterosexual, and that needs to happen when they’re still at the “Oh, right, can I have a biscuit?” stage. To say otherwise is immoral, because it allows the discrimination and hostility to creep into the lives of those children, with nothing to counter it. It is absolutely fine, and fair for people to have an opinion on homosexuality, bisexuality, fixed-or-fluid gender, what is not fine or fair is for them to impose their opinion on others as a fact. Again, homosexuality is not a criminal offence in the UK, or a mental disorder, some people find it a distasteful notion, and therefore deem it ‘wrong.’ If it’s being practiced consensually, between adults, and ‘not frightening the horses’, it can’t really be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it just is. ‘Moralising’ sexual preference (unless it’s for children or animals, or any other non-consensual practice, I’m not going to look them up, my search history is dubious enough as it is.) is harmful. There are gay Christians, lesbian Muslims, asexual people of ‘all faiths and none’, and myriad combinations of everything else. To refuse to acknowledge that is at best ignorant, and at worst incredibly damaging.

I don’t like baked beans. Some people do, some people are indifferent. I’ll eat them if I have to, but I’d prefer not to. What I won’t do is insist that other people don’t eat baked beans, because I think they’re ‘wrong’. (I actually think they’re goblin-shit, disgusting orange lumpy things, with a terrible habit of sticking to the back of the fork, and ending up in the washing-up bowl, but that’s just me.) Whether I eat baked beans or not doesn’t impact on anyone else. Neither does whatever I get up to in the privacy of my own bedroom. I’m not going to go about the place defacing baked beans cans in the supermarket, or hurling abuse at people I see eating baked beans. I’m not going to go to anyone’s house, and dump their beans-on-toast in the bin, I just don’t like beans. I’ve outed myself as bean-ist, bean-ophobic. I could claim that I have a ‘moral objection’ to baked beans, and start a campaign to ban them. How ridiculous would that be?

Nobody taught me to dislike baked beans, in the same way as nobody taught me to have something of an ambiguous attraction to males and females. I’m ‘greedy’, because I can find either/or equally appealing. Or neither, depending on circumstances. I’m not stealing your beans, or forcing you to eat beans, my sexual identity has absolutely no impact on anyone but the person I’m with. I’m no more a ‘predatory lesbian’ than I am a ‘cougar’, chasing down anything with a pulse in order to satiate my ‘dubious’ desires. (Anyone pearl-clutching about the fact that I worked in a school, and might have ‘exposed’ myself to children, it only ever came up once in 14 years. “Miss, I think I might be bi, what are you?” “I’m not really anything, apart from ‘me’, and that’s all you have to be.” ever so slightly duplicitous, but I didn’t want the girl to think it was compulsory to ‘pick a side’ at the age of 13.)

There will be children in those classrooms in Birmingham, and across the UK who will end up being not-heterosexual. There will be children with two ‘mums’ or two ‘dads’, invisible-erased under the ‘moral’ proclamation of ‘normality’. Yes, it is the majority-norm, but it isn’t the only option, and insisting that it should-be, citing ‘morality’ is regressive, and harmful. It could, potentially, be the start of a slippery slope, if it’s ‘morally justified’ not to even mention homosexuality, what next? Whose morals carry the greater weight, and how should they be imposed on others?

As others have pointed out, there would be outcry if it was another-other that had been cited as a moral objection. It is illegal to discriminate on grounds of religion, or ethnicity, or gender, disability OR sexual orientation. That a proportion of the population find homosexual practices distasteful does not mean that they are ‘immoral’, any more than a mixed-race marriage, or a couple where one partner was raised Jewish, and the other Catholic. The ‘question’ shouldn’t have needed to be asked. It isn’t a ‘question’ in any sense other than the rhetorical, no amount of hiding behind religious dogma framed as morality makes it a valid question. I respect the rights of others to have views that differ from mine, but the perceived victory of this ‘moral’ argument makes me uneasy. If a parent-protest about homosexuality can cause a school to (temporarily) cease part of the curriculum, what’s next? ‘History is written by the victors’ comes to mind, how many backward-steps before the whole SRE curriculum is deemed immoral, what with some groups objecting to sex before marriage, why should children be ‘taught’ about reproduction, healthy relationships, and bodily autonomy? They’ll find out when they’re married.

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