Australia: Marxism and Homosexuality -gender fluidity
It has not been a good week for avowed Marxist
and Safe Schools Coalition co-founder Roz Ward who is now under suspension from
her university job.
She earlier resigned from a Victorian
Government committee following the leak of her Facebook post criticising the
Australian flag as “racist”.
New Matilda reports that she has been stood down by Latrobe University for
having “undermined public confidence in … you as a person associated with the
Safe Schools Program.” Further, her conduct has “damaged the reputation of the
Safe Schools Program and aligns the Safe Schools program with views that have
nothing to do with the program, and its message and content.”
As one Christian commentator has noted: “Raise
a legitimate complaint about what our national flag represents … and all hell
breaks loose.” Yet as David Ould also points out,”this lady has pushed a really
awful political agenda upon our schools and she was untouchable.”
Suddenly the debate over the Safe School Coalition seems old-fashioned. Gender fluidity – the idea that gender is socially determined – has given the controversy a sense of being novel.
Initial concern about the school curriculum that claimed to make
schools safe for LGBTI students was that it smuggled in a hefty dose of
ideology.
But as criticism emerged of Roz Ward, co-founder of the Victorian
Safe Schools Coalition, as a “Marxist”, things are sounding very 1950s. And
critics of the programme are sounding like cold war museum pieces.
Ward has resigned from an advisory role with the Victorian
Government after The
Australian newspaper discovered a post on her
Facebook page: “Now we just need to get rid of the racist Australian flag
on top of state parliament and get a red one up there and my work is
done.” The post captioned a picture of the rainbow flag hoisted over the
Victorian Parliament as the Premier, Daniel Andrews, made an apology to the
LGBTI community for past discrimination, which included prison terms
served for homosexual acts.
Roz Ward -Ward’s resignation occurred after she was approached by the paper
to comment on her post. She resigned before the story could be published in the
next day’s paper.
But Ward was being true to her convictions. A red flag over the
parliament building in Spring Street would be better. She happens to be a
Marxist.
Online Opinion reports
that Ward told the 2015 Melbourne Marxism Conference “To smooth the
operation of capitalism, the ruling class has benefited, and continues to
benefit, from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender
identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
“Both serve to break the spirits of ordinary people, to consume
our thoughts, to make us accept the status quo and for us to keep living or
aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and
families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in
those units.”
In the period of revolutionary fervour in Soviet Russia, before
Stalin’s purges accompanied a more conservative view of family, some extremely
radical experiments were carried out. An extreme example was the abolition of
the family home in the city of Sotsgorod. The manifesto for this new town
proposed the gradual abolition of the family itself. “The ever-increasing drive
toward collectivization of life impels us to build houses in an entirely
different way than they have been up to this time and as they are still
constructed in capitalist countries, where the basic economic unit is the
family, each with its individual economy.”
Roz Ward is true to the spirit of communism that existed before
Stalin. So in one sense a certain amount of red-baiting based on this
match between Ward and early communism is justified on the basis of
truth. But it might be worth noting that both large-scale communist
societies, Russia and China, held to traditional marriage for most of
their history.
If Roz Ward has Marx and Lenin as allies, supporters of
traditional marriage have Stalin and Mao. But the issue of contemporary
Australia’s view of gender won’t be answered by pointing out that one advocate
for gender fluidity, however prominent, is a Marxist.
In the same way, pointing out that an advocate for traditional
marriage is a Christian won’t win the argument either. Many Australians are
cynical of any “ism”, Christianity sadly included. At one time respect for
Christianity was high enough to have an effect. No longer.
Red-baiting won’t be enough to win the gender wars. Most
Australians will see Marxism as a quirkily old-fashioned belief. The problem is
that many Australians now see Christianity the same way.
In a key article, “The Left won the Culture War. Will they be
merciful?” published this week in the Washington Post the real situation facing
conservative Christians is laid bare. A well-respected conservative Christian
leader, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
is quoted thus: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going
to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.” He added, “Christians
must adapt to the changed cultural circumstances by finding a way ‘to live
faithfully in a world in which we’re going to be a moral exception.’ ”
Another high-profile Baptist leader Russell Moore wrote in
the Post:
“Christianity doesn’t need ‘family values’ to flourish. In fact, the church
often thrives when it is in sharp contrast to the cultures around it.”
No matter how accurate the label of “cultural Marxism” might
be for Roz Ward, the real issue facing Christians is that our culture has
shifted. Sexual minorities now have real cultural power. Australians on the
whole won’t be buying into Roz Ward’s cultural Marxism, but they will want
to be more tolerant of the LGBTI communities.
Red-baiting won’t cut it. The real challenge for Christians is to
live in a new community, as a minority. Not a Soviet society (Sorry, Roz
Ward, no Red Flag) but one that waves a Rainbow one.
