Speaking on the Today programme about communities who were objecting to their primary-school aged children being taught the presently proposed form of relationship education, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the ex-Ofsted chief, made the following astonishing, and profoundly shocking, statement. He said, “These people, who have very conservative views, sincerely held, have also got to understand that they’re living in this country with the values that this country holds and they’ve got to balance these two issues.” This remark has the unavoidable corollary: “if they don’t do that they shouldn’t be living in this country.” Who on earth does this man think he is speaking about and speaking to? Who are “these people” he’s referring to? Well, Sir Michael, I am one of them. I wholeheartedly espouse the views they put forward and completely uphold the objections they are making. My family arrived in this country in the entourage of Eleanor of Aquitaine; are you suggesting I should go back there?
He was undoubtedly directly referring in his remarks to the Muslim community. First of all he should, and probably does, know that many of those he is talking about have been here for three, four and even five generations. How long, for goodness sake, does it take to become a fully fledged British citizen who has an unalienable right to be “living in this country” whatever they feel? And secondly, “these people” are, anyway, not just Muslims. There are millions of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and other ordinary folk who feel just the same way and do not want their young children to be taught “relationship education” in the way currently proposed by the education authorities.
No one is suggesting that people in this country do not have the legal right to live in same-sex sexual relationships – they certainly do – but many, many people do sincerely believe that it is not right to do so. In the same programme the presenter said to Sir Michael Wilshaw that one of the objectors interviewed had said, “Really we don’t accept homosexuality as a valid sexual relationship to have.” His reply was, “That’s wrong, that’s absolutely wrong.” What right does Wilshaw have, on the basis of a few decades of scientific theorising and liberal lawmaking, to set himself up as an authoritative moral arbiter contradicting several millennia of deeply held moral criteria, scrutinised and upheld by many of the greatest minds of human history?
It is only thirty years since Margaret Thatcher introduced her Section 28 legislation, outlawing the promotion of homosexuality in schools, proclaiming it to be “a pretend relationship”. She did not do this on the basis of propagating an extreme right wing opinion, she did it because it was a sure-fire vote winner. In other words she was pandering to the huge number of British voters that she knew held the same sentiments she did. This was just thirty years ago. So Wilshaw’s “values that this country holds” are actually of very recent origin. Indeed many of the grandparents of the “these people” he was alluding to had already been here for twenty years before that happened so how can their descendants be accused of holding un-British values?
Of course, it is vital that all British children are made aware, at an appropriate age, of the fact that same-sex relationships, and other gender related issues, are absolutely legitimately part and parcel of the social environment of the country in which we live and must be accepted as such; but it is also “wrong, absolutely wrong” to stipulate that they, I, and many millions more people of this country should be forced to go against deeply held religious and other beliefs and definitively affirm that such things are morally right. And that is precisely what this new type of relationship education is hell-bent on doing.
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