Giving Offense Today
The Polish Ministry of Education has removed a passage from a new school textbook related to sexuality in modern times, due to public criticism of its offensiveness.
Here (and I apologize in advance for assaulting your innocence with such smut) is the offending passage:
Increasingly sophisticated methods of separating sex from love and fertility lead to the treatment of sex as entertainment and fertility as human production, one could say breeding. This raises a fundamental question: Who will love the children thus produced?
No doubt you are outraged. Appalled. How dare anyone suggest, let alone in a textbook designed for young people feeling hormonal confusion and trying to find a path of life, that the modern social transformation of our innate sexual impulses into mere sources of physical amusement unrelated to matters of love and procreation is likely to lead to an increasingly mechanistic or utilitarian view of reproduction, and in turn to result in children born without loving and devoted parents!
The next thing you know, these hateful reactionaries in the Polish Ministry of Education will be suggesting that life as a child of divorce is not a beautiful and desirable symbol of freedom, and that a child’s parents should not cavalierly prioritize their individual fulfillment over considerations of their child’s psychological health. Or that doctors and teachers should not have the authority to guide children into life-altering surgeries, sexual experimentation, or mind-altering drug treatment programs without parental interference. Or that governments should not decide which children are worthy or unworthy of being allowed to be born, on the basis of prenatal testing and an expert panel’s prejudgments about the “quality of life” possible with various medical conditions. Or that growing up with an identifiable and respectable father in one’s life is a positive and irreplaceable influence in the process of moral and social development.
Is this the slippery slope the Polish government has set itself upon? Is the Ministry of Education truly prepared to stand up and spell out the essential hatred at the core of its messaging on sex, love, and reproduction, namely — let us say it once, shamefully and quietly, before the State mercifully bans these ugly thoughts forever — that the private family, founded in the love between two adults of reproductive age, and roiling with intimate and complex passions of all sorts, is a socially beneficial institution, and not to be lightly dispensed with in favor of the easy comfort of interchangeable attachments and transitory pleasures?
Let such horrifying and life-hating sentiments be banished from the public square as soon as possible in the names of Community, Identity, and Stability, here in the all-important founding years of our dear World State.
