Category Archives: Liberal

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. (Marion S. Trikosko/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Early in the twentieth century, a subset of American Protestants began to tour the globe. They also built international NGOs and created new connections with their fellow believers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the process, these ecumenical Protestantssometimes called liberal or mainline Protestantstransformed American domestic politics from the 1920s to the 1960s. Inspired by its global connections, this influential religious community helped create the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it mobilized politically in support of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society, and anti-Vietnam War protests. In the same way that the rise of the Christian Right cannot be understood apart from the mobilization of evangelicals, the rise of American liberalism at mid-century cannot be understood without a historical account of the global political mobilization of American liberal Protestants.

Ecumenical Protestants led the charge in bringing international human rights into the domestic politics of the United States. In doing so, they revitalized American conversations around race, the economy, and U.S. foreign relations. They also unwittingly helped create the politically polarized nation that exists today. The polarization of American religious groups into liberal and conservative camps occurred long before the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s, since the political activism of ecumenical Protestants helped realign religious communities into political coalitions. In some important ways, we are living in the world ecumenical Protestants helped create.

In the middle of the twentieth century, ecumenical Protestants fighting segregation and economic inequality were wedded to a position-paper liberalism that emphasized issuing statements and creating consensus. But by the 1960s and 1970s, a new spirit of activism intensified divisions along the fault lines that emerged in earlier decades. While protests and sit-ins worsened generational divides and intensified the rift between liberals and the Left, still more criticism came from the Right. Political conservatives, evangelicals, the laity, and many Southerners grew increasingly alarmed as the ecumenical National Council of Churches encouraged protests against the Vietnam War, segregation, and poverty with unprecedented vigor. Meanwhile, the World Council of Churches turned sharply against colonialism. The gap in values between ecumenical leaders and ordinary churchgoers became extraordinarily wide. One mid-1960s poll, which was gleefully promoted by evangelicals, reported that on civil rights, 67 percent of [National Council of Churches general] assembly delegates thought change was proceeding too slowly, whereas 70 percent of average Americans thought it was going too fast. The gap was as wide for the Vietnam War. Fifty-two percent of National Council of Churches delegates wanted US troops withdrawn from Vietnam, but only 18 percent of Americans did. In fact, 55 percent of Americans advocated increased bombings in Vietnam, according to the poll. Most devastatingly, it appeared that Protestants who attended church regularly were more conservative on these issues than Americans who rarely went to religious services.

By the 1970s and 1980s, gender and sexuality became a more pressing issue and drove a wedge between ecumenical Protestants, the laity, and evangelicals. Ecumenical leaders had never championed womens rights with the same intensity as they had the United Nations or desegregation. But they had lent support for birth control, sex education, and sometimes even spoke up in support of interracial marriage. After the rise of feminism in the 1960s, and especially the legalization of abortion following the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, gender became an intensely debated topic among ecumenical Protestants. The role of women in church and family life, abortion, the AIDS epidemic, and homosexuality became some of the most pressing and divisive issues for ecumenical Protestant leaders. Like the political controversies at mid-century, the fault lines were similar, with ecumenical leaders largely accommodating the demands of feminists and LGBTQ groups, while evangelicals made the patriarchal heterosexual family and opposition to abortion the hallmarks of their political identity. The big difference at the end of the twentieth century, compared to earlier decades, was that many Protestants in the Global South supported a conservative line on gender and stood against the liberal leadership of ecumenical Protestant denominations. The more recent debates about gay clergy led to the split of the United Methodist Church, a further blow to the ecumenical movement. New York Methodist bishop Thomas Bickerton woefully observed in 2020 that the line in the sand over homosexuality had turned into a canyon.

For ecumenical Protestant leaders, political and theological divisions were exacerbated by demographic changes in their churches. Among the most significant of these changes was the exodus of youths from ecumenical churches and the aging of their congregations. Some Protestant youths, who turned further to the left than their elders, remained faithful members of their denominations. But, beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating in the following decades, many ecumenical Protestant youths left their denominations altogether. They were shaped by the values promoted by national Protestant leaders but did not find those values expressed in their home churches. Many young activists sought out secular groups, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or Amnesty International, which better expressed their religiously motivated ethical commitments to human rights than did Methodist, Congregationalist, or Presbyterian churches. Others, encouraged by the religious pluralism promoted by ecumenical institutions, explored other outlets for their faith or simply stopped believing. Although they were shaped by the values and politics of ecumenical Protestantism, some of these young people left the churches in which they grew up and never returned.

Evangelicals held on to their young members, at least for a time, and Catholic churches were replenished by immigrants, while ecumenical Protestant denominations began shrinking in the late 1960s. The term mainline Protestant came into use in the 1960s and quickly became synonymous with decline. To the present day, these congregations are growing smaller and older with each passing year. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014 ecumenical Protestants (which Pew calls mainline Protestants) constituted only 14.7 percent of the population, down from 18.1 percent in 2007 and nearly 30 percent of the population in the early 1970s. As churches shrank, the average churchgoer aged. The number of Methodists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians over the age of fifty rose by 10 percent between 1957 and 1983. As younger and more progressive members of ecumenical Protestant churches left, congregations sometimes became more conservative. Today, slightly more ecumenical Protestant churchgoers identify as Republicans than as Democrats. As churches became more conservative, they began withholding funds from activist organizations like the National Council of Churches, which now struggles with financial shortfalls.

As telling as these statistics are, what ecumenical Protestants have lost cannot be measured by numbers alone. Most crucially, ecumenical Protestants lost control of the cultural capital of Christianity to the Christian Right. From the 1920s to the 1960s, ecumenical Protestants had commanded the attention of the press, the sympathy of Americas political elites, and a popular understanding that their specific religious tradition was at the heart of American democracy and represented the best hope for a more just and peaceful world. While historians have rightly celebrated the decline of Protestant hegemony and the burgeoning religious pluralism that followed, they have not fully accounted for the ways in which ecumenical Protestants used their privilege at mid-century and the effects that had on the United States and beyond. Ecumenical Protestants wielded their power in surprising ways, by choosing to fight racial injustice, poverty, and imperialism. These very initiatives were partly responsible for their sudden loss of status in American public life, which would be ceded to evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

Evangelical Protestants, in particular, positioned themselves as Christianitys defenders against the hostile forces of political and theological liberalism, which they viewed as a slippery slope to secularism. The modern evangelical movement was born in 1942, with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in the same year that ecumenical Protestants launched the World Order movement. Since that moment, it has been a Janus-faced movement, with Billy Graham representing the polite, purportedly apolitical wing, and Carl McIntire leading the dissenting, anti-ecumenical wing. At first, the evangelical movement was modeled on the ecumenical movement: the National Association of Evangelicals was inspired by the Federal Council of Churches, and the evangelical Christianity Today was modeled on the ecumenical Christian Century. But evangelicals were also innovators who sought out new ways to gain the publics attention. Soon, new models of worship, like megachurches and TV ministries, helped propel evangelicals to new heights and gave platforms to their more radical activists. The fundamentalist wingled by Jerry Falwell in the 1970sbecame the public face of evangelicalism as this religious group became a major player in Republican politics. Internationally, evangelicals expanded their missionary outreach in the 1970s, while ecumenical Protestants had pulled back because of concerns about cultural imperialism.

The evangelical movement in the 1970s was the mirror image of ecumenical Protestantism: It policed racial boundaries, attacked welfare programs, and voiced support for the Vietnam War and for South Africas apartheid government on anti-communist grounds. None of this was new. The political orientation and alliances of evangelicalism had been shaped, in part, in the 1940s in reaction to what ecumenical Protestants were doing, placing evangelicals on a path that led from opposition to the United Nations and human rights to support for Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Despite the best efforts of their leaders, however, evangelicals could not replicate the cultural and political authority that the Protestant establishment had wielded at mid-century. Evangelicalism is politically effective but its power is derived partly from its partisanship. So long as religious pluralism remains an accepted norm in the United States, it is hard to imagine evangelicalism becoming more than it is now: one group among many competing for public influence.

It was no coincidence that American conservatism and American evangelicalism rose together, just as it was not coincidental that American liberalism and American ecumenism had risen together at mid-century. Ecumenical Protestants supported economic reform from Roosevelts New Deal to Johnsons Great Society. They took part in anti-racist activism beginning during World War II and proved to be reliable allies for the NAACP and for the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Less successfully but still significantly, ecumenical Protestants worked to diminish anti-communism, transcend the Cold War, and reduce the arms buildup in the United States.

Ecumenical Protestantism was at the heart of mid-century liberalisms rise and fall. This was the case because ecumenical Protestants were important players in liberal politics. It was also the case because they had tied their political initiatives so closely with their theology, thereby entangling religious and political battles in new ways. Ecumenical Protestants avoided partisanship, and it was partly their ties to the liberal wings of the Democratic and Republican parties that made mid-century liberalism as durable as it was. They worked alongside a group that historians call the New Deal coalitionan unstable alliance between Jews, African Americans, working-class European ethnics, and southern whites backing the Democratic Party. They also worked with liberal Republicans to press their agenda. The New Deal coalition came apart in the 1970s along many of the racial, regional, and economic fault lines that ecumenical Protestant human rights activism had widened. Moreover, many of the organizations that had supported mid-century liberalism began to collapse. Just as ecumenical Protestants faced declining numbers and rebellion among their ranks, so too did some labor unions and civil rights organizations. To take one example, in the same way as the laity rebelled against the political initiatives of ecumenical leaders, so too did workers in the 1970s rebel against the actions of union leaders.

The ecumenical Protestant leaderships move away from consensus politics, and the unpopularity of their views with churchgoers, helped make it possible for evangelicals to capture the Republican Party and move it rightward. Divisions in the United States greatly sharpened in the 1960s and 1970s over segregation, affirmative action, and the Vietnam Warbut also, as this book has shown, over religion. These divisions realigned American politics and created an opening for the rise of modern conservatism. Ecumenical Protestantism contributed to the rise of liberalism at mid-century, and the religions decline accelerated the decline of political liberalism in the 1970s.

But the story of mainline decline is misleading partly because it misses the political work ecumenical Protestants have doneand continue to dothat shapes our world today. The most obvious example is that the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, along with dozens of denominations and thousands of religious groups, continue to pursue a progressive political agenda. Leading voices calling for racial justice continue to come from ecumenical denominationsfigures like Disciples of Christ minister William Barber and United Church of Christ minister Traci Blackmon. Liberal politicians, like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, continue to be shaped by an ecumenical Protestant heritage. They are joined by the many people whose values were shaped by their Protestant upbringing but who are no longer churchgoers. Although they get less attention than evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants and post-Protestants continue their political work in towns and cities across the nation, in the nations capital, and at the United Nations.

Inspired by ecumenism and the political doctrine of globalism, ecumenical Protestants sought to reshape the world at mid-century. By bringing international ideas to bear on domestic politics, ecumenical Protestants assured that their global gospel would have its most dramatic impact on the United States. Their human rights activism would politicize and transform religious life in America. But their mobilization also had repercussions well beyond their churches. It reshaped American liberalism and polarized U.S. politics in ways that reverberate into the present day.

Gene Zubovich is assistant professor of history at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and a 2021-22 Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. He is the author of Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States. Follow him on Twitter: @genezubovich

Excerpted fromBefore the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States,by Gene Zubovich 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Liberal Protestants and the Polarization of the US - Religion & Politics

While thinking about the faculty vote, anticipated for this Spring, to shift Harvard College to a system of previous-term course registration, I remembered a faculty discussion about general education. Should requirements be distributed across fields of knowledge, or were some subjects more important than others? Or was it wrong to organize by content at all would it perhaps be a better idea to teach scientists how humanists think, and vice versa?

One colleague offered a simple principle cutting through such abstractions: We should teach them what we do. Education, he argued, emerges from the offerings of faculty and academic departments. The mission and scope of the University is the aggregated expertise of the faculty, so we should get the students to follow us as we ply our scholarly trade.

Previous-term registration would be, at long last, the victory of this faculty-centric view of education.

Caricatures of the preregistration debate are available to suit the audience. One poses it as a battle between administrative convenience and student liberty. Another has it as institutional dedication to high-quality education faced off against student pettiness and unreliability. Its hard to get past the rhetoric and hypocrisy on both sides without going back to first principles. What is college for? Without any apparent forethought, Harvard has for years been on a path to change its answer to that question. Previous-term registration is another step.

Harvards view used to be that undergraduate education was about discovery. Students are admitted to no department or major; they have the entire first year and more to learn about academic offerings and to settle on a concentration. It has been considered a mark of personal growth to choose a concentration different from the one on your Harvard application.

And under the Harvard model, a concentration was not the defining center of undergraduate education anyway. A liberal education an education on becoming a free adult was a voyage of self-discovery. Its success could not be judged by college honors; it could be evaluated only at the end of life. Education was, as President James B. Conant put it, what was left after everything that had been learned was forgotten.

Classroom learning was only a piece of this liberal education; for many Harvard students, however much they may have valued their academic experience, extracurriculars were more meaningful experiences. My own career began as a term-time job I had never touched a computer until I fibbed my way into a programming job in William James Hall. I am far from unique in this scenario: Our understanding of life inside Russia today is heavily informed by a New York Times reporter who cut his teeth writing for The Crimson about general education.

Graduate education is sharply different. Given the need to earn a living in their chosen mtier, graduate students must be trained according to professional standards; students of the professions need constraint, not freedom. This view of education as training has, by degrees, crept into the College. Social forces questions about the value of higher education, anxiety about financial security, the national student debt crisis (its limited impact on Harvard graduates notwithstanding) have further contributed to a careerist view of college.

Previous-term registration is the natural extension of this career-focused approach to undergraduate education. Especially for first-year students, preregistration makes educational sense only if you think students should arrive knowing what they want to study and college should help them study it.

The faculty-centric view of undergraduate education, that the purpose of university education is for faculty to teach students what we do, is also aligned with previous-term registration. Its not only the scientists who can be charged with treating curious undergraduates as committed acolytes of their discipline. Professors in the social sciences or humanities who greet students searching for meaning in life with lessons on the esoteric vocabulary of their scholarly field are transferring the spirit of their graduate program into undergraduate education.

Some will find me the hypocrite here isnt the growth in the applied sciences the biggest factor in the professionalization of the college? Its not so simple. The serendipity that brought many Computer Science students to the field will, regrettably, be rarer in the future, but SEAS will have no enrollment problems under previous-term registration. The consequences for the humanities will be far worse. For every prospective English concentrator who stays in the field because concentration preferences will be stickier under preregistration, two will not show up in English courses at all, they and their families having focused, at home over the summer before their first year, on the importance of courses they associate with material return. Search algorithms will guide them straight to the courses featuring the right words no worries about distraction by academic curiosity. Other algorithms will efficiently ration the seats in capped courses among the petitioning students.

Previous-term registration will make matters cleaner and more orderly; no more messy experiences like the one that a few years ago horrified a student newly arrived from France. What I considered joyful first-week energy he thought appallingly disrespectful, with students lugging their bicycles through the classroom while I was lecturing. Welcome to Harvard, and to America, I told him. You can do what you want here, and that is the way we like it.

Harry R. Lewis 68 is the Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science and former Dean of Harvard College.

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Preregistration is the Enemy of Liberal Education | Opinion - Harvard Crimson

Rachel Williams has been named the new dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts(UNCSA), effective July 1, Chancellor Brian Cole has announced.

Rachel Williams

Williams, an artist, teacher and advocate who has experience in visual arts, feminist theory, womens issues, and community engagement,comes to UNCSA after more than two decades at the University of Iowa where she is associate professor and department chair of Gender, Womens and Sexuality Studies and Studio Art. Williams will oversee a full-time faculty of 14 in the academic division that offers a variety of liberal arts courses in formats ranging from traditional lectures and seminars to project- and studio-based courses for student-artists attending the university in the five arts schools (Dance, Design & Production, Drama, Filmmaking, and Music).

We are so fortunate to have Rachel joining us to lead our Division of Liberal Arts at UNCSA, said Chancellor Cole. Rachel not only has a passion for and individual talent in the arts, but she is also prolific in her scholarly research and formidable in her field. Her deep experience and connections will only serve to further enrich the arts education we offer our student-artists.

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Patrick J. Sims added, Rachel has a strong commitment to student needs and demonstrated achievement and advocacy in the EDIB (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging) space, as well as being passionate about liberal arts. As a native North Carolinian, she knows our state well and is looking forward to building closer connections to other UNC System schools. She is a strong collaborator whom I know will not only forge connections between liberal arts and the arts schools but also with the community at large.

Williams said,Educating future leaders in the arts is one of my passions. The opportunity to serve UNCSA is a dream come true. I am very excited to collaborate with the gifted faculty, staff and students to support and create cutting-edge learning and engagement opportunities in the Division of Liberal Arts."

Educating future leaders in the arts is one of my passions. The opportunity to serve UNCSA is a dream come true. I am very excited to collaborate with the gifted faculty, staff and students to support and create cutting-edge learning and engagement opportunities in the Division of Liberal Arts.

She added, Artists are leaders who reflect, reimagine and create solutions. Through their work, they bring attention to issues, make our lives more livable and help to solve the problems of the world.

Williams received a B.F.A. in painting and drawing from East Carolina University, and a Ph.D. in art education and an M.F.A. in studio art from Florida State University. She is associate professor of Gender, Womens and Sexuality Studies and Studio Art at the University of Iowa, where she has worked since 1999 and is currently serving a second term as chair. She also served as the university ombudsperson in the office of the president.

An area of focus in Williams scholarly research has been women in prison, and she has worked with incarcerated women as an artist, scholar and teacher since 1994. American alternative/single creator comics and graphic novels have been a focus of her creative scholarship. She was part of a team that received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Racial Reckoning and Social Justice Through Comics in 2022-23.

Williams writing appears in Southern Cultures, Meridians, the Journal of Arts Management Law and Society, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Feminist Studies, and Visual Arts Research. She is also the author of Teaching the Arts Behind Bars (Northeastern U. Press, 2003); Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso Press, 2021); and Run Home If You Dont Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (UNC Press/Duke Center for Documentary Studies, 2021). Her current research focuses on intersecting systems of oppression, gender, race, sexuality, and arts-based research.

Williams succeeds Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Ph.D., who has served as interim dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at UNCSA since July 1, 2021, following Dean Wilcox, who served as dean from 2012-2021. The national search was facilitated by Isaacson-Miller and led by Vice Provost and Dean of Student Affairs Tracey Ford, Ed.D., and Liberal Arts faculty member Rosemary Millar, Ph.D., who served as co-chairs of the search committee.

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Rachel Williams named dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at UNCSA - UNCSA - UNCSA

The Liberal Party is running a snappy advertising campaign on TV and social media called Look at the facts. Overprinted at the top is the claim Australias recovery is leading the world.

The 30-second video makes nine assertions. According to my count, one is correct, two are substantially deceptive and six are blatant lies. Heres my examination of each claim.

The first graph depicts GDP compared to pre-COVID, indicating this refers to economic growth. But claiming Australia is still a leader on this metric is quite false.

Choose what you pay and your level of coverage.

For country comparisons, economists use annual GDP growth, which is recorded for all advanced economies four times a year. We have the numbers for the 2021 December quarter for the 59 very highly developed countries listed by the UNs Development Program (UNDP). These include all OECD members and most International Monetary Fundadvanced economies. Australias modest 4.2% annual GDP growth ranks 43rd out of those 59 economies. Nowhere near leading the world.

The UK, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Estonia, Poland, Hungary and Greece are all above 6%. Ireland, Israel, Malta, Chile, Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey and others are above 9%.

The fine print in the Liberal chart says Dec 2019 to Dec 2021. Hmmm. So it picked an odd two-year time interval for which there is no readily available global database. Why? Could it be that its December 2019 starting point was a particularly disastrous low, with Australia then in a per capita recession before COVID?

Even if we take that weird two-year interval, Australia still lags badly. Yes, Australias GDP rose 3.39% from December 2019 to December 2021, so that figure is accurate. But the others appear fabricated.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis clearly shows the US rise was 10.6%, not 3.2%. Similarly, data for France shows GDP increased 4.27% over the two years, not 0.9%. UK data shows a 5.91% lift since 2019, not a decline.

Damningly, the chart leaves out all advanced economies with higher growth than Australias. These include Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Taiwan, Chile and Turkey.

Of course, we can see why it would go with the falsehood Australias economy is leading the world. The truth Australia ranks 43th out of 59 advanced economies doesnt have quite the same ring to it.

But why would it falsify the data when it knows the economics writers at The Australian Financial Review and The Australian will eviscerate it for the blatant deceptions? Oh, wait

That was once true, but not since the bungled vaccine rollout and the disastrous mismanagement of federal nursing homes.

Australia has lost 4434 lives to COVID this year at a rate of 170 per million. That ranks a dismal 18th among our 59 advanced nations.

The graph in the video above compares Australia with cherry-picked countries close to the epicentres in Europe and the US. A more valid comparison, I would argue, is with advanced nations far from those countries, and using current figures.

Just an absolute barefaced falsehood. The IMF shows general government gross debt as a percentage of GDP for all 59 advanced economies. Easily accessed. In 2012, Labors last full year, Australias debt was 27.5% of GDP and ranked ninth in that list. Not bad. By 2021, debt had ballooned to 62.1%, ranking a miserable 30th. Hence, 29 advanced economies now have less debt than Australia.

Untrue. When the Coalition won office in 2013, Australias jobless rate ranked sixth among OECD member countries. (These are the 38 big free-enterprise economies among the 59 advanced nations.) Australia now ranks a modest 14th, having been overtaken by eight more nations.

The Liberal graph again compares Australia with seven non-comparable nations and ignores the advanced economies beating Australia. These include Norway, which improved employment by 3.11%, Argentina by 3.3%, Cyprus 3.7%, Israel 4.1%, New Zealand 4.3%, the Netherlands 4.5%, Denmark 5.3% and Malta 5.9%.

No it isnt. In 2013, Australia had the worlds best performing economy. It now ranks well outside the worlds top 20. All-time worst economic outcomes since Morrison became treasurer in 2015, as reported by Crikey and others, now number 60.

This would make Donald Trump blush. Last months budget papers showed that from 1969 onwards tax to GDP has been much higher under the Liberals. The highest-taxing administration was John Howards. Morrisons was second highest.

Yes, the headline jobless rate is lower. But you could argue that is due to migration shifting into reverse, to thousands of workers on one hour or zero hours a month, and to the blow-out in the public service not a strong economy.

Apprenticeship numbers have recovered slightly in the past year, but from a low base. Relative to population, apprentices in 2017 and 2018 were the lowest in two decades.

This claim is correct. But thats due to higher population and the larger budget relative to 2013, not sound management.

There we have it. Nine bold claims under the shameless heading Look at the facts. Eight of them are easily disproven by current data from the governments own departments.

Two questions arise: will any mainstream economics reporters do their job and expose these? And will the whoppers succeed again in returning the Coalition?

Crikey is an independent Australian-owned and run outfit. It doesnt enjoy the vast resources of the countrys main media organisations. We take seriously our responsibility to bear witness.

I hope you appreciate our reporting and consider supporting Crikeys work. Join now for your chance at election themed merch.

Peter FrayEditor-in-chief

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The Liberal Party wants us to 'look at the facts'. But just whose facts? - Crikey

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EXCLUSIVE: Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer has authored a new book aimed at exposing how mainstream media outlets keep getting the news wrong and how their newsroom's lack of ideological diversity helped create a "crisis of confidence for the press."

Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under former President George W. Bush, says his new book is a reckoning on why the press continues to lose trust, as well as readers and viewers.

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"What the mainstream press covers is too often wrong and what they fail to cover is too often right," Fleischer said in an interview with Fox News Digital about the forthcoming release of his new book.

Fox contributor Ari Fleischer says most Americans live in a media-created fantasy land. (Broadside Books)

"Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong And Just Doesn`t Care" is being published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The books release date is July 12, 2022, with pre-orders available now.

Fleischersaid he cites example after example in his book of bad reporting, with a chapter dedicated to the New York Times and another to CNN.

"What I really do is let reporters hang themselves with their own words," Fleischersaid.

Instead of neutral reporting, journalists went above and beyond to make a case against former President Trump labeling his statements as blatant "lies" without offering the same treatment to Democrats, Fleischer said.

Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer has authored a new book about media mistakes, titled: "Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong And Just Doesn't Care". (Courtesy of Ari Fleischer)

"I think what motivated a lot of reporters was they saw Donald Trump as an existential threat to America," Fleischersaid. "And they used their power, and they used their perch to do something about it. And in so doing, that helped destroy a lot of trust in the institutions of the press corps."

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Among Fleischer's examples: The COVID-19 lab-leak theory that was initially shunned as conspiracy, the Hunter Biden laptop story that was suppressed by Big Tech and the Trump-Russia collusion story spurred on by the infamous Steele dossier.

"The Steele dossier should have been shunned by every reporter with good instincts," Fleischersaid of the discredited political opposition research compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele alleging an extensive conspiracy between Trump and the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

"Instead, it became a multi-year feeding frenzy, when it turns out it's totally wrong. Contrast that with their coverage of what Joe Biden said about his son Hunter's business partners and business interests. Joe Biden's statements have been contradicted by texts and emails found on Hunter Biden's laptop, but the media suppressed that story. And Big Tech shut down the New York Post for revealing it."

NY TIMES, WASHINGTON POST REPORTING ON HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP AFTER EARLIER DOUBTS PROMPTS MEDIA 'RECKONING'

The American public's trust in the press has been at or near historical lows, according to polls. Just 7% of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" and 29% "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting, according to a 2021 Gallup poll. Combined, that 36% level of confidence is just slightly above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

"The mainstream media is in decline and in denial and both are bad places to be," Fleischersays.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who set up Orbis Business Intelligence and compiled a dossier on Donald Trump, in London where he has spoken to the media for the first time. (Victoria Jones/PA Images via Getty Images)

Outlets like CNN and the New York Times are still salvageable, but it will take hiring reporters and editors who don't sound like college-educated Democrats, according to Fleischer. Journalism schools and newsrooms need to recruit people with views like the other half of America pro-life people, people who carry guns, religious people and more.

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If newsroom decisions involved employees who think differently, some of this bad reporting would have never made it to print or on air, Fleischer argues.

"Journalism has original sin. And the original sin is who becomes a reporter in the first place," Fleischersaid. "And here, journalism has a diversity problem. Their newsrooms don't look like America. They don't sound like America. They sound like half of America. They sound like college-educated, overwhelmingly Democratic voting people."

This is Fleischer's second book. His first was a 2005 memoir about his time in the Bush White House, called "Taking Heat."

Fox News' Andrew Murray contributed to this report.

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Ari Fleischer writes new book on why the liberal media keeps getting the news wrong - Fox News

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A new nonprofit organization Do No Harm is fighting back against radical progressive ideology in the healthcare industry while promoting fairness, equal access, and the best, most personalized treatment for every patient.

"We are a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers united by a moral mission: Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda," the organizations website explains.

THE FIVE FINISHES AS NO. 1 CABLE NEWS PROGRAM, LAURA INGRAHAM OUTDRAWS RACHEL MADDOW FOR TOP SOLO FEMALE

Do No Harm is fighting back against radical progressive ideology in the healthcare industry while promoting fairness, equal access, and the best, most personalized treatment for every patient. (iStock)

Do No Harm chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvanias Perelman School of Medicine, penned a Wall Street Journal piece explaining his nonprofits mission and why he started Do No Harm.

"Healthcare is being infected by the radical ideology that has corrupted education and public safety. But while critical race theory and crime waves have been in the news, the public is largely unaware of medicines turn toward division and discrimination. Americans deserve to know that their health and well-being are at risk," Goldfarb wrote.

"At the heart of this is the claim that healthcare is systemically racistthat most physicians are biased and deliver worse care to minorities. Health disparities do exist among racial groups, but physician bias isnt the cause," Goldfarb continued. "The psychological test at the root of this narrative, the 1998 Implicit Association Test, has been widely discredited, and I know from long experience as a medical educator and practitioner that physicians address the needs of each patient, regardless of skin color. Moreover, attacking physicians is dangerous. It degrades minority trust in healthcare while undermining health outcomes for everyone."

Goldfarb then urged readers to examine whats happening in medical research.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY EXPOSED IN DETAIL IN NEW DOCUMENTARY, 'WHOSE CHILDREN ARE THEY?'

"The National Library of Medicine database shows more than 2,700 recent papers on racism and medicine, which generally purport to show physician bias leading to racial disparities in health outcomes. Yet the most commonly cited studies are shoddily designed, ignore such critical factors as pre-existing conditions, or reach predetermined and sensationalized conclusions that arent supported by reported results. These papers in turn are used to source even more shoddy research. This is a corruption of medical science in service to political ideology," he wrote. "Prominent medical journals are complicit in the crusade against medical professionals they publish piece after piece calling, explicitly or implicitly, for a fundamental change in the medical profession."

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb feels medical schools are "increasingly are preparing physicians for social activism at the expense of medical science," and lowering admission standards. (iStock)

Goldfarb feels medical schools "increasingly are preparing physicians for social activism at the expense of medical science," and lowering admission standards. The result will be "fewer talented physicians providing high-quality care to fewer patients," he wrote.

The New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, The Journal of American Medical Association, American Medical Association and National Library of Medicine are among the publications that have injected political ideology into their work, according to Do No Harm.

"Physicians are being pushed to discriminate," Goldfarb wrote. "These policies and practices have no justification. Theres no credible evidence that physicians are racist or that minority patients will benefit if healthcare is built on a race-based foundation. Common sense says that patients of all colors will suffer. The publics trust in medical institutions, which has already fallen during the pandemic, will fall further and take patient health with it."

Goldfarb feels "healthcare is close to a tipping point," but hes confident most physicians oppose liberal ideology influencing the industry.

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"Many fear speaking out, lest the social-justice mob destroy their careers, but the woke takeover of healthcare will do that anyway. Thats why Im launching Do No Harm, a nonprofit that will help medical professionals and concerned Americans protect and promote the principles at the heart of healthcare: fairness, equal access, and the best, most personalized treatment for every patient," Goldfarb wrote. "Current and future physicians must tell the country that healthcare is being profoundly damaged by a radical and divisive ideology. The health and well-being of every American depend on it."

Do No Harm is seeking to make an impact online, with accounts up and running on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, in addition to its website. The nonprofit will focus on rallying medical professionals to fight far-left ideology and improve the world's best healthcare system.

See more here:

Do No Harm aims to keep liberal ideology out of healthcare: Physicians are being pushed to discriminate - Fox News

This is the first in a two-part series on the major parties Treasury spokespeople. You can read Carol Johnsons profile of Jim Chalmers here.

When Josh Frydenberg was studying law at Monash University, hed tell fellow students he wanted to go into politics and hopefully one day might be prime minister.

He would say it in a jovial fashion, not in an arrogant way, remembers one student from the time. Hed say [to someone], You can be in my cabinet.

The story is instructive: Frydenbergs intensely ambitious nature was forged early, and so was his personal and political style.

Unlike the rest of us, he was always a bit more careful of how he conducted himself.

Hes not remembered for excessive partying or drinking.

This was quite possibly because of his aspirations, but also because of the example of his parents and others in the [Jewish] community.

There was something else too, that went to Frydenbergs first ambition. He was still consumed by his tennis obsession, even though hed given up his dream of becoming a pro after a years full-time tryout after he left school.

Discipline is a cornerstone in Frydenbergs life. As a schoolboy, Frydenberg recalls, I wouldnt go out with my school friends.

His tennis coach, Peter Geraerts, would tell me to run down Toorak Road, in front of my friends, to see what I had to give up for a tennis career.

He was always prepared to put the hard training in mentally and physically, says Geraerts, who started coaching Frydenberg at age 12 or 13, and is still in contact.

Josh Frydenberg playing tennis.Josh FrydenbergThe former student quoted above also keeps in touch.

Ive always found him someone you can have a very robust conversation with and he will listen to different perspectives and on occasion he would change his perspective after listening.

As Treasurer and deputy Liberal leader, Frydenberg is in sight of the prime ministership. But, while he may sooner or later clinch the prize, politics being politics means it could equally turn into a mirage.

So far, the diligent, careful aspirant has had a dream run.

That might seem an odd observation, given the huge challenges of the pandemic. Yet the successful economic response to COVID-19, based on solid Treasury advice, means Frydenberg has been able to boast, in this election campaign, a set of enviable economic numbers, including unemployment at 4 per cent.

Its not a policy place Frydenberg ever thought hed be in. He declared in his maiden speech:

We need to limit the government. Our government is too big. [] my goal is to ensure that government learns to live within its means. [] Less dependence on government makes for a better Australia.

In his early days as Treasurer, the measure of his success was set to be returning the budget to surplus, a target he said unequivocally he would achieve, but then never did.

Reaching budget balance was as far as he got, before COVID turned the economy and the budget pear-shaped.

Although Frydenberg has delivered four budgets (including three in 18 months), independent economist Saul Eslake sees him as a work in progress.

Eslake says a really good treasurer does three things makes good policy decisions, is able to persuade the public of the wisdom of them, and occasionally argues for policy changes that are good for the economy, but might cost votes.

He gives Frydenberg a tick on the first two (though not unqualified), but says he is yet to establish himself as a reformist treasurer.

Hes the best treasurer in the past decade, which is not setting the bar very high. But hes not in Keating or Costellos league, Eslake says.

If he gets another three years as treasurer, he may have the opportunity to improve his ranking on point three. Hes so far barely disturbed the scoring on that.

Warwick McKibbin, professor of economics and public policy at the Australian National University, says Frydenberg has done a good job during the COVID crisis. He has a very good memory and hes good with numbers. He can filter good arguments from bad arguments.

But he doesnt stick his neck out very far. Hes adventurous in asking interesting questions privately, but not willing to push it too far, because hes trying to keep a political position.

He has the potential to understand why you want to reform as leader it would depend on the numbers. His decisions appear to be politically based.

Some reforms have been made, including changes to insolvency arrangements, taking on the tech giants to get them to pay for the news they use, an overhaul of foreign investment arrangements, and more transparency in superannuation.

But he hasnt confronted the big tax and other reform questions on the economists agendas.

Asked whether he thinks big reform is still possible, Frydenberg says: Of course its possible. You cant underestimate how all consuming the pandemic has been. [In future], I think there will be an appetite for [reform], although he adds, I dont buy into the theory we havent reformed.

Frydenberg entered Parliament for the seat of Kooyong (once held by Robert Menzies) in 2010, after one preselection rebuff but a model preparation for a future high-flying Liberal.

Hed been to Oxford and Harvard, worked in banking and been a staffer in the Howard government to Attorney-General Daryl Williams, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, and the prime minister.

Both Downer and Howard became major influences on him. He hadnt been involved in partisan politics at university he did win a big battle for president of the law students society but joined the Liberal Party while working for Williams.

The most intense networker imaginable even Morrison has quipped publicly about this Frydenberg had already an extensive contact list by the time he arrived in the House of Representatives.

Some veteran Liberals quickly marked him out for higher things.

Amanda Vanstone, who had been a minister in the Howard government, attended a Frydenberg fundraiser with Margaret Guilfoyle, a Liberal icon who had been finance minister in the Fraser government. I cant remember her exact words but she effectively said, this guy is part of our future, Vanstone recalls.

Tony Abbott was opposition leader when Frydenberg was elected, and the newcomer was impatient as he looked for promotion.

In the Abbott government he was made parliamentary secretary to the prime minister and later assistant treasurer.

His first real test came in Malcolm Turnbulls second ministry, after the 2016 election.

Frydenberg (minister for resources, energy and northern Australia in the first Turnbull ministry) became minister for the environment and energy, as Turnbull was trying to shift a resistant Coalition towards a better response on climate change and emissions reduction.

Despite all efforts, including solid work by Frydenberg, the exercise ended in political disaster for Turnbull, becoming a major factor in his overthrow.

In the fall of Abbott and then of Turnbull, Frydenberg displayed one quality his colleagues and friends recognise loyalty.

One of Frydenbergs best friends, fellow Victorian Greg Hunt, jumped to Peter Dutton when Dutton challenged Turnbull in 2018.

Frydenberg resisted any such temptation, and was rewarded.

He was approached by colleagues to run for deputy making for a difficult conversation when he had to tell Hunt he was opposing him for that position and won overwhelmingly in the first ballot after Scott Morrison became leader.

That hes not a troublemaker helped Morrison when internal criticism of the PM grew in recent months.

In a Morgan poll in February, Frydenberg was preferred as Liberal leader by 38.5 per cent, Morrison by 31 per cent and Peter Dutton by 12.5 per cent.

Among women, Frydenberg led Morrison 41 per cent to 29 per cent. In Morgans March poll, the margin was 46 per cent to 28.5 per cent, and among women, 47.5 per cent to 28 per cent.

In every election campaign, the treasurer has a big job, especially in a Coalition government, which traditionally wants economic credibility to be centre stage.

This time, Frydenberg is particularly stretched. He is doing much heavy lifting in teal seats where Liberals are under challenge from high profile, well-funded independents and Morrison is a negative.

And he is watching his back against a highly-organised teal campaign in his own seat, which is on a 6.4 per cent margin.

On the Easter weekend, Morrison and Frydenberg locked in a bear hug outside a synagogue in Melbourne, an image that mightnt go down so well in Kooyong, given Morrisons poor personal popularity.

Frydenberg was classed as a conservative in earlier years but seems to have moved to a more centrist position. In 2015, he declared he had changed his stance on marriage equality.

Importantly, his conservatism has always been interlaced with a humanitarian streak derived from the experiences of his family.

His maternal grandparents and their daughters, including his mother Erica, were interned in the Budapest ghetto. Many relatives died in the Holocaust.

Those who know the family well speak of them as warm, supportive and generous, and say his father Harry, a surgeon, and his mother, a psychologist, have been crucial in forging Frydenbergs values.

In his preparation for the political life, Zelman Cowen, Australias second Jewish governor-general, was crucial.

For years Frydenberg visited Cowen for breakfast on Saturday and Sunday. He sang to Cowen, an opera lover, on the night he died in 2011, regularly took flowers to his widow Anna, and has sworn the oath to his various political offices on the Hebrew Bible Cowen gave him.

Frydenberg says:

Zelman was always about integrity, intellectual curiosity. He had a guiding light. He really put me through my paces.

His Jewish identity and heritage are woven through Frydenbergs persona. Besides Cowen, some of his important mentors were Jewish. He chose Monash law school, the favoured choice of Jewish students, over the more prestigious University of Melbourne.

A friend from university days and later, Melbourne businessman Duncan Murray, says his Judaism is part of who he is and part of his brand. He has not shirked from being proud of it.

Frydenberg says: What my Judaism has instilled in me is a love of family, respect for tradition and learning and, of course, the importance of faith.

If Frydenberg reached the top, he would be Australias first Jewish prime minister.

If the government loses, the contest for opposition leader would presumably be between Frydenberg and Dutton.

Judging now, Frydenberg would start favourite against Dutton, who is from the hard right.

Frydenberg showed in winning the deputyship that hes a good harvester of votes within the party. All that networking doesnt go astray.

But the route of opposition leader is not the optimal path for him.

He does not excel at negative campaigning in the way Abbott did, or Dutton does. Perhaps it goes back to that willingness to see another side of things, or a lack of natural aggression.

Also, the first leader after a defeat does not necessarily get to be the one who takes their side to victory. Then again, it would also depend on how close the election result was.

From Frydenbergs perspective, the best way to the prime ministership would be to assume it in government some time in the next term.

That scenario would of course be full of assumptions. It would also mean Frydenberg PM would be asking for a fifth Coalition term at the following election. It would be a fresh face on a wrinkled body.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Original post:

Josh Frydenberg could be the next Liberal Party leader. So who is he? - The New Daily

Ahead of the council elections on May 5, Cardiff's Liberal Democrats have released a manifesto promising more street sweepers, electric charging points and to repair the city's streets with a programme to "fix crumbling roads, pavements and footpaths". The party also promises to build an extra 3,000 council homes in the next decade.

Other pledges include limiting any council tax rises over the lifetime of the next council term to below the Welsh average, supporting vulnerable adults and children and reviewing the current deal with GLL/Better, who run the city's leisure centres, to "ensure that every community is getting the services they need".

In 2017, the Lib Dems won 11 seats, a loss of six on the election before. The ruling party was Labour which took 40 seats, it now has 39 seats. The Conservatives had 20 and now have 21. You can see all our election coverage ahead of May's election here .

Pentwyn Leisure Centre would be reopened and a tourist information centre would be brought back to the city centre.

Read more:More than 70 councillors have already been elected ahead of May's election

Group leader, Rhys Taylor said: "Were optimistic and ambitious for the future of our home and Waless capital city, but the first job of a council must be to get basic public services right. Despite inflation-busting council tax rises and eye-watering levels of borrowing for pet projects, the Labour party running Cardiff council is failing to get the basics right. After a decade of Labour leadership, our capital city has been left without a bus station, waste collections are in chaos, our streets are dirty, our citys heritage has been eroded, woodland and green spaces destroyed, and community facilities written off.

"Our focus will be on cleaner, safer, and happier communities. On making sure everyone has a safe place in Cardiff to call home. On ensuring everyone has access to vibrant green spaces. On affordable, reliable public transport. On creating a new way of listening to residents about your priorities for your communities".

On education, the manifesto says it would "target resources to the most vulnerable learners, provide digital and other equipment so that all pupils have equal access and fund enrichment centres in the school holidays" and ensure enough school places and open schools up to the wider community.

The manifesto makes bold promises on planning too. "We will change the way planning works in Cardiff from tick box consultations by reviewing the method by which consultations are carried out, meaningfully involving and listening to communities. Communities need to be involved from the outset, rather than being presented with a plan agreed behind closed doors. We will ensure that developers pay the section 106 money they have promised, so that affordable housing, playgrounds and infrastructure is funded properly."

And it promises police will tackle anti-social behaviour and a pledge to bring communities together. "We will change the way planning works in Cardiff from tick box consultations by reviewing the method by which consultations are carried out, meaningfully involving and listening to communities. Communities need to be involved from the outset, rather than being presented with a plan agreed behind closed doors. We will ensure that developers pay the s106 money they have promised, so that affordable housing, playgrounds and infrastructure is funded properly."

Continue reading here:

What the Liberal Democrats plan to do for Cardiff if they get into power - Wales Online

The flagbearer for the WA Liberals is now Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, a polarising figure who lacks the retail political skills of Bishop or the influence of Cormann.

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Linda Reynolds lost the significant defence portfolio to Queenslander (and future leadership aspirant) Peter Dutton and has been wounded politically in the fallout of her staffer Brittany Higgins alleged rape.

Melissa Price, who was anonymous as environment minister to the point of caricature, has made a better fist of it as Defence Industries Minister but is overshadowed in the Liberal khaki campaign by Dutton.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt is widely respected and Liberals believe he will hold on to his seat of Hasluck despite Labors best efforts, but at 69 is closer to the end of his parliamentary career than the beginning.

Then theres Ben Morton, the special minister of state who is one of Scott Morrisons closest confidants and in the centre of the Liberal campaign brains trust. The one-time tyro state director of the WA Liberals in the Barnett years, he is like a pig-in-the-proverbial in campaign mode, but his skills are best deployed behind the scenes than out front with voters.

Morton has a knack of framing political contests as choices in terms that connect with voters everyday concerns, but when he was state director of the WA Liberals, he was also blessed with Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swans mining tax, a policy that was anathema to the rock-kicking entrepreneurs out west who showered the Liberals with donations.

That tide has well and truly turned and now it is WA Labor who are overwhelmingly preferred by Perths donor class, property developers chief among them.

A coterie of deep-pocketed Perth identities that has coalesced around residential developer Nigel Satterley and former Ernst and Young partner and now-CEO of disability and human services provider APM Mike Anghie fell out with Colin Barnett in the dying days of his government and is now right in the McGowan corner, with $1000-a-plate pay-for-play fundraising dinners a feature of Labors recent period of local supremacy.

And it is here that McGowan has done so much to put the sword to the once-dominant Liberal branch.

The Premiers extraordinary win at last years WA election erased dozens of Liberal office holders, with the party reduced to just two members of the 59-member Legislative Assembly and seven of the 36-member Legislative Council.

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The Liberals were essentially wiped from their former stronghold north of the Swan River in greater suburban Perth, where WA electoral majorities typically take root.

That doesnt just mean parliamentary dominance at a state level, it also obliterates the Liberals grassroots party infrastructure: paying jobs for party loyalists in electorate offices and the hubs around which volunteer efforts come election time are coordinated.

The rout has been compounded by the partys own dreadful internal dynamics, which the faction Cormann once led now dominated by polarising conservative southern suburbs MLC Nick Goiran, who is seemingly hated by everyone outside of his grouping.

So bad is the acrimony that Goiran threatened defamation action against the authors of a critical election review, and state director Stuart Smith a threat that elicited an apology and the withdrawal of the relevant section.

If the Liberals are a party on the brink and they appear to be it will be for the voters to decide whether to tip them over the precipice.

The action is again centred on Pearce and Swan, which, if Labor won both (a result that is not certain but would see the WA Labor campaign well satisfied with a job well done) would see the party hold seven of WAs 15 seats.

History is on the Liberals side.

Labor has not won more House of Representatives seats in WA than the Liberals since 1990, when Bob Hawke defeated Andrew Peacock, securing eight of 14 in the lower house, and has not won more votes than the Liberals since 1987, when Hawke beat John Howard.

WA swung against Labor, which lost seats, in Paul Keatings 1993 defeat of John Hewson.

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The west also stuck with John Howard in 2007; WA was the only state in which Kevin Rudd lost a seat (with Swan and Cowan swinging to the Liberals as Hasluck swung to Labor for a net loss of one in WA amid gains of 24 seats in the rest of the nation).

But complacency has cost the Liberals dearly of late. Many in the party figured McGowans 2017 win was its low-water mark and the vote would automatically begin to come back in 2021 a disastrous miscalculation.

In an increasingly volatile electorate, nothing can be taken for granted.

Read more here:

Why the Liberals face a fight for survival in battleground WA - WAtoday

Does progress have to mean the sexual liberation of children? Michel Foucault thought so, as did many of the now high-ranking Labour Party members who once supported the Paedophile Information Exchange. Sexual interest in children is hardly unique to the modern world, of course, or indeed the West. Child sex slaves were socially acceptable in ancient Rome, and the longstanding practice of bacha bazi in Afghanistan still sees young boys feminised and abused by adult men.

Nor is paedophilia unique to the progressive Left. Just this week, Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, prompting fellow Tory MP and LGBTQ advocate Crispin Blunt to declare angrily that Khans conviction was a dreadful miscarriage of justice and nothing short of an international scandal.

But its also true that since the sexual revolution, there has been a knocking on the door of progressive respectability by individuals with an intense interest in assisting the sexual development of children, and sometimes as in the case of Foucault questionable motives for doing so. Such activists invariably come armed with the logic of liberalism: using phrases such as agency, consent and education. The resulting queasy blend of pleasure, freedom, education and adolescence burst into flames this week, with news of a theatre production, The Family Sex Show, coming to Bristol that offers relationships and sex education supposedly suitable for ages five and up.

Cue public outrage, Mumsnet up in arms, and a petition to scrap the show that at the time of writing has more than 30,000 signatures. Its a homegrown British version of an increasingly ferocious front in the American culture war in which both sides are entrenched, and convinced of their own righteousness. On one side stand those who argue for ever more extensive sex education in the name of LGBTQ youth and sexual emancipation in general. On the other stand those claiming to defend the authority of parents over their children, which they argue represents childrens best protection against inappropriate adult sexual attention.

So far, this war has raged with characteristically American vigour. Recent examples are legion: Texans in uproarabout pornographic books in schools; school masturbation lessons for six-year-olds; drag queens on Nickelodeon. American conservatives are now pushing back at this efflorescence of sex chat for children, calling the vanguards of kid-friendly sexual emancipation groomers. On a practical front, conservative states have seen a spate of legislation constraining (or seeking to constrain) the nature and extent of sexual content that may legally be delivered to children in schools.

Advocates, meanwhile, are outraged at the groomer epithet. They argue its fine to be gay or kinky or non-binary or whatever, and that all sexual expression is acceptable provided everyone consents. For them, content of this kind simply normalises these perfectly acceptable identities, and helps to spread tolerance while ensuring LGBTQ youth feel represented and supported.

This moral standoff is the logical end-point of a tug-of-war as old as liberalism: the question of who is responsible for shaping children and to what ends. In Roman times, parental well, patriarchal authority over children was absolute, to the point of granting fathers the right to kill their children. It was the Christian faith that first ascribed universal personhood and dignity even to children, limiting the scope of this authority.

Christian teaching, though, still held that children should submit to their parents. It was the liberalising thinkers at the wellspring of modernity who began winkling out people from under the authority of the church and children from under the authority of their parents.

John Locke, one of the original liberal thinkers, argued for the separation of church and state, and its no coincidence that he was also the first parenting pundit. His Some Thoughts Concerning Education was published in 1693, and heavily influenced the next smash-hit parenting guide: Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Emile, written in 1763.

For Locke, education was essential. In his view, of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. Rousseau, meanwhile, was so convinced of its importance that, after concluding the family of his mistress Thrse Levasseur wasnt up to the job of raising the kids he fathered with her, he persuaded her to give them all away to the foundling hospital. In Confessions (1782), Rousseau admitted that he trembled at the thought of entrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. Presumably Rousseau thought the extremely high risk of his children dying in an orphanage a less fearful prospect than seeing his educational ideas poorly executed by the woman he repeatedly impregnated but refused to marry.

In any case, this left both Locke who never fathered children and Rousseau equally free to theorise about education, freedom and human nature, innocent of any hands-on experience with actual children. And this blind spot has cast a long shadow since, for emancipating children is, to say the least, a paradoxical undertaking.

Locke and Rousseau envisaged humans as autonomous, rational and capable of making decisions. But anyone with practical experience of how helplessly dependent a baby is, or how magnificently unreasonable toddlers can be, knows theres considerable ground to cover before you can describe your child as in any way rational or capable of making sensible choices. And getting them to the point where they can do this takes decidedly non-liberal methods, including providing direct moral instruction with the aim of eventually producing an independent, self-governing adult. Liberal citizens capable of making the most of freedom dont just appear in a vacuum; you have to make them.

Emancipating children has another key corollary, too: a reduction in parental authority. This is obviously true at the scale of individual parent-child relations, and is usually a gradual and benign process. As my child grows older, part of my job as a parent is to help her develop independence, which means slowly stepping back from managing all aspects of her life.

Whats perhaps less obvious, though, is that a culture of individual freedom also means defanging parental authority in general. This was tacitly acknowledged by Locke, Rousseau and the innumerable parenting pundits who have emerged by dint of writing books on how to raise ideal citizens. Each parenting manual says, tacitly, that just being the childs parents doesnt make you right by definition. As a parent you have to be doing it right as well, where right is defined by the larger project of shaping ideal citizens to enjoy freedom.

Yet in the centuries since Locke and Rousseau, the scope of those freedoms we consider our birthright has expanded too. This is usually treated as moral progress, but has also happened in no small part thanks to technologies that extend our strength, buttress our weaknesses or give us control where none existed before. In particular, the contraceptive revolution has extended freedom into the terrain of sexual desire.

By severing sex from its material consequences, reproductive technologies took the danger out of desire, allowing us to reimagine sex as a kind of consequence-free leisure activity. After all, once procreation is an optional rather than near-inevitable side-effect of sex, then on the face of it there seems to be no firm argument for preventing freely consenting adults from pursuing sexual pleasure in whichever form they desire.

Leaving aside the merits of this change, making the best of an emancipated world requires us as Locke and Rousseau realised to equip citizens to navigate it. It therefore follows that sex education isnt just an option but a necessity: if you accept the premise that emancipation is good, then sexual emancipation and the free, consenting expression of desire is also good. And given that children need direct moral instruction prior to attaining full liberal citizenship, good liberal parents have an active duty to provide instruction to their children, from the earliest possible age, in the full range of acceptable modern sexual expression.

From this perspective, filling the heads of five-year-olds with information about polyamory, or masturbation, or non-binary identities, isnt a precursor to sexual abuse at all even if its done against the wishes of that five-year-olds parents. Rather, its a vital part of preventing such abuse.

This, then, is the objective The Family Sex Show claims for itself. A Q&A explains that the show was aimed at ages five up because sexual development and behaviour in children starts from birth, and its important that children are supported in their exploratory development, safely and comfortably. To this end, The Family Sex Show proposes an alternative to porn: that is, a show offering intersectional, feminist, non-binary, anti-racist and sex-positive [sic] take on Relationships and Sex Education. This material will, the show promises, use pleasure as a vehicle for consent.

I admit Im less than reassured by the prospect of anyone using pleasure as a vehicle for consent in material aimed at my five-year-old. For if predatory Tories and Romans tell us anything, its that dark desires are an unpleasant constant in (especially male) human nature that no amount of awareness can mitigate.

I have no doubt that The Family Sex Shows erotic evangelism is well-intentioned. But however sincere its objective of helping to educate young people to enjoy modern sexual liberation in a healthily autonomous way, it remains stubbornly true that there is more than one set of reasons why an adult might seek to educate pre-pubescent children about pleasure and consent. Even the best-intentioned educator may still be paving the way for someone more predatory.

So while the term groomer is unfair in the sense that the intent behind most of this infant erotic proselytising really isnt initiating sexual contact with those kids, its also entirely justified. For this is precisely what preschool porn evangelism enables in practice. By normalising the idea that pre-pubescent children should engage with sexual material, The Family Sex Show in practice carries water for genuine paedophiles.

If we want to push back against the liberal syllogism that got us to the point where educators determinedly ignore the obvious slipperiness of this slope, we need to look again at its premises.

Contraceptive technologies are here to stay. But we neednt accept as self-evident the argument that followed the contraceptive revolution that all desires are fine provided consent is given. This is simply not true. Not all desires, or expressions of sexual desire, are good. Some need to be repressed, and if necessary oppressed, in the interests of protecting the vulnerable.

We can argue about which desires should be repressed, and the nature of the oppression in extremis. But what we cant do is offer sex education to children on the premise that education and consent can replace this need for limits. For when it comes to children, there is such a thing as too much information. And when it comes to sex, there really is such a thing as too much freedom.

See the original post:

The rise of the liberal groomer - UnHerd