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• Battle between Church and State over sex education in schools
  

The Head of the Catholic Church in Lanka, Cardinal Ranjith Malcolm, in a pulpit blast last Sunday, made a scathing attack on government plans to radically reform education and enthrone literature promoting LGBTQs as the third sex of the human species in school classrooms, with students brainwashed in their formative years to accept this freak deviation of nature as part and parcel of natural life.

There were no three sexes of all species on earth that Noah boarded on his Ark before antediluvian floods broke out, nor was there a transgender sex that ate the forbidden fruit with Adam and Eve in the paradisiacal Garden of Eden. Nor is there a single reference mentioned, not even a small footnote jotted, in the recorded history of man to a third hybrid sex of the human race.

Nor have there been unearthed from anthropological diggings any empirical evidence to show from human skeletons recovered that a third sex ever existed throughout the annals of history.

HIS EMINENCE CARDINAL MALCOLM RANJITH: Government was importing ‘degraded values of a Western world without religion.’

Any such skeletons found rattling in the cupboard of the ‘Woke’ movement are a modern-day invention placed there in recent times to substantiate the hoax that a third sex existed throughout man’s natural evolution. If it did, why weren’t there any transgender Finches on Darwin’s Galápagos Islands?

But say, who’s behind the beguile?

Who’s behind the mass deception practised on the young, the naïve, the emerging Gen Zs, hardly out of their bassinets, unnatural sexual practices as the norm in pure and virginal minds? The ideal fertile beds to implant the Woke Movement’s insidious and noxious idealistic thoughts.

They embrace to their hearts the sacred five, the LGBTQs—thrown off the bus of human civilisation as anomalies of nature—into their bosoms as the most caring and compelling act of compassion they could flaunt to showcase themselves as the morally superior beings on earth. This elite lot of pampered poodles overflow with empathy for those who bear ‘the love that dared not speak its name’, as Oscar Wilde said on the dock before being convicted of sodomy with a partner of the same sex.

Do they think that the straight and narrow do not extend boundless compassion to anyone on the other side of life’s street?

Compassion is not weighed by the quantity that’s flaunted. Its true value is felt in the last full measure of genuine compassion toward those in pain and suffering; and, as the Buddha further expounded, to extend compassion to the world’s ignorant.

Like those intoxicated do not realise, in their drunken stupor, what heinous deeds they commit, ignorance of the true reality of this world, with the deceptive veil of Maya shrouding its true state, the follies that men do are due to ignorance. As Jesus Christ said on the cross, seeing how the mob below brayed for his blood, ‘Father, forgive them. For they do not know what they do.’

The Cardinal does not condemn any LGBTQ member on a personal and individual level and extends to them his profound sympathy and understanding.

But he blasted the concerted efforts and the organised campaign waged by NGOs funded by foreign agencies such as the United Nations Population Fund.

He said, ‘The government is now getting ready with teachers and textbooks to teach sex education to children from Grade Six. Some organisations are trying to destroy the cultural and moral foundations of our country. What is the meaning of this? Is this really education? Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to teach such matters to their children at the right time?’

The Cardinal alleged, ‘But they are going to teach children even as young as eleven all this and make them know how to make same-sex relations. Behind all this are international organisations that are trying to destroy our society. They have given money to the government, money to the education ministry to print the necessary textbooks to send our country’s children astray. These lessons are going to be taught in our schools from January 27th next year, from grade 6 children onwards. What is all this for? How can a civilised government allow such uncivilised things to be brought into the country and taught to our children?’

Furthermore, the Cardinal said, ‘The temple and the church do not exist to keep flowers or light candles and go home but to live in the Dhamma and obtain happiness from it. The way western nations want us to live, the way the IMF wants us to live will allow them to destroy our culture, and we cannot let them do that.’

He charged that the government was importing ‘degraded values of a Western world without religion.’

But Prime Minister cum Education Minister Harini Amarasuriya, who is spearheading the education reforms, stayed defiant. Amidst the Cardinal’s outrage and in the face of the spiritual might of the Catholic Church, she stood her ground as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar.

Come what may, no matter the faith the Cardinal possesses to move mountains and men, she made it clear, ‘the lady was not for turning’. With icy determination to push her education reforms, including sex education, through the gauntlet of vehement protests, she announced at a press briefing this week that sex education will be taught only at a ‘sex-appropriate’ age. She said that with sexual perversions on the rise, the children must, from an early age, know how to protect themselves from sexual abuse.

Will teaching sex education for children in Grade 6, at which grade they will only be eleven years of age, be a sex-appropriate age for them to learn of the birds and the bees and the measures to take to avoid getting pecked or stung by them?

Especially at that tender age of eleven, when most girls haven’t attained ‘coming of age’ nor boys their puberty and are still to feel the sexual stirrings in their loins, the subject of sex may appear alien terrain where monthly bloodletting for girls and sticky ejaculations unexpectedly happen to boys at night, will scare the hoots out of them all long before their advent.

Any talk of their private parts being violated and abused may give such traumatic childhood nightmares from which they may never recover but remain scarred for life and turning frigid at the hint of sex for life.

But with all respects to the Cardinal as well, sexual intercourse that makes procreation of the species possible, need not be taught at schools at any grade or age. It naturally comes to humans even as it naturally comes to birds and bees.

It’s only a recent highfalutin nerdy theory, developed by nerdy academic dons to be blindly followed by nerds that tell us sex must be academically taught at schools under academic supervision. But isn’t the grove where Plato taught his political philosophy the hallowed seat of nature where sexual desires awaken when the season is right for wild oats to be sown and to reap the next harvest?

A child’s mind is like a delicate rose. It must not be stunted nor made grotesque by unnecessary cropping that warps its early bloom. Once the bed is made fertile and is free of weeds, the nation’s seed and blossom must be left to naturally bloom. Not nipped in the bud by know-alls.