Sexual liberation?

Sexual liberation?
The London Free Press, February 25, 2000
By Rory Leishman

During the mad drive by Josef Stalin to collectivize agriculture in the former Soviet Union from 1930 to 1933, close to 10 million farmers were consigned to the Gulag. Another 10 million men, women and children died of famine.

Yet at the time, this monumental tragedy went virtually unreported. Most foreign correspondents stationed in Moscow were content to recite lies put out by government propagandists about growing food production.

Malcolm Muggeridge, to his everlasting credit, was a singular exception. As Moscow correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, he took an unauthorized train trip through the countryside at the height of the famine.

In a harrowing series of articles about this trip, Muggeridge reported seeing "peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread." At a railway station early one morning, he observed a line of rich peasants, "with their hands tied behind them being herded into cattle trucks at gunpoint – all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet."

The articles were smuggled out of Moscow in a diplomatic pouch and published in the Guardian. The result was a sensation. As expected, Muggeridge was kicked out of the Soviet Union. "What he did not foresee," writes Ian Hunter in Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life, "was the reaction in England. He was vilified, slandered and abused in the pages of the Guardian and elsewhere." Echoing Pravda, the English head of the National Committee of Friends of the Soviet Union denounced Muggeridge as hysterically unbalanced and a liar.

The most distinguished academics disputed Muggeridge's reports. Paul Johnson recalls in A History of the Modern World: 1917 to the 1990s that during a visit to the Soviet Union when millions were dying in the midst of the famine, Julian Huxley found, "a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England."

George Bernard Shaw, writes Johnson, "threw his food supplies out of the train window just before crossing the Russian frontier 'convinced that there were no shortages in Russia.' 'Where do you see any food shortage?' he asked, glancing round the foreigners-only restaurant of the Moscow Metropole."

How could all of those reporters and renowned intellectuals have been so wrong? The answer, in retrospect, is clear: They were blinded by ideology. They were so persuaded of the success of communism that they could not see the terrible truth about the dreadful failure of that perverse system.

Today, most people like to think they are ever so much more enlightened than their ancestors. But is that true? Have most of us truly thrown off the blinders of ideology?

Not at all. While almost everyone outside the peculiar world of academia has renounced communism, many are now blinded by another ideology – so-called sexual liberation.

Yet the devastating impact of the sexual revolution of the 1960s should be clear to all who have eyes to see. The upsurge of sexual promiscuity has undermined the family; stranded countless numbers of children in broken homes; and brought on an unprecedented epidemic of abortion that blights the lives of millions of anguished mothers.

On January 11, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article by researchers from the United States and Canada that was based on a study of 681 young gay and bisexual men in Vancouver. Although the average age of the men was just 25, they admitted to having had, on average, no fewer than 30 male sexual partners.

That's not the worst of it. "Preliminary results," the authors conclude, "suggest a disturbing trend toward increasing levels of unprotected anal intercourse."

Homosexual and bisexual activity is the most frequently reported risk factor for AIDS in Canada and the United States. And since 1989, AIDS has been the leading cause of early death among men in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Yet most of our journalists, academics, parliamentarians and judicial rulers insist that homosexuality and bisexuality constitute safe and legitimate alternative lifestyles.

Muggeridge warned about the folly of the sexual revolution. He prophesied that unbridled sexuality would lead to a culture of death in which no one can be safe – neither a baby in the womb, a handicapped child in a nursery nor an aged and frail grandparent on a sick bed.

Only the ideologically blind can fail to see the truth: Once again, Muggeridge was all-too-tragically right.

Rory Leishman
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