By Jonathon Van Maren

Late last year, Dr. Jordan Peterson sat down with the Scottish Catholic Observer for a wide-ranging discussion on the culture wars raging across the West. When the interviewer brought up the censorship increasingly inflicted on pro-life groups in Europe, Peterson was unequivocal: “That’s just beyond belief to me, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice. If you think the pro-life voice should be silenced there is something seriously wrong with you. I don’t care what you say about the abortion debate, there is something to be said on both sides at minimum so to stile that debate is part of this totalitarian leftism that I think is reprehensible and dangerous.”

What I found most interesting were Peterson’s comments about the debates on sex education currently taking place across Canada and other jurisdictions throughout the West. One of the reasons these debates generate so much heat is due to the fact that we no longer possess any cultural consensus on sexuality, and thus there is virtually no way to implement state-sanctioned sex education without alienating several groups of people who will strongly disagree. LGBT activists are simply never going to agree with Christians, Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, or Muslims on sexuality, and when they claim the right to teach their ideology to other people’s children, backlash is inevitable and necessary.

“I think we are probably near the point where the state should get out children’s sex education,” Peterson noted, “because there is no cultural consent as to what it should be, so I think that should devolve back to the family.” For obvious reasons, I believe that the only viable solution to this cultural chasm that preserves parental rights and freedom of religion is to do precisely what Peterson says, and I’m glad to hear that he holds this position and is willing to articulate it publicly.

Since Peterson has spent several years as one of the LGBT movement’s most prominent targets, he is well aware of the fact that the common ground our culture once possessed has caved in. He notes that leaving sexuality entirely out of the schools wouldn’t “be a perfect solution, but state-mandated sex education hasn’t been perfect either because it’s become so contaminated with ideology. I think the schools should just leave it be. If your children are taught by ideologues then you should pull them out of the classes because there is no excuse for it.”

That’s a bold statement to make, especially considering the likelihood that if your children attend a public school, they are being taught by ideologues. Specifically, Peterson notes, the gender ideology that has recently infected the elites is both dangerous and spreading fast. “The idea that in the last five years we’ve discovered what gender really is, is the height of absurdity,” he stated firmly. “I do think that the fundamental consequence is that it’s going to confuse more kids than it is going to help.”

It is consistently encouraging to me that a man who tells parents to pull their kids out of school to prevent them from being taught dangerous sexual ideologies has risen to such prominence in such a short amount of time. It is an indication that regardless of how insane our culture appears to be, and despite the fact that the elites have embraced this wicked nonsense whole-heartedly, huge numbers of people have not bought into the progressive’s agenda of radical self-determination and sexual indoctrination. We can only hope that the sanity of Peterson, and those like him, will prevail.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.