News Roundup

Parents may withdraw children from new sex education classes

Parents will still have the right to withdraw their children from sex education, Minister for Education Norma Foley has said. The Constitution recognises parents as the primary educators of their children. A new Relationships and Sexuality Education programme has been drafted for Junior Certificate children.

Ms Foley said: “I want to be clear around this: we operate in our schools a spirit of partnership with our parents, the wider section of stakeholders and partners within education. We retain within our schools parental consent at all times for parents to feel that they have freedom to withdraw their students from anything that is happening within a school environment.

“That is important. I know the value of that parental consent in schools, and I know the value of it in all other aspects of life.”

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Ban single sex schools says Labour TD

The Labour party has introduced a Bill to ban all single sex schools within 15 years regardless of parental wishes.

Labour spokesman Aodhán Ó Ríordáin claimed: “The fact that so many of our schools are still separated by gender sends the wrong message to children at a young age about gender equality”. About 30pc of Irish pupils are in single-sex schools.

“Ireland stands almost alone with our gender segregation system and we are out of kilter with the rest of the European world. While the conversation is rightly happening about the nature of gender equality in our society, education must be a feature of this”, he said.

“This Bill is about addressing the legacy of single gender schools and move to fully gender integrated schools within 10 years at primary level and 15 years at secondary level.

The Bill would see all State funding removed from any schools that don’t comply with mixed admissions.

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Leading sex educationalist says porn can be ‘positive’

A leading voice in sex education has said porn can be ‘positive’.

Dr. Kate Dawson, a lecturer the University of Greenwich, made the claim on RTE’s Upfront programme on Monday night as part of a discussion about school-based Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). A new RSE programme for junior certificate students is almost complete and ‘porn literacy’ will likely be part of it. A big question is whether students will be taught that porn can be ‘positive’ as well as negative.

Asked whether porn use can ever be positive, Dr Dawson claimed that in the course of her own research, many people reported that “it helped them to feel that their body was normal and that their sexual interests were normal. They felt less alone and isolated”.
On the other hand, she said in the research literature, it is very hard to look into the topic of pornography because you can’t examine it in its natural state.

“You can‘t observe people watching pornography, and see the outcomes over time but we know that for the most part, only a small percentage of people report having very bad experiences with pornography. For the vast majority of people it seems to do no harm”.

This was despite several young women in the audience saying it was influencing men to copy what they see in porn, including slapping and choking women when having sex.

Dr Dawson claimed that academic research has not established a cause and effect relationship between porn and violence. She was contradicted by Peadar Tobin, TD, who said lots of research exists that shows it has this effect.

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South Korea records world’s lowest fertility rate ever

South Korea’s fertility rate, already the world’s lowest, has dropped yet again in the latest setback to the country’s efforts to boost its declining population. Deaths exceeded births by over 120,000 people in a population of 52 million.

The country reported that the fertility rate, or the average number of children expected per woman, fell to 0.78 in 2022 – down from 0.81 the previous year.

Countries need a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population, in the absence of immigration.

South Korea recorded more deaths than births for the first time in 2020, a trend that has continued since.

In 2022, the country recorded about 249,000 births and 372,800 deaths.

Similar demographic declines are being seen in several other Asian countries including Japan and China, raising concerns there will be too few people of working age to support the ballooning elderly population. European countries also have below replacement level fertility rates.

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SNP leadership contender holds traditional views on marriage

Scotland’s finance secretary has risked her political career by freely admitting to her belief that sex is for marriage and marriage is for one man and one woman.

Kate Forbes, 32, a frontrunner to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s first minister was elected to the Scottish parliament in 2016. She told The Scotsman that she would have voted against the bill to allow same-sex marriage, which was passed in 2014.

“I think for me, Angela Merkel [the former German chancellor] is the example I would follow, I would have voted, as a matter of conscience, along the lines of mainstream teaching in most major religions that marriage is between a man and a woman,” she said.

Forbes said that she is being attacked for her religion by an “illiberal” wing of the SNP because critics cannot fault her record in government.

She also said that she would have quit the cabinet over the gender recognition reforms that would allow people to change their legal sex through self-identification.

Asked by Sky News if it is wrong for people to have children outside of marriage, she said it is “something that I would seek to avoid, for me personally”.

 “My faith would say that sex is for marriage and that’s the approach I would practice.”

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Arson attacks on churches in Germany and France

Historic churches in both Germany and France have suffered extensive damage in arson attacks in the last few weeks.

The historical Baroque “Church of the Cross” in Wissen, Germany, was desecrated and severely damaged on February 10. The police have identified a 39-year-old perpetrator who caused damages worth millions of euros. According to the reports, the man broke open the back door of the church by smashing it with stones, vandalised religious symbols and set fire to the high altar, which has been completely destroyed. Two firefighter squads extinguished the fire.

Meanwhile in France, three Parisian churches were subject to arson attacks last month by unknown perpetrators. The last attack was on the Church of Saint-Laurent in the 10th district on the 24th. According to the findings, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the left side of the door.

A similar incident included a Molotov cocktail thrown against the church door of the Saint Martin des Champs.

Also, the church of Notre-Dame-de-Fatima in the 19th arrondissement has been the victim of two arson attacks – on 17 and 22 January.

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38pc of Americans would screen embryos for intellectual aptitude, survey says

A significant minority of Americans would favor genetic screening of embryos simply to boost their child’s chance to attend an elite university, a new survey indicates.

Several bioethics experts and economists designed the survey to explore public opinion about in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and pre-implantation genetic testing of embryos. The survey asked respondents whether they would test and edit an embryo’s genes to increase the chances the conceived child would grow up to attend an extremely competitive college.

Informed that the embryos had a 3% chance of getting into a top-100 university, they were asked whether they would opt for an intervention that would bump up their embryonic progeny’s chances to 5%.

According to the survey results, 38% of respondents said they would genetically screen IVF embryos for predicted academic achievement while 62% would not. Another 28% of respondents said they would edit the genes of IVF embryos to boost a child’s chance of acceptance at top colleges, while 72% said they would not.

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Number of female religious in Ireland halves in 20 years

The number of women religious in Ireland has halved in the last 20 years.

There were 9,031 women religious at the turn of the millennium, but it has declined to just 4,494, a decrease of 50.2%. The vast majority of the remaining nuns in the country are past normal retirement age.

This is according to the most recent figures from the 26 dioceses on the island of Ireland. Some of the figures relate to 2021 and so include the effects of the first year of covid.

However, the figures from the other dioceses relate to pre-Covid times and so are expected to drop further once updated statistics are released.

Commenting on the figures, Dr Bronagh Ann McShane told The Irish Catholic the future for female religious life in Ireland and elsewhere is “very uncertain”.

“We’re at a turning point,” she added.

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FBI retracts document targeting Traditionalist Catholics

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has retracted a field-office report lumping some “traditionalist” Catholics with “violent extremists”. The prestigious Wall Street Journal criticised the report’s embrace of a “false leftist political narrative that religiously inspired support of traditional marriage or pro-life views amount to a rising domestic terror threat”.

A whistleblower last week leaked a January report from the FBI’s Richmond office entitled: “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

According to the report, “radical-traditionalist Catholics” are characterised by their devotion to the Latin Mass, their disdain for modern popes, and their “frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.”

It also noted its lack of evidence that “radical” traditionalist Catholics have done anything to warrant targeting.

The FBI retracted the document once it was made public saying it didn’t meet the Bureau’s “exacting standards” and was being removed from its system.

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A third of German expect pressure for euthanasia in case of illness

Almost one in three Germans (30 per cent) expect that pressure on the old and sick will increase as soon as active euthanasia is legalised.

This was the result of a survey conducted by the market and social research institute INSA-Consulere on behalf of the Protestant news agency IDEA.

Half of the people (49 per cent) do not share this fear. 18 per cent do not know their opinion, and 4 per cent did not answer.

Remarkable is that young people especially expect increased pressure on the elderly and sick. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 37 per cent have this fear.

Euthanasia is a much more sensitive issue in Germany than in other European countries. When neighbour-country The Netherlands legalised euthanasia in 2000, the German Minister of Justice, Herta Däubler-Gmelin spoke about a “terrible breach of taboo”.

The reason for the German reluctance lies in the Nazi era. Before and during the Second World War, the word “euthanasia” was used for a killing program for disabled people.

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