Northern Ireland's new sex education row is specifically about the North's politics, writes Newton Emerson
That reference to science is a quote from a Northern Ireland Office press release. In a DUP press release it recalls other debates about the teaching of evolution, as was perhaps the intention.
For those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s, this has been a star-spangled trip down memory lane. The first stirrings of the modern American culture war were influential in the Northern Ireland of my youth. The rise of the religious right in US politics had been noted in Britain, and universally derided, but evangelical congregations in the North were intrigued and inspired.
It was a partial escape, however, a shiny imported novelty we were adept at making our own. Creationism seemed to stir up more passion than sex education, bizarrely; the hunt for blasphemous English texts and library books was genuinely aggravating. Yet there was a sense it was all recreational, a good argument but with little really at stake.
The hope of the great and the good, then as now, was for the emergence of “normal” left-right politics. Why should this have been about economics, as always presumed, especially in a region with few economic powers? Religious right versus liberal left was an equally valid experiment with some cross-community potential.
The escalating nastiness of US politics has been noticed in Northern Ireland, and is increasingly setting the agenda. Parents have become suspicious and schools nervous. A DUP education minister was caught up in a row two years ago when 60 parents objected to sex education being introduced by a board of governors, which she chaired. There will be others in politics wondering how common such disputes could become and what the opportunities are to exploit them.
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