Imagine if someone were to ask you, to your face, if you were the most hated man or woman in your country. All of us would probably say no. When I recently put this question to Gabriele Kuby, a German Catholic sociologist, she paused to think about it quite seriously.
“No, maybe not,” she replied. “The politicians of the AfD [Alternative for Germany] right-wing party, they can’t go into restaurants. They are on TV and everyone knows their faces. Many people know my face too – but I think it is worse for them … But concerning all the LGBT issues, maybe concerning that, and gender, yes – it’s me.”
Kuby is the author of The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom, an acclaimed analysis of the cultural forces shaping the new world order. Later this year it will have been published in some seven editions and 13 languages, in spite of the work receiving not a single review when it was first printed in German in 2012.
Instead of plaudits Kuby receives slights and harassment in her native Germany. Most of it doesn’t bother her, as it comes in the form of cheap slurs and lazy platitudes in the media, where she is compared to the Nazis. In the past she was often invited on to television talk shows only to be ambushed and outgunned by a mass of angry voices, a kind of orchestrated ruse seen in Britain on countless occasions. When she speaks at public events, she is sometimes confronted by hecklers inside the venue at the same time as demonstrators protest outside.
Perhaps more than anyone, she knows the truth of the observation of Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth that opposing the Western secular consensus on sexuality has become “a bit like arguing with an alcoholic” because of the irrational and angry response it evokes. Yet this has turned her into the bar-room brawler whom everyone fears; she is hated and virulently opposed, but she is on her feet and still fighting.
One of the toughest tests she faces is a legal battle against the playwright Falk Richter whom she is suing for character assassination. In a play called Fear he depicts Kuby as a zombie who has risen from a grave dated 1945. To send her back there, he recommends that she is shot in the head. Ironically, Kuby is derided a “hate-monger” as her eyes are poked from a photograph of her face.
She took action after her application for an injunction to halt the play was rejected on grounds of freedom of artistic expression, leaving her exasperated. “They [the producers] are manipulating quotations,” she says. “My voice says something I have never said, like ‘we need fascists’ or ‘we need a totalitarian state’. The audience hears my voice say that.
“Just imagine if it was a Muslim who was attacked like this. The play would survive one day and neither would the director survive, but for Christians they can be hunted down.”
Such animosity raises the question: why bother? For Kuby, the answer is found in a sense of vocation, the hard and narrow path she feels compelled to walk on the pilgrim journey of her life. She also has a profound sense of duty, convinced that sexual licence is giving rise to new ideologies and a new totalitarianism. Her path has taken her into the Catholic Church from a Lutheran and left-wing background. She was born in Konstanz into a distinguished intellectual family.
Her father, Erich, was a left-wing journalist, publisher and screenwriter and her uncles include Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work on quantum mechanics, and EF Schumacher, the economist who advised Britain’s National Coal Board for nearly two decades.
She feels she has always been on the search for truth, a quest which ultimately led her to abandon the ideals of the student rebellion of 1967, in which she briefly participated while at the Free University of Berlin, and later the esoteric psychology which she and her husband followed during most of their married life.
She notes that another famous German convert, St Edith Stein, now a patron saint of Europe, wrote that “whoever searches for truth will find God” – an observation with which she deeply identifies today.
Her moment of conversion came following the breakdown of her marriage at the age of 50, when she found herself abandoned with three teenage children. A chance encounter with a woman she had never met, and who invited her to pray, left her with the conviction that she had to become a Catholic.
So she contacted the parish priest who, she says, “went on about the Pope, John Paul II, and how wrong he was” before giving her instruction. “It wasn’t that good,” she recalls, before she explains how her first Confession, while on a pilgrimage, was so profoundly moving that it prompted her to write a book about her conversion. Among the people who admired it was Benedict XVI, who told her that it spoke to a “whole generation”.
By that time, Kuby, as a Catholic, had begun to view the world differently, possibly, she believes, through the light of grace and from “moving out of sin”.
She drew the conclusion, after reading Sex and Culture by the British academic JD Unwin, that Western society was deteriorating and that a distorted notion of sexuality was “the main issue attacking the person, attacking society, ruining marriage and family and ruining the path of children”.
She then learned about “gender ideology”, the revolutionary theory which holds that gender is not determined biologically but can be chosen by the individual, and decided that it was a “very, very serious threat to the whole of society”, as one of the most poisonous fruits of the sexual revolution. Her research resulted in her first book on the subject, The Gender Revolution: Relativism in Action, published in 2006.
Further research produced her most accomplished work, The Global Sexual Revolution, and Kuby presented this book to Pope Benedict in person at the Vatican on October 31, 2012.
On December 22 that year, the German pope used an annual address to the Curia to denounce the “profound falsehood” of the ideology of gender which, he said, imperilled the duality of man and woman in creation and also therefore threatened to destroy the family as “a reality established by creation”.
“I know it [the book] was influential,” says Kuby.
Pope Francis has denounced gender ideology repeatedly, describing it as a part of the “global war on the family” during a visit Georgia and Azerbaijan last year.
Yet in Britain barely a day goes by without a (usually uncritical) news report on the advance of this pernicious ideology. Examples include the “no-platforming” at universities of once celebrated feminists and gay activists for daring to question its dogmas, or the ban by the British Medical Association on doctors using the term “expectant mothers” in case it offends people who say they have changed their gender.
Some children even in Catholic primary schools are now asserting the so-called right to choose their gender. It is a problem which the Church feels quite powerless to address.
In some instances the Church appears to be a willing collaborator. Only last week, this magazine reported that St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School in East Dulwich, south London, will from September introduce a “gender-neutral” policy which will allow boys to wear skirts.
Elsewhere, I have heard teachers discuss instances in which “well-meaning” adults have put pressure on children who have “presented themselves differently” to come out as transgender. And later when, say, a boy of seven or eight one day turns up to class dressed as a girl, the school does not respect his privacy or offer pastoral help but instead celebrates his diversity.
The child then arguably becomes an instrument of proselytism. His decision is announced to all of the other pupils – without the consent of their parents – and to local print and broadcast media, which soon begin to report stories sympathetically about him. At this point, no one dares to refer to him as a male.
Conversely, imagine a tomboy who is similarly persuaded that she is really a male, so she turns up at her doctor’s surgery with her parents in tow and soon obtains the drugs that will change her body permanently, and at an age when it is questionable whether she understands quite what she is doing to herself.
It is surely impossible to believe that such practices can ever be included among the reasons why Catholic Church founded schools in this country, or explain why Catholic parents insist on choosing such schools for their children.
Kuby’s advice to all within the Church is to pray for the courage to vigorously resist the imposition of this ideology. She cites the example of the White Rose movement in wartime Germany, the students who spoke out against “Nazi terror” at the cost of their own lives.
She is very unlikely to persuade everybody, including Catholics, of the justice of her cause, but Kuby says she is resolved to speak the truth “until my last breath”.
To her, the freedom to seek, establish and proclaim the truth is an infinitely higher value than the avoidance of any contrived notion of offence. There are, after all, very few who have showed sensitivity about the risk of offending her.
Simon Caldwell is a freelance journalist
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