The international pro-life youth organization World Youth Alliance has won an important victory over the EU bureaucracy, forcing the European Commission to admit that teaching chastity and other virtues to young people is not, as they had alleged, “contrary to European values”. As a consequence, funding of the EYA under the European CERV programme will resume, despite protests from radical leftwing MEPs.
The Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme is a European Union funding initiative running from 2021 to 2027 with a total budget of approximately €1.55 billion. Not well known among ordinary citizens, Its purported aim is to “protect and promote rights and values enshrined in the EU Treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights, supporting open, democratic, and inclusive societies”, but it has recently come under increasing scrutiny and criticism as a honey pot through which the European Commission funnels enormous amounts of money into the pockets of radical left-wing NGOs with radical agendas, many of which are strategically aligned to the communist, green and socialist groups in the European Parliament. Recipients of lavish and largely un-controlled funding include the abortion lobby (such as IPPF European Network) and militant LGBT groups (such as ILGA Europe).
Radical left-wing groups and their allies within the EU institutions are jealously watching over that the billion-euro pot must benefit only them and under no circumstances their opponents – by which they mean, in particular, all groups that advocate for the natural family (comprising a father, a mother and a child) and oppose abortion.
Normally, the staunchly ideological Eurocrats entrusted with managing the fund ensure that such groups do not receive any funding from the programme – and whilst the reasons for this discrimination are never openly stated, it is clear that conservative groups which do not regard the killing of children as a “women’s right” or homosexual debauchery as a form of family life, shouldn’t even bother applying for grants that serve to fund a rigidly left-wing, artificial “civil society”.
However, the World Youth Alliance cleverly outwitted the system by applying for funding for a sex education programme organised by itself and its partner organisations – which was promptly granted. Quite clearly, it was beyond the imagination of the officials responsible for awarding grants that such a programme might exceptionally not consist of drag queens in nursery schools or propaganda promoting gender reassignment for primary school children, but rather of serious, values-based education on how to deal responsibly with one’s own sexuality.
When ILGA, IPPF-EN and their allies in the European Parliament learned that CERV grants had been given to a group not toeing their ideological party line, they orchestrated a hate and defamation campaign against WYA, broadly accusing the group of “disseminating anti-abortion misinformation and promoting narratives opposing gender rights” and calling it (without any corroborating arguments) “fundamentally at odds with EU values“. The effort was led by a group called “Open Democracy”, which is funded and steered by the notorious US-Hungarian billionaire and “philanthropist” George Soros, and by pro-abortion lobbyist Neil Datta and squad of nasties in the radical left-wing fringe of the European Parliament, known as the “European Parliamentary Forum”.
When the abortion/LGBT lobby and its henchmen issue orders, the bureaucrats at the European Commission obey without giving it a second thought. EACEA, the agency to which the Commission has outsourced the administration of the CERV programme, immediately suspended the payment of funds to WYA and launched an investigation, in the course of which two weirdo professors from England and Belgium were asked to provide an “expert opinion” on the sex education programme developed by WYA. Although the two experts were unable, despite their best efforts, to find any misappropriation of the funding paid to WYA, they concluded that the programme “contravened European values” because it “recommended sexual abstinence before marriage” and “emphasised chastity”.
Chastity? Abstinence before marriage? Now that sounds like the recommendation that any responsible parents would give to their children. But for EACEA the positive mention of “chastity” is contrary to the EU’s “values”, reason enough to exclude organisations from EU funding.
But chastity is by definition a virtue – the virtue of living a responsible sex life, or of “integrating sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being”. It is, in very simple words, the virtue relating to sexuality. Logically, the purpose of any “sexual education” must therefore be to inculcate the virtue of chastity, just as the purpose of a grammar class is to teach pupils how to read and write, or the purpose of a course in arithmetic is to teach how to add, substract, multiplicate and divide. What else did EACEA believe to be the purpose and scope of a sexual education programme? The claim that a “sex ed” programme is not in line with EU values is a patent absurdity, exposing to ridicule those who state it.
The initial decision to suspend the payment of funds already pledged to WYA therefore revealed nothing negative about WYA, but rather gave the astonished public and conservative politicians – who otherwise rarely concern themselves with this strange ‘civil society’ that is being fattened up by the Commission with taxpayers’ money – a deep insight into the ideological thinking of the European Commission and certain radical lobbies that call the shots in the European Parliament. It soon became clear, however, that this decision would not stand up in court, which is why the EACEA had to revoke it to avoid embarrassment.
It is to be hoped, however, that the matter is not yet settled. It is time to scrutinise the generous funding that the EACEA awards under the CERV programme to organisations such as ILGA or IPPF_EN, whose activities and ideological orientation run counter to all values worth upholding. Why do pressure groups, whose primary political objectives are the destruction of the family and the killing of unborn children, receive millions in ‘operational grants’ for which they do not even have to provide any evidence of performance? The underlying reason for these cash flows is probably that they form part of a power arrangement designed to secure the support of the Greens and the Left in the European Parliament for the European Commission: they back the Commission’s policies as long as their ideological front organisations receive generous funding from the EU budget. This arrangement, which so far has gone largely unnoticed by the public, is an important part of the Brussels machinery.
However, the success of the WYA shows that these funding sources – unless they are to be abolished altogether, which might not be a bad idea – must be open to all organizations. Pro-life organizations, for example, which provide practical support to pregnant women in crisis situations and thereby save many lives, can also apply and are likely to be more deserving of funding than the Marxist pressure groups that have monopolized this funding so far, despite the fact that they do not provide any practical help to anyone, but merely engage in questionable political “advocacy”.
