Category: Public square

The rapid fragmentation of society, the emergence of isolated communities with only tenuous links to their wider context, and the impact of home-grown terrorism have all led even hard-bitten, pragmatist politicians to ask questions about â??Britishnessâ??: what is at the core of British identity; how can it be reclaimed, passed on and owned by more and more people?

The answers to these questions cannot be only in terms of the â??thinâ?? values, such as respect, tolerance and good behaviour, which are usually served up by those scratching around for something to say. In fact, the answer can only be given after rigorous investigation into the history of nationhood and of the institutions, laws, customs and values which have arisen to sustain and to enhance it. In this connection, as with the rest of Europe, it cannot be gainsaid that the very idea of a unified people under God living in a â??golden chainâ?? of social harmony has everything to do with the arrival and flourishing of Christianity in these parts. It is impossible to imagine how else a rabble of mutually hostile tribes, fiefdoms and kingdoms could have become a nation conscious of its identity and able to make an impact on the world.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester Breaking Faith with Britain

Far from just a cult of silence about the true nature of radicalism, there’s now a culture of institutionalized denial. West Midlands police with no less a body than the Crown Prosecution Service have had to apologise to Hardcash Productions, the makers of the Dispatches film ‘Undercover Mosque’, for libeling them with accusations of ‘fakery’ and inciting religious hatred. Their exposure of hate preachers at Green Lane Mosque and other Birmingham Islamic centres, rather than being praised as a service to the community, was reported to the broadcast watchdog Ofcom by the police.

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When someone does something bad in the name of religion, they are usually deemed mad or criminal. How do you criminalise a worldview? You can’t. You just pretend it doesn’t exist. You lie to yourself about what is there in front of your face. Finally, if you can’t stand the message you shoot the messenger. The police and more worryingly still the CPS haven’t a clue about how to tackle cultural crime on this scale. It goes to the heart of our own most sacred cow – a secularism that says all religions are equal – and equally irrelevant.

What we are witnessing is the national sickness of the soul. It is a sickness that leads first to moral and actual blindness – and then to social collapse. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The bloodthirsty rhetoric of the radicals reveals an ugly – and very real – determination to force their religion on the country by fair means or foul, and it is good citizenship for the sake of all our faiths – not racist or islamophobic or an incitement to religious hatred – to recognize it.

Jenny Taylor Undercover mosque: How did police get it so wrong?

What Britain needs is US-style think-tanks whose size enables them to do what the far more modest British think-tanks cannot do and for which there is a crying need — to challenge the intellectual stranglehold of the universities. Indeed, we need to go much further than that. At the heart of Britain’s spiral of intellectual, moral, social and political disintegration (yes, I am indeed understating the case) lies the intellectual hegemony of the left, enforced through bullying, intimidation, character assassination and the whole bag of tricks used to stifle an open society.
The result is a public discourse from which truth, evidence and rationality have been exiled, a society where normative values have been replaced by the transgressive or alien, and a national culture which is losing the will to live. In America, these pressures certainly exist, particularly in the academy and its outriders in the media; but at least there a culture war is in progress with the fightback being conducted by the big think-tanks, publications like the Weekly Standard, City Journal or Commentary, talk radio and Fox News, and the evangelical churches. In Britain, the absence of any such alternative discourse means there has been no culture war here but a culture rout.

Melanie Phillips

Around the world, the two-person, mother-father model of parenthood is being fundamentally challenged.

In Canada, with virtually no debate, the controversial law that brought about samesex marriage quietly included the provision to erase the term â??natural parentâ?? across the board in federal law, replacing it with the term â??legal parent.â?? With that law, the locus of power in defining who a childâ??s parents are shifts precipitously from civil society to the state, with the consequences as yet unknown. In Spain, after the recent legalization of same-sex marriage the legislature changed the birth certificates for all children in that nation to read â??Progenitor Aâ?? and â??Progenitor Bâ?? instead of â??motherâ?? and â??father.â?? With that change, the words â??motherâ?? and â??fatherâ?? were struck from the first document issued to every newborn by the state. Similar proposals have been made in other jurisdictions that have legalized
same-sex marriage.

In New Zealand and Australia, influential law commissions have proposed allowing children conceived with use of sperm or egg donors to have three legal parents. Yet neither group addresses the real possibility that a childâ??s three legal parents could break up and feud over the childâ??s best interests.

In the United States, courts often must determine who the legal parents are among the many adults who might be involved in planning, conceiving, birthing, and raising a child. In a growing practice, judges in several states have seized upon the idea of â??psychologicalâ?? parenthood to award legal parent status to adults who are not related to children by blood, adoption, or marriage. At times they have done so even over the objection of the childâ??s biological parent. Also, successes in the same-sex marriage debate have encouraged group marriage advocates who wish to break open the two-person understanding of marriage and parenthood. Meanwhile, scientists around the world are experimenting with the DNA in eggs and sperm in nearly unimaginable ways, raising the specter of children born with one or three genetic parents, or two same-sex parents.

Nearly all of these steps, and many more , are being taken in the name of adult rights to form families they choose. But what about the children?

Institute for Marriage and Public Policy The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Childrenâ??s Needs

Marriage and birth rates are falling dramatically, pensioners now outnumber teenagers, and more and more people are living alone, says the Institute for family policy in a survey of life in the 27 EU countries.

The report, â??The evolution of the family in Europe in 2008â??, was debated in parliament on Wednesday and describes the European birth rate as â??criticalâ??.

Urging national governments to set up a ministry for the family, it says, â??Europe is now an elderly continent. Almost one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion. The marriage rate fell by 24 per cent between 1980 and 2006. Two out of three households have no children, and nearly 28 per cent of households contain only one person.â??

It says the average marriage lasts about 13 years and the number of abortions in the EU every year is put at 1.2 million – equivalent to the population of Slovenia. That makes abortion the largest single cause of death in Europe.

It warns: â??Europe is undergoing a demographic winter, and now, Europe is an elderly continent.â??

The parliament.com

Philip Hamburger Separation of Church and State

In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later.

Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.

Civitas – The Institute for the Study of Civil Society is doing a valuable public service. It produces fact-sheets for teachers

Do Fathers matter?
Does Marriage matter?

Yes, it has come to this. More urgently than teachers, it is politicians who need those fact sheets. And we need to familiarise ourselves with some of these linked organisations