These cases are not aberrations. They are the outcome of a process that has been going on for the past three decades and more, in which the fundamental values of civilised society have been systematically trashed and up-ended. They are the result of the doctrine that all lifestyles must be considered equal and that no one has right to pass judgment on anyone else. Thus, women had a God-given right to bear babies out of wedlock. Stigma and shame were considered an affront to individual rights; disapproval of adultery or elective lone parenthood were dismissed as ‘Old Testament fundamentalism’.
Government policy, egged on by activist judges who deliberately voided family law of ‘moral judgments’ on the basis that there was no right or wrong in family life because it was always just too complicated to untangle, accordingly penalised marriage, rewarded adultery, further incentivised lone parenthood and systematically normalised irregular relationships.
The outcome is a shattered social landscape of lost and abandoned children, raised in households of gross emotional chaos and physical and moral squalor. Ignoring the fact that this underclass has become detached from the most basic values of civilised life, the so-called progressive intelligentsia declares that its only problem is ‘poverty’. Accordingly, it has supplied lone mothers with benefits on the basis that they were most in need. The result has been financial incentives for unmarried women to have multiple children – whose primary need was to have a committed father and stable family life, the very need government policy ensured would never be met.
Melanie Phillips The barbarism of ideologues
