Anglican Mainstream

By Fr Ed Tomlinson

[...]  If you doubt that this move undermines marriage consider the implications of the proposals passed in the commons tonight. Laws are forming which will prove utterly confusing, and entirely adult centred, to any future five year old. No longer will there be a gold standard, a universally recognised marital union to hold families together. The place where children instinctively feel THEY belong. Instead we will have a smorgasbord of adult relationships – each as devoid of obvious meaning as the next. And none of them uniquely centred around the young. For, of course, all must be not only equal but the same! Such is the nonsense spouted today where feelings now trump logic.

Tom and Adam will be married but clearly unable to produce offspring alone. Dave and Molly will be heterosexuals in a civil partnership who do have children. When a child asks “what is the difference between the civil partnership and marriage and between civil marriage and religious marriage?” How on earth will parents respond? It will all sound so confusing and unclear. What will society be saying about the purpose of sex, the place of children and much more besides? And where we once encouraged morality by teaching children to wait for sex until married- what will we say in future? Please hang off until you opt for civil partnership/marriage/cohabitation or just feel like it? There will be no obvious forum in which sex and the rearing of children truly belongs.

We will have descended into a culture in which all relationships are largely self defined and on the same footing. Brilliant news for those simply wanting to be PC, or to pretend they are same when basic biology clearly shows difference, but devastating for marriage which will be in such a weaker and more obfuscated place than ever before.

Yet Cameron and co. still insist this move is about strengthening marriage…you couldn’t invent it.

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by Christopher Booker, Telegraph

The Oxford sex-grooming case reveals the glaring failures of our child-protection system

Most of the coverage given to the case of the seven men found guilty of the appalling physical and sexual abuse of underage girls in Oxford has focused on the fact that most of these monsters were of British Pakistani origin. But what should be seen in its own way as even more disturbing is the fact that five of these six girls were in the care of our “child protection” system.

Not only did the social workers consistently refuse to protect these children from hideous abuse over eight years – one 12-year-old girl’s parents pleaded in vain with them to intervene more than 70 times, another mother rang social services to report her daughter missing more than 100 times – but social services also actively connived in it, as when one care home bought a 13-year-old child “sexy underwear”, before sending her out to be drugged with heroin and gang-raped.

Almost identical was the case of those British Pakistanis from around Rochdale, jailed last year for similar offences against underage girls, most of whom were also in care. In Parliament, Simon Danczuk, Rochdale’s MP, quoted health workers who told him that the social workers had refused to intervene “because they believed that the girls had been making life choices, which was why they were seen as prostitutes”.

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By Damian Thompson, Telegraph

The results of the 2011 Census, published last year, were pretty devastating for Christianity, indicating that it will be a minority religion in Britain by 2018. This week we were given a more detailed breakdown of the figures. I took one look at them and thought: OMG.

That’s short for “Oh My God”, in case you didn’t know. It’s an acronym popularised by young people on Twitter. Young people who, increasingly, don’t believe in the God they’re invoking.

For the first time, the proportion of under-25s who don’t describe themselves as even nominal Christians has risen above 50 per cent. Also, the new breakdown shows that the rate of decline in British Christianity has been masked by the presence of 1.2 million foreign believers in this country. Take them out of the picture, and we can see that home-grown Christianity has shrunk by 15 per cent in just a decade. To quote the demographer Prof David Coleman of Oxford University, “It is difficult to see whether any other change in the census could have been remotely as big.”

Take a bow, Anglican and Catholic bishops. I don’t know if the British Humanist Association hands out awards, but you certainly deserve one – a statuette of Polly Toynbee, say, for untiring efforts to water down the Christian message to the point where it’s not worth believing in.

Consider the following story from this week’s Daily Telegraph. A five-year-old boy at St Mary’s Catholic Primary School in Wimbledon called another pupil’s shoes “gay”. The head, Sarah Crouch, called in Stonewall. Whether she was doing this to protect miniature footwear from homophobic abuse or as part of a wider programme of thought reform is not clear. But we do know that Stonewall conducted a “training day” at the school – with the blessing of the Archbishop of Southwark, Peter Smith, who apparently chose to gloss over the fact that Stonewall is 100 per cent opposed to Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

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By Jon Mitchell, MercatorNet

In debates about the family, some social scientists are asserting the primacy of theory over facts. Is this science?

In the March issue of Pediatrics, the publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics, an article called “Marriage and the well-being of children” appeared that considered the role of marriage in child outcomes. In a short statement, the authors dismissed the body of data on marriage and child outcomes as inconclusive. The authors went on to argue “even if empirical support for its claims was strong, the argument is morally insufficient for denying state recognition to other types of relationships.”

It is certainly noteworthy and ironic that an empirical research journal would dismiss the role of data in forming public policy and it raises some interesting questions about the use of empirical research in formulating law.

This tension between research and law is debated in a new book from New York University Press called What is Parenthood? While the primary focus of the book is the legal relevance of biology and gender in an age of modern families, the question about the use of empirical data in forming family law looms large.

The state is thoroughly entrenched in the business of declaring who is and isn’t a parent. In the years ahead, as the use of reproductive technology grows and family forms become more diverse, this will continue to become an important legal question. While a strong argument can be made that family law is preoccupied with the dissolution of families, many legal theorists see the law as a proactive agent in shaping the future of families. The principles on which these legal reforms are based are of central importance.

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A compilation (key points in bold type) of excerpts from five articles on the redefinition of parenthood following legalisation of gay marriage, compiled by gentlemind
 
1  “The Audacity of the State” (excerpt) by Douglas Farrow (Touchstone)

Naked Before the State: To make matters very much worse, the parens patriae power has recently received an enormous boost from another feature of the contraceptive society: same-sex “marriage.” Though most people have not yet realized it, the advent of same-sex marriage has transformed marriage from a pre-political institution conferring “divine and human rights,” as the Roman jurist Modestinus put it, into a mere legal construct at the gift and disposal of the state. The legal terrain has thus changed dramatically, along with the cultural—something I have tried to show in a little book called Nation of Bastards. The family is ceasing to be what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights confesses it to be, viz., “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

Replaced by a kaleidoscope of transient sexual and psychological configurations, which serve chiefly to make children of adults and adults of children, the declining family is ceding enormous tracts of social and legal territory to the state. At law, parent-child relationships are losing their a priori status and privilege. Crafty fools ask foolish fools, “What harm does same-sex marriage do to your marriage, or to your family?” The truthful answer is: Same-sex marriage makes us all chattels of the state, because the state, in presuming to define the substance rather than the accidents of marriage, has made marriage itself a state artifact.

Those who have trouble connecting the dots here—which lamentably includes many defenders of the traditional institution—should take time to consider the fact that the new “inclusive” definition, in striking procreation from the purview of marriage, has left both parents and children without a lawful institution that respects and guarantees their natural rights to each other.

Opening up marriage in principle to non-generative unions really means closing it in principle to the inter-generational interests on which it has always been based. From now on, the handling of those interests will be entirely dependent, legally speaking, upon the good graces of the state. Every citizen will stand naked before the state, unclothed by his most fundamental community, unbuffered by any mediating institution with its own inherent rights. Nor should it be overlooked that, what the state has the power to define, it has the power to define again and again, and even to dispense with.

Admittedly, even the state has not yet fully connected the dots, but that is happening with remarkable rapidity, as concurrent moves in education demonstrate. States and international agencies are increasingly prone to argue that children have the right to a state-directed education and that this right must be protected by the state against the interference of parents. The logic is not difficult to follow: If marriage is procreative, it is also educative; but if it is not procreative, it is not educative either—educative rights and responsibilities are up for grabs, and it is the state that will do the grabbing. The pillar that is the family appears to have cracked nearly through.

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CEN Editorial

British law and culture are deeply conflicted when it comes to matters sexual. There is the obvious conflict of the more ‘liberal’ and the more ‘traditional’ views of any restriction on sexual activity after what is now called ‘the sexual revolution’ of the 1960s. Mary Whitehouse led largescale protests against the sexualisation of society away from the basic Christian norms that had been in place for a very long time. In literature and the London theatre sexual activity became standard fare, the ‘Office of the Lord Chamberlain’ was closed, and sex outside marriage lost any taboo. Homosexuality between consenting adults in private was, rightly, decriminalized, but that as we now know was but the start of a campaign against what schoolchildren are now taught as ‘heteronormativity’.

‘Women’s Lib’ urged women to ‘burn their bra’ and get out into the dodgem cars of casual sex and enjoy themselves, just like the men – and the other side of the feminist movement campaigned against the view of women as ‘sex objects.’ No-fault divorce followed, with the equalization of property rights between couples, and now divorce rates are high and single motherhood as legitimate an option as marriage, formal or informal.

The nuclear family became demonized by feminism as driving women crazy at home, a terrible prison, and women also were expected to go out to work out of economic necessity even if they wanted to be mothers at home. The state removed the tax break of ‘the married man’s allowance’. The age of the internet added to the potential for and access to sex in all forms: internet dating and also porn of all kinds, sites for quick-fire casual sex and upmarket anonymised orgies. In biblical terms, a respectable paganisation of sex arrived and is in full swing: use of the body is now detached from moral shaping. Abortion on demand on an industrial scale is an accepted form of contraception.

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By John Smeaton, SPUC

The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, the Protect the Pope blog and other media have reported on the scandal of a Catholic primary school in Wimbledon which invited Stonewall, the UK's main homosexual lobby, to train its teachers how to deal with 'homophobic bullying'. Antonia Tully, the coordinator of SPUC's Safe at School campaign, was quoted in the reports, saying:

“Many parents will be very concerned that a gay rights organisation is considered to be an appropriate source of advice on how to deal with children using inappropriate language in the playground.

If a primary school takes on Stonewall’s agenda, young children will be exposed to homosexual issues, which they are too young to understand properly. Parents expect a school to provide an education, not subject their children to gay propaganda.”

The Catholic Herald reports that an unnamed source close to the school:

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By Nick McDermott, Mailonline

Almost a quarter of girls whose fathers were absent during early childhood suffer depression as teenagers, a report says.

Some 23 per cent will show symptoms such as sadness or severe tiredness later in life if their parent leaves before they turn five, researchers found.

It makes them almost 50 per cent more likely to have future mental health problems than older girls, confirming previous studies that suggest pre-schoolers cope badly with break-ups because they are less likely to have a support network of friends and other family members.

Those ‘coping mechanisms’ meant just 15 per cent of over-fives reported signs of mental distress later on – the same as those whose parents stayed together.

Boys coped best of all with early parental separation, with less than ten per cent in the youngest age range going on to suffer teenage depression, psychologists found.

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By Robert Oscar Lopez, MercatorNet

By John Bingham, Telegraph

Middle class parents vying to get their children into church schools have started a “rush to the font”, official figures showing a surge in demand for baptisms of nursery-age children suggest.

While the most recent annual figures from the Church of England show a further slight fall in attendance at Sunday services, the number of couples having their children baptised is on the rise.

And although the numbers of families having babies christened are growing steadily, demand for baptism from those with older children – mostly preschool age – are growing three times as fast.

There was also a boom in demand for less formal “thanksgiving” services for children, again primarily for toddlers and young children rather than babies.

The Church of England said it was clear that parents still see it as important to have their child baptised but are increasingly leaving it later to do so.

But, according to the Rev Dr Sandra Millar, who now runs the Church of England’s Christenings Project – an ongoing “market research” programme on baptisms, their motives are often mixed.

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by Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

Truly, it seems that scarcely a day now passes without our being informed of yet another celebrity accused of sexual depravity.

[...]  The real reason no one at the BBC did anything about Savile or Hall was not just the fear of destroying their lucrative stars. It was also that, especially during the Seventies and Eighties, sexual licence was considered acceptable and anyone who spoke against it was treated as a pariah.

This was, after all, what the sexual revolution was all about. All constraints on sexual behaviour were removed. ‘Lifestyle choice’ meant the right to have sex with anyone.

No one had the right to judge anyone else’s sexual behaviour. Those who warned this would unravel not just traditional morality but the very bedrock of decency and order were scorned and insulted.

This permissive attitude was extended to children, too. The young were greedily viewed as a huge consumer market, and so were cynically targeted by sexually suggestive pop lyrics, clothing and magazine articles.

At school, young children were subjected to grossly inappropriate ‘sex education’, which was a green light to sexual activity. Such lessons presented sex as a kind of sport, telling children in effect:

‘Here are the pleasures, here are the risks, now enjoy yourself but be careful.’

Accordingly, when 14-year-old fans threw themselves at pop stars and other celebrities, no one disapproved.

With the ‘rights of the child’ supreme, children’s homes couldn’t even discipline their young residents without being sued or prosecuted.

So children wandered out of these homes more or less at will to go on the prostitution game and fall victim to sexual predators.
 
And everyone carefully looked away from gay paedophilia; even to raise it as a problem was to be vilified as an anti-gay bigot. The legal age of consent thus fell into general disuse. In the past few days, there has been a hue and cry against the barrister Barbara Hewson, who suggested the age of consent should be lowered to 13 to end the prosecution of ageing celebrities for ‘low-level’ sex offences.

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by Blaise Joseph, MercatorNet

Peter J. Leithart, First Things

[...]  It’s a truism among social historians that the nuclear family is not the traditional family. Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner pointed out years ago that marriages used to be “firmly embedded in a matrix of wider community relationships.” Husbands and wives knew each other long before they were married, and their marriage “pulsed” with the same life as the wider community. Today, by contrast, “each family constitutes its own segregated subworld,” a subworld that married couples have to exert “much greater effort” to construct. For today’s couples, “success or failure hinges on the present idiosyncrasies of only two individuals.” Once, it took a village. Now two are enough to tango.

Not even the most traditional of traditionalists wants to return to a world where clan ambitions and dynastic politics trump the desires of individual men and women. At its best, though, that “matrix of wider relationships” provided models for lifelong marriages, encouragement and advice to weather marital storms, and dozens of sets of eyes to notice when marriages were going sour. Communities are meddlesome, but meddling can be a social good.

Traditionally, marriage and family in turn opened out to the community. As Wendell Berry says, “Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community.” Even today, married couples “say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is.”

Marriage stretches beyond the local community to embrace the cosmic: “The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth.” Embedded in a network of relations, marriage and the nuclear family were public facts.

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By John Jalsevac, LifeSite News

After a grade 7-8 teacher in Toronto posted graphic “safe sex” pamphlets in his classroom, at least one of which was originally designed for “mature” venues like gay bath houses, the Toronto District School Board has put him on home assignment, but defended the teacher for having “good intentions.”

"They were put up by the teacher in an attempt to speak more directly to youth on what is a sensitive topic," TDSB spokesman Ryan Bird told Sun News.

Bird told LifeSiteNews that Vroom has been removed from the school and is "on home assignment pending a review," but would not give any more details.

One of the pamphlets depicted two men apparently engaged in a sex act and gives explicit advice on oral sex. The pamphlet was produced by the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) and is intended primarily for distribution to homosexual bars and bathhouses across the city. It is not intended to be given to children, said an ACT spokesman.

"We do use explicit language because we're targeting a specific community where this kind of language is warranted and needed," ACT spokesman Andrew Brett said.

Other pamphlets in the classroom reportedly included an ad for female condoms and the morning-after pill.

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From European Dignity Watch

On Thursday, April 23, as France voted for the legalization of sex-same marriage despite months-long mass protests, Professor Helen Alvaré of George Mason University School of Law affirmed that such “sexual expressionism” cannot lead to true human flourishing.

Invited by the European Parliament, Professor Alvaré, a specialist in family law, spoke of existing tensions and even clashes between the free exercise of religion, on the one hand, and the push for equal recognition of all sexual behavior, on the other. Although recognition of different sexual orientations (known collectively as LGBT) is not a new phenomenon, the claim for granting them complete equality within society is. Alvaré calls this the “demand for sexual expressionism”.

Based on strong emotional and sexual interests, LGBT organisations have continued to push for public recognition of their different sexual orientations – thereby pushing for a new definition of marriage. For “sexual expressionists”, the sole condition for marriage should be an emotional relationship between a flexible number of consenting adults – a decision based on individuals, regardless of the consequences that this may have on children, lineage, and society. Besides the legal redefinition of marriage, the key goals of „sexual expressionists“ – as a necessary consequence of that lifestyle – are free access to contraception, abortion and sterilization.

But again, this demand has no foundation in any research of what actually contributes to the well-being and flourishing of persons and pays no attention to consequences, which include the large-scale immiseration of lower- and middle-class women.

According to Professor Alvaré, instead of responding to the social science evidence of what women really want and need – namely a stable partnership, a marriage, and a family – the demand for the recognition of “sexual expressionism” is mainly articulated as a liberation from religion as a way to achieve full equelity and freedom.

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By Ryan T Anderson, New York Daily News

By John Bingham, Telegraph

Britain has been ranked as one of the worst places in the developed world to be a mother, due in part to couples putting off having children until later life.

The UK is languishing behind Slovenia, Estonia and Greece in a global league table of the best and worst places in the world to give birth compiled by Save The Children.

It was ranked 23rd behind most of western Europe including Ireland, France and Germany, and other leading developed countries in the chart which takes into account factors such as infant and childhood mortality, maternal health and measures of women’s rights such as the number of female MPs.

Nordic countries dominated the top of the table, with Finland leading the way, while sub-Saharan Africa accounted for the bottom 10 places in the table of 176 countries. The Democratic Republic of Congo was judged the worst place in the world to be a mother.

Although infant mortality rates in the UK have recently reached a historic low, Britain’s record still trails that of many European neighbours. Other issues which counted against Britain included having fewer women in positions of power.

The charity said that one key factor which pushed the UK lower than other European countries was a higher proportion of women dying in childbirth than in places such as Slovakia, Montenegro and Lithuania.

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By Michael Cook, MercatorNet

By Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

[...]  The more those around me demonised those of us who were clinging to moral precepts based on duty rather than self-interest, the more important it became to me to try to open people’s eyes to what was thus being ignored, denied or misrepresented.

I was particularly aghast when, in May 1993, a single mother of a six-year-old boy, who had been treated with a fertility drug, gave birth to sextuplets.

I wrote of the ‘reckless amorality’ of a society in which there was general jubilation among the NHS staff involved ‘for the brilliant masterstroke of creating a single-parent family of seven’.
 
Over the past 30 years, our cultural and political elites have simply destroyed rational discourse, polarised opinion and thereby undermined the possibility of finding common ground

There were whole communities where committed fathers were almost totally unknown. Children as young as five were becoming highly sexualised from the example of their promiscuous mothers.

Family breakdown was dissolving the bonds of society and civilisation itself.

According to teachers, doctors and social workers I spoke to, young men were fathering children indiscriminately and children were growing up in unbridled savagery and lawlessness to despise their mothers and disdain men and all authority.

What really horrified these professionals was these disastrous consequences were being ignored.

The idea that a woman could be mother and father to her children — more, that it was her ‘right’ to choose such a lifestyle — led directly to the hopeless plight of often inadequate women struggling to raise children while the men who fathered them were, in effect, told they were free to do their own thing.

I was as perplexed by this as I was appalled. I had been brought up to believe the Left stood for altruism rather than selfishness, community rather than individualism, self- discipline rather than the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest.

Instead, society was worshipping at the shrine of the self, and this was causing a rising tide of juvenile distress, crime, emotional disturbance, educational and relationship failure.

The fact that I continued to write along these lines regardless of all the abuse hurled to shut me up seemed to drive the Left nuts.

Yes, they espoused a doctrine of being tolerant and non-judgmental, but not when it came to me. I was branded a ‘moraliser’, which appeared to be a term of abuse.

Most of the time, those hurling insults provided no contrary evidence or even arguments, just blanket denials and gratuitous abuse.

Those of us who inhabit the world of intellectual combat should not be too surprised by the missiles that are hurled our way.

But I believe my experience is symptomatic of what has happened to British society and western culture as a whole over the past 30 years.

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by Robert Oscar Lopez, Public Discourse

During oral arguments on Prop 8, Justice Kennedy alluded to the views of children of same-sex couples as if their desires and concerns are identical to and uncritical of their parents’ decisions. But the reality is far more complicated.