Anglican Mainstream

By Jonathon van Maren, LifeSite News

[...]  Peter Hitchens is, as anyone who reads his columns knows, a pessimist. He believes Western civilization, especially in Europe, is creaking rather loudly, and uses his column to amplify that fact regularly. “I just say I’m realistic,” Hitchens tells me, “I think the outlook for Christian civilization is currently rather bleak, and I think that anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding himself.” He lists quickly a number of proofs for his assertion: mass divorce resulting in untold damage to a generation of young people, the rejection of marriage by the current generation leading to increased dependence on the state, abortion on demand, and morally (and even ideologically) bankrupt “conservative” politicians.

Even debating such things has become difficult, Hitchens notes, because, “People are taught, almost universally, what to think, and those classes of society who were previously taught to think, no longer are. You actually get people who might be thought to rank as intellectuals or important thinkers who don’t actually think, and who are as ill-accessible to logic as anyone.”

One proof supporting this assertion, of course, is the abortion debate in both Great Britain and Canada. “People deceive themselves because they believe it in their interests to do so,” Hitchens says, “They either want to indulge their own actions, or they want to avoid confronting the actions of others for the private life.” When I ask him what his opinion is on the phenomenon of the Left’s worship of science abruptly ceasing whenever embryology is brought up, Hitchens replies, “The more people shout about science and knowledge and reason, the more likely it seems to me that they will probably be ignoring them in some important part of their lives.”

While restrictions on freedom of speech vary in both Canada and Britain, pro-abortion protestors on both sides of the Atlantic seem to agree that some evidence should never see the light of day. “It is undoubtedly true,” Hitchens notes, “that knowledge of what an abortion does, particularly pictorially, is one of the very few things which is almost totally true to say is completely censored, particularly from mainstream television.”

The rhetorician is quick to admit that supporters of abortion have, up until now, soundly defeated us in the area of rhetoric. “I saw a little bumper sticker in the US: ‘Against abortion? Don’t have one,’” he relates, “I always thought that someone should produce a bumper sticker saying, ‘Against murder? Don’t commit one,’ which is the same logic. The thing is that people don’t realize that it’s the same logic because the recognition of the humanity of the baby is what’s been withdrawn. That’s been the great success of the pro-abortion lobby, to suggest that there is only one human involved in an abortion, when in fact there are two.”

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by Steve Doughty, Daily Mail

We foot the bill for subsidised housing, crime, health, social care and disrupted education – and the cost is rising

• Costs include housing, crime, health and disrupted education
• Estimates produced by Relationships Foundation think tank
• Report calls on David Cameron to find ways to support families

Family breakdown is costing taxpayers almost £50 billion a year and the bill is rising fast, a new analysis said yesterday.

The costs generated by family breakdown – including subsidised housing, crime, health and social care and disrupted education – have gone up by nearly a quarter in just four years.

The estimates, produced by the Relationships Foundation think tank, include large rises in tax credits for single parents, in housing benefit, in NHS and social services spending, and in spending on policing.

The report calls on David Cameron to find ways to support families and to put family policy at the forefront of the Government’s interests.

Foundation director Michael Trend said: ‘For too long Governments of all colours have ignored the vital output of families and the multi-billion pound cost of their failure.

‘This is unsustainable in any economic climate, let along the current one.’

The report put the share of tax credit spending attributable to family breakdown at £9.79 billion, up from £6.31 billion in 2009. Including other state handouts, the total benefit spending on broken families was put at more than £18 billion.

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From The Iona Institute

The children of religious couples are more likely to abandon religion if their parents divorce, but it doesn't have as big an effect as previously thought, a new US study suggests.

The study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, found that children who had two religious parents who divorced are twice as likely to become estranged from their church as adults compared to people whose parents didn't get divorced.

"When both parents are religious, the effect of divorce has a negative effect on religiosity," says Jeremy Uecker, a professor at Baylor University and the lead author of the study.

"They might think their parents' marriage was ordained by God or something and that breakup can have more of an effect on their religiousness in adulthood."

The main reason parental divorce affects religious outcomes, Uecker argues, is that children are separated from one of their parents, and parents are usually considered the primary source of religious training for children.

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By John Bingham, Telegraph

Under a long-awaited bill allowing same-sex couples to marry, only infidelity between people of opposite genders would count as adultery in divorce cases.

It means that people in a same-sex marriages who discover that their spouse is unfaithful to them would not be able to divorce for adultery – unless it was with someone of the opposite sex.

Equally, it makes clear that straight people cannot accuse their partner of adultery if they discover they had a secret lover of the same sex.

It comes after Government legal experts failed to agree what constitutes “sex” between same-sex couples.

The bill also makes clear that gay couples would not be able to have their marriage annulled on grounds of non-consummation for the same reason.

Lawyers and MPs said the distinction over adultery created inequality between heterosexual and homosexual couples in the divorce courts and would lead to confusion.

They said it made it likely that adultery would simply be abolished as a grounds for divorce – either through Parliament or the courts.

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By Kerry McDermott, Mailonline

Plans to allow same-sex couples to marry in Britain could pave the way for the concept of adultery to be abolished in law, experts have said.

Under the Government's draft Bill only infidelity between a man and a woman constitutes adultery.

So while the law would give same-sex couples the right to wed, they would not be able to divorce their partner on the basis of adultery if their spouse went on to be unfaithful – unless they cheated with somebody of the opposite sex.

It also states that a straight person who discovered their husband or wife had a lover of the same-sex could not accuse their unfaithful partner of adultery in a divorce court.

Lawyers and MPs have argued that the distinction over adultery – which arose after Government legal experts failed to agree on what constitutes sex between same-sex couples – would cause confusion.

They warned it would create inequality between heterosexual and homosexual married couples who found themselves in the divorce courts, and said it would likely result in adultery being abolished altogether as a grounds for divorce.

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By A N Wilson, Mailonline

[...]  I hold up my hands. I have been divorced. Although I was labelled a Young Fogey in my youth, I imbibed all the liberationist sexual mores of the Sixties as far as sexual morality was concerned.

I made myself and dozens of people extremely unhappy — including, of course, my children and other people’s children. I am absolutely certain that my parents, by contrast, who married in 1939 and stayed together for more than 40 years until my father died, never strayed from the marriage bed.

There were long periods when they found marriage extremely tough, but having lived through years of aching irritation and frustration, they grew to be Darby and Joan, deeply dependent upon one another in old age, and in an imperfect but recognisable way, an object lesson in the meaning of the word ‘love’.

Back in the Fifties, GfK National Opinon Poll conducted a survey asking how happy people felt on a sliding scale — from very happy to very unhappy.

In 1957, 52 per cent said they were ‘very happy’. By 2005, the same set of questions found only 36 per cent were ‘very happy’, and the figures are falling.

More than half of those questioned in the GfK’s most recent survey said that it was a stable relationship which made them happy. Half those who were married said they were ‘very happy’, compared with only a quarter of singles.

The truth is that the Sexual Revolution had the power to alter our way of life, but it could not alter our essential nature; it could not alter the reality of who and what we are as human beings.

It made nearly everyone feel that they were free, or free-er, than their parents had been — free to smoke pot, free to sleep around, free to pursue the passing dream of what felt, at the time, like overwhelming love — an emotion which very seldom lasts, and a word which is meaningless unless its definition includes commitment.

How easy it was to dismiss old-fashioned sexual morality as ‘suburban’, as a prison for the human soul. How easy it was to laugh at the ‘prudes’ who questioned the wisdom of what was happening in the Sexual Revolution.
 
About one-third of marriages in Britain end in divorce

Yet, as the opinion poll shows, most of us feel at a very deep level that what will make us very happy is not romping with a succession of lovers.

In fact, it is having a long-lasting, stable relationship, having children, and maintaining, if possible, lifelong marriage.

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by Steve Doughty, Mailonline

The number of older people whose marriages collapse when they reach their 60s has risen sharply, official figures have revealed.

Even though divorce overall has become less common, the rate of break-ups among the ‘silver separators’ has soared in the past ten years, figures from the Office for National Statistics show.

The proportion of couples splitting up in their 60s is up by 58 per cent on last year, and is likely to keep rising.
 
The overall rate fell to 10.8 divorces per 1,000 people last year – down from 14 per 1,000 in 2004.

In 2001, only 3,693 women aged 60 or over got divorced. Last year that number had risen by 58 per cent to a record 5,836.

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By Steve Doughty and Jason Groves, Mailonline

Ministers responded to the growing crisis over family break-up yesterday … by releasing a mobile phone app to ease the path for couples wanting to separate.

There was an angry reaction to the launch of the online advice package, which will tell parents how to get legal and financial advice, and how to break the news to children.

It tells parents that ‘it’s not the separation itself that can cause harm to your child, it’s the level of conflict that they see between parents’.

The initiative came as senior Tories piled pressure on David Cameron to make good as early as next week his long-standing pledge to shore up marriage with a tax break for husbands and wives.

Former children’s minister Tim Loughton said next week’s Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne is ‘absolutely the last opportunity’ for the Government to show it regards marriage as important and that it means to stand by its promise.

Treasury Exchequer Secretary David Gauke said: ‘We are committed to finding ways to support marriage in the tax and benefits system.’

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By Rosa Silverman, Telegraph

Family breakdown during childhood was “consistently associated with psychological distress in adulthood during people’s early 30s”, the study said.

The picture was the same across different generations, suggesting that although divorce and separation have become more common than they once were, the impact they have on mental health has not decreased.

The report, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, said that good health depended on lifestyle conditions, or ‘social medicines’.

These were said to include a stable family life, stress-free childhood, alcohol-free culture for young people, secure and rewarding employment, positive relationships with friends and neighbours and a socially active old age.

The paper said: “People who suffer stresses such as parental divorce in childhood are at a higher risk of social and psychological problems later in their adult lives.”

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• Almost 2.5m aged 45-64 have no spouse, partner or children living with them
• Amount has grown 50% since the mid 1990s
• Number of loners has pushed up demand for housing

[...]  Family researcher Patricia Morgan said of the Office of National Statistics analysis: ‘These are appalling figures and we have to ask why the Government is ignoring this development. ‘This is a fall-out from the spread of casual unions and the effective state discrimination against marriage.’

She added: ‘The growth of numbers of people living alone is very expensive indeed, in terms of state benefits, the need for more development and  health and social services care, because people who live alone are more likely to need the NHS or social services.

‘People think that it is cheaper if people don’t form families. It isn’t. ‘The Government could start by ending the 25 per cent discount on council tax for people living by themselves. It’s crazy. It is fining people who live together.’

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By Steve Doughty, Mailonline

The decline of marriage has left ever-increasing numbers of middle-aged men and women living alone.

Almost 2.5million between 45 and 64 have their own home but no spouse, partner or children to live with them.

The army of such loners has grown by more than 50 per cent – 800,000-plus – since the mid-1990s, an official analysis said yesterday.

And the number of men on their own has increased far more than women.

The Office for National Statistics report suggests that men who have not committed to long-term relationships or whose marriages have been ended by divorce are finding it harder to win partners once they reach middle age.

One reason could be that middle-aged women with good qualifications and jobs have little interest in forming relationships with lower-earning men.

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By Steve Doughty, Mailonline

Getting divorced is a painful and difficult thing. You probably hadn’t worked that out for yourself, so a quango stuffed with eminent lawyers and judges has taken it upon itself to tell you so.

Since divorce is awful and miserable, the quango in question, grandly called the Law Commission, thinks we ought to do something about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get rid of all that ‘acrimony and wasted costs’?

This is a favourite song of the great and good of the legal profession, the state-funded charities and the counselling groups, the liberal academics and the think tanks which get reported by the BBC. The tune hasn’t changed in 50 years.

And whenever a government has listened and done something about it, the result has been a disaster.

It was the Law Commission – set up by Harold Wilson in the 1960s – which drew up the 1969 Divorce Reform Act. This was widely regarded as a long-delayed and absolutely necessary piece of legislation. It got rid of all that uncaring need to prove fault, with resulting embarrassing court cases, when a couple divorce.

The new law brought in two and five-year waiting periods for divorce by separation, and the quickie, which can take only six months, when someone accepts their behaviour was at fault.

So in one well-designed swoop, our finest legal planners freed unhappy married couples from their bonds, took the pain out of divorce, cut excessive legal costs, rationalised the process of separation, and empowered future generations of women.

Well, they would have done, if only people had behaved the way they were supposed to.

What we got was more lawyers, more costs, and, above all more divorce. In 1968 there were just under 46,000 divorces. That more than doubled by 1972, trebled by 1979, and peaked in 1993 at over 165,000.

Given the very well documented damage caused by divorce to adults and children, I would not be confident in saying the 1969 Act did very much to free people from misery and pain.

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By Trey Dinsdale, Christian Post

[...]  Bishop Robinson, who was once married to a woman and is now divorced and remarried to a man, was asked at one point why he should be taken seriously as an advocate for his position when he himself has broken the vow that he took with his former wife. Bishop Robinson’s reply was interesting and in a way, I can see how it would seem noble to one who thinks from his perspective. His response was a description of how his marriage ended. Mr. and Mrs. Gene Robinson went to the courthouse with their priest and lawyer and after they received a divorce decree, they went directly to their church where they read apologies and gave back the symbols of their vows, the rings that they had exchanged seventeen years earlier when they were married. Their vows had been to honor one another and when it became clear that the present circumstance was unnatural for Mr. Robinson, they mutually agreed to release one another from those vows in order to honor those same vows. There is a circular and internal consistency to their logic.

By Hilary White, LifeSite News

Once again, the various bodies of the “progressive” establishment in the U.S. Catholic Church have erupted in a frenzy of outraged condemnation at the Vatican office issuing a warning this week to an academic who wrote that homosexuality and masturbation are morally acceptable.

Sr. Margaret Farley, a former full professor of ethics at Yale University’s Divinity School, also happens to be a member of the Sisters of Mercy and an established leader in the Catholic Church’s own internal sexual revolution. Her 2006 book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, which asserts the moral acceptability of homosexuality, “gay marriage,” remarriage after divorce, and masturbation, has been the subject of an ongoing intervention by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2010.

On June 4, the revolution’s flagship paper, the National Catholic Reporter, published a notification Sr. Farley received from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and has been furiously fanning the flames since then. The NCR coverage has been picked up by dozens of blogs and several mainstream news outlets, all echoing the theme of the big, bad, retrograde Vatican attacking innocent defenders of freedom of thought and our new era of sexual freedom.

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By Charles C W Cooke, National Review

[...]  Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too. According to UCLA’s Williams Institute, two-thirds of legally recognized same-sex couples in the United States are lesbian. (Solely on the “marriage” front, in Massachusetts’s first four years, this statistic was 62 percent.) While data in the United States are clearly limited, Scandinavian countries have been at this a little longer. Denmark was the first country to introduce recognition of same-sex partnerships, coining the term “registered partnership” in 1989. Norway followed suit in 1993, and then Sweden in 1995. Again, Stockholm University’s study seems to confirm the American trend. In Norway, male same-sex marriages are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages, and female same-sex marriages are an astonishing 167 percent more likely to be dissolved. In Sweden, the divorce risk for male-male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages, and the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men. This should not be surprising: In the United States, women request approximately two-thirds of divorces in all forms of relationships — and have done so since the start of the 19th century — so it reasonably follows that relationships in which both partners are women are more likely to include someone who wishes to exit.

The debate over marriage does not necessarily hinge on its popularity among the eligible, and advocates of gay unions would no doubt assert that “equality” is not a numerical proposition as quickly as their opponents would aver that the very idea is a hopeless category mistake. But it is nonetheless worth noting that there is no particular groundswell — even in states and cities that have both legal gay marriage and significant numbers of homosexuals — and that, when gay couples do decide to get married, they are more likely than their straight equivalents to change their minds later.

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By Judith Woods, Telegraph

A survey shows that young people aspire to a good marriage – so why does the divorce rate continue to rise?

[...]  It is here – and in similar buildings the length of the land – that pensions are carved up, houses allocated and, at the extreme end, legal arguments conducted over furniture and family pets. Assets are divided, children’s fates decided. And as their family splits asunder, 3.8 million children find themselves victims of what Family Division Judge Sir Paul Coleridge calls “one of the most destructive scourges of our time”.

A new survey shows – contrary, perhaps, to expectation – that young people regard marriage and the raising of a family to be more worthwhile than a high-flying career or the acquisition of material wealth. Indeed, the research, carried out by care home charity Friends of the Elderly, revealed that a lasting marriage was the leading aspiration among every age group, including 18-24 year-olds.

Earlier this month, when Coleridge established the Marriage Foundation, an independent charity dedicated to championing marriage as the “gold standard for relationships”, Left-wing commentators were highly critical. In return for raising his head above the politically correct parapet to reject the canard that when it comes to bringing up children, cohabitation is the equal of a legal union, bar the paperwork, he was branded reactionary.

But now it would appear that he was reflecting the mood of the nation. While no one disputes that cohabiting parents can be as loving and supportive as married couples, the incontrovertible fact is that their relationships are less stable – they are almost three times more likely to break up by the time their children are seven. And the long-term consequences of divorce and relationship breakdown on children are clear: they are more likely to play truant, take drugs, abuse alcohol, commit crime or self-harm.

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For those engaged in America’s culture wars, it is clear that the welfare of children is the battle ground of choice. We are barely out of the gate with civil unions and same-sex “marriages,” and we have been told, in defense of these new institutions — and with the help of Hollywood — that The Kids Are All Right. And if it be true that “by their fruits ye shall know them,” then, if the kids are all right, so must be their parents.

But as we hurtle along in our social experiments, allaying our fears that children may not be getting the best deal in the new domestic arrangements, let’s pause for a moment and pay heed to the many children who, as adults, have come forward to say something about that older, accepted, and more or less “settled” issue: divorce.  Read here

by Charles C W Cooke, National Review Online

Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

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by Jason Groves, Mailonline

Iain Duncan Smith last night signalled support for a major campaign to promote marriage and turn back the ‘appalling’ tide of divorce.
The Work and Pensions Secretary, widely seen as the social conscience of the modern Conservative Party, indicated he was wholeheartedly behind a bid by High Court judge Sir Paul Coleridge to end the ‘destructive scourge’ of family breakdown.

Sir Paul will formally launch the Marriage Foundation today in a bid to raise awareness of the vital role of marriage in bringing up children.

The senior family court judge said he felt compelled to speak out because of the unprecedented scale of the problem.

He added: ‘I happen to think that the family judiciary have a contribution to make to this debate. Most of us have watched as the situation has gradually got more and more and more appalling and out of control and there comes a time when it is, I think, irresponsible to remain quiet.

‘This is now happening across Britain – and indeed Europe and North America – on a scale we have never seen before and the impact it has on the whole of society is very, very real and dramatic and we need to highlight it and do something about it.’

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By Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

At last, a member of the judiciary has broken ranks to warn of a social disaster that has taken place on the courts’ own watch.

Tomorrow, a High Court family judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, will launch a foundation to promote marriage and to warn of the catastrophic consequences of family breakdown.

[...]  The institutionally liberal Law Commission recommended one liberalising family measure after another, such as easier divorce, ending the stigma of illegitimacy or establishing equal rights for cohabitants, both gay and straight.

At the same time, New Left thinking about radical and non-judgmental ‘lifestyle choice’ swept through the intelligentsia. One baleful result was that supposedly objective research itself became corrupted.

The truth became not only unsayable but unknowable, as government researchers airbrushed the category of marriage out of official statistics, making it impossible to quantify the effects of different kinds of relationship.

Academic researchers who tried to tell the truth about the devastating effects of divorce on children found themselves professionally ostracised and at risk of having their grant funding cut.

The actual damage to children from divorce and elective lone parenthood was further masked and minimised by other researchers, who were either consumed by guilt over their abandonment of their own children, or cravenly chose to go with the flow. Meanwhile, research carried out mainly in the U.S. which produced overwhelming evidence of the relative harm done by family breakdown in virtually every area of children’s lives, was wickedly brushed aside.

Of course, there are many lone parents who do a heroic job against all the odds raising their children well. And there are some situations where it is indeed best for truly warring or abusive couples to part.

But research has shown that most marriages are not broken by such extremes but merely by grumbling dissatisfaction.

And in that kind of situation, it is usually better for the children if the parents stay together.

To which liberals have sneered that staying together ‘for the sake of the children’ is a cruel and heartless doctrine. But since when was putting the welfare of their children ahead of parents’ own interests considered cruel and heartless? Only since society decided that children were an inconvenient obstacle to the right of parents to live lives of unfettered selfishness. 

Now Sir Paul has decided someone has to break through all this lethal nonsense.

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