Australia: horror that senator defends the traditional family

Well, liberalism continues to march onward in this country.

A senator, Cory Bernardi, has written a book called The Conservative Revolution (I haven't read it yet - Bernardi is a conservative-leaning member of the Liberal Party).

In it he calls the traditional family of married parents and their biological children "the gold standard," i.e. the ideal to aim for. He cites statistics showing higher crime rates amongst boys from single parent families and higher promiscuity rates for girls.

The response? A fury of condemnation. Word like "dangerous," "offensive" and "inflammatory" are being thrown around in the media.

There has been very little discussion of what Bernardi actually had to say. The tactics to oppose Bernardi have been (apart from the name calling) to wheel out experts to say that there are a whole variety of family types which are equally legitimate; to nominate people who have been raised by single mothers and who have turned out OK; and to argue that all that matters is that people love and look after their children well, regardless of the family type.

It seems that liberal society is determined to rush headlong down a path in which the traditional family becomes increasingly marginal.

I can't see it ending well. I've said it before, but I'll repeat it once more: if you say that all family types are equal, then you are saying that a single mother family is equal to a family with both a father and a mother. In which case, the father is no longer playing a necessary role. He could just as well not be there.

So either men will start to believe that they are not necessary in the lives of their children, in which case their commitment to family life and to paid employment will decline; or else we will all live a great pretence, in which it will be politically correct to insist that single mother families are equal, but people won't really believe it.

This is not to say that you cannot recognise that there are single mothers who did not intend to end up as single mothers and who work hard to do their best by their children. We can recognise the efforts of these women, but without giving up on the ideal of having as many children as possible raised within a traditional family.

We should not be cowed by the liberal insistence on an equality of family types. We should continue to argue for the traditional family as we build an alternative to the liberal mainstream.