Wednesday, January 08, 2014

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.

7 comments:

  1. Of course what Mr. Bernardi has written is true, on average. There is really no serious question about that. I don't know why it is that liberals believe that pointing to individual success stories refutes a claim about what happens on average. We all know drunk drivers who have made it home in one piece and three-pack-a-day smokers who live to ninety, but that is not the way the smart money goes. Traditional marriage is the safe (but not certain) bet. Alternative options should be entered with eyes wide open.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "...people who have been raised by single mothers and who have turned out OK"

    Its called "IKAGO" syndrome, standing for "I Know A Good One". Its a way of shutting down any discussion about a broader issue by citing a single example to show the issue doesn't exist.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As opposed to Cory's claims which are: "I Dont Have Any Evidence BUT"... (IDHAEB). Its usually the work of the non-expert, the social conservative or the bigot. Not sure which one Cory is...and after all IDHAEB myself...

      Delete
    2. Does Cory Bernardi really not cite any evidence? There has actually been a lot of research done on the issue, in particular, on the issues he raises, such as the link between single motherhood and rates of incarceration:

      By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy-two percent of juvenile murderers and 60 percent of rapists come from single-mother homes. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.

      You can argue about the validity of the research but it's unwise to claim that it's not there.

      Delete
  3. Bernadi has guts nonetheless and is getting the issue out there.

    Jesse_7

    ReplyDelete
  4. The Australian family has disintegrated to the core such that anyone who even questions the single parent household is deemed to be naive and backwards. It is now deemed so normal owing to high rates of promiscuity among men and women. My generation, Generation Y, I anticipate will be worsening the trend because many of them live of pornography. Even many girls of Gen Y think pornography is not only acceptable, but empowering and even fashionable. It shows how sexualised Australia is. I write a lot about Australian culture at my blog at www.goodwritingandfun.blogspot.com.au

    ReplyDelete