Melanie Phillips on Marriage Breakdown.......

Writing in the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips has a useful article on the effects of marriage breakdown to couples, children, the wider family and the nation.
There are, of, course, all sorts of personal reasons for marriage breakdown, but how far are those influenced by a climate in which marriage seems no longer to be perceived as a good in itself, but rather a lifestyle choice among many, apparently equally valid, lifestyle choices?

As Melanie says:

"The family is the building block of society. If the institution of the family is broken, society breaks with it.

That is what has happened in Britain over the past four decades as part of a deliberate attempt by the 'progressive' intelligentsia to reshape society around the unrestrained gratification of adult sexual desire under the banners of ' liberation', 'equality' and 'rights'.

As a result, nearly half of all babies are now born outside marriage; Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe; and women and children are at far greater risk of sexual and physical abuse.

Children from fractured homes do worse in general in every single area of their lives.

As the High Court judge Sir Paul Coleridge recently observed, the family courts are overwhelmed with cases involving damaged, miserable or disturbed children.

Yet for years the evidence of this catastrophe has been swept under the carpet or denied outright by those pushing this agenda.

Anyone who drew attention to it was pilloried as a bigot who wanted to turn back the clock to some mythical 'golden age'.

Marriage was progressively undermined. With divorce court judges deciding they were no longer prepared to make judgments about who was to blame for the breakdown of a marriage, divorce soared. "

Those who favour the gay rights agenda continue to push for their notion of equality in all areas of life; Melanie Phillips made some interesting points about what that agenda seeks:

"But is the gay rights agenda really about tolerance, or is it about trying to stop heterosexuality being the behavioural norm?

Because it entails treating gay relationships as identical to heterosexual ones in every respect, any differences - over marriage or adoption, for example - are damned as discrimination and bigotry.

As a result, what started as a decent intention to eradicate intolerance has turned into intolerance as morality has been stood on its head.

Thus opposing gay adoption on the grounds that children need a replica mother and father is denounced as 'homophobic'."