Lady Hale: what is a family?

Lady Hale

Lady Hale (Baroness Hale of Richmond) is President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Prospect magazine has named her one of the world's top 50 thinkers. So she has some clout in the field of law.

Last month she gave a speech on the topic "What is a 21st Century Family?". It's an interesting speech as it illustrates clearly one aspect of the way that liberal moderns think about such issues.

To explain, though, I need to turn briefly to a post written by Andrew Willard Jones. He notes that Christians often call liberals moral relativists. And yet liberals do clearly have a strong belief in right and wrong:

The entire ideological edifice of liberalism rests on the conviction that it is just plain wrong to intervene in the individual’s pursuit of desire fulfillment, and that to do so is a violation of justice, the paradigmatic moral principle. You will find no group of people more certain of the rightness of their convictions and more willing to force others to comply with them than those who congregate on university campuses. There is, obviously, no shortage of right-and-wrong in late liberalism’s woke culture. And yet, many Christians continue to talk about moral relativism. Why?

The pursuit of individual autonomy, and the concept of justice flowing from this, does provide liberals with categories of right and wrong. But here is the critical point. Within the liberal framework the actual term or category "moral" is indeed limited to the issues that society has a relatavistic stance toward:

in the everyday liberal vernacular, the word “moral” is restricted in application to things that society is more-or-less relativistic about.

Liberalism sets up the binary of moral/political. The moral is my own subjective, irrational and private beliefs on issues that the state is indifferent toward. Once an issue is thought to involve public policy, however, it becomes part of the morally neutral political and economic realm that the state then seeks to regulate.

Lady Hale's speech makes sense within this liberal framework. On the one hand, she praises the shift toward autonomy within modern family life:

...three things stand out from the developments of the last 50 years. The first is an increasing desire and respect for individual autonomy in adult decision-making – by both men and women. So we try and facilitate or at least acknowledge the family life created between same sex couples, through informal partnerships, through assisted reproduction, adoption and surrogacy. At the same time, we increasingly respect their decisions to bring their adult relationships to an end and their autonomy in deciding upon the financial consequences of doing so

On the other hand, she is quick to identify the purpose of family life as a political/economic one. She believes that the family originally had very limited purposes, being established to provide a legitimate male heir for the transmission of property. However, it was the role of the family in providing economic support for its members that gave it a more significant reason for existence. As a mini welfare state, it relieved the state itself of some of its financial burdens:

As I have said before, the conjugal family is its own little social security system, a private space, separate from the public world, within which the parties are expected to look after one another and their children. The more the private family can look after its own, the less the state will have to do so...Perhaps it was for this reason that the narrow view of family relationships began to expand.

She believes it to be a "narrow view" to see family relationships as being based on kinship. This makes sense if the purpose of the family is simply to be "its own little social security system" as kinship is irrelevant to this aim.

She is also critical of attempts to reform family law in the UK by limiting alimony to five years. She questions how the reforms,

can possibly fulfill the role of the family in shouldering the burdens which it has created rather than placing them upon the state. 

Again, given her view that the very reason for the existence of the family is to relieve the state of a potential financial burden, you can understand why this decides the matter for her.

There are two main points to draw from all this. First, if the family exists as a social technology then it doesn't really matter what form it takes. It could be three adult men and five children as long as it is performing its economic role of being "its own little social security system". That is what matters to a liberal state that only admits to determining public policy on "morally neutral" economic and political grounds, but within the larger understanding of justice as being based on maximising individual autonomy.

Second, most people currently see aspects of family law as being gravely unjust. For instance, a wife can unilaterally and without any grounds divorce her husband and yet the state will still compel him to support her financially whether it be through alimony or child support. She can elect not to work, not to provide for herself, but still compel her now ex-husband to work on her behalf as if he were still her husband. It seems mad.

However, it makes sense within the liberal framework. First, this framework seeks, in Lady Hale's words, "individual autonomy in adult decision-making" including to "respect their decisions to bring their adult relationships to an end". Therefore, the liberal state is committed to easy divorce.

At the same time, the liberal state sees the family as a social technology that has the function of acting as a mini social security system. Therefore, the state wants the husband to be an economic provider - that is his permitted social function. The liberal state wants to have its cake and eat it too, by emphasising autonomy and easy divorce, as well as men working as providers - even after they have been rejected as husbands by their wives.

This is not a viable approach in the long term for a number of reasons:

1. The emphasis on autonomy can only undermine family commitments. If the aim is to maximise our ability to pursue our desires without impediment, then you cannot have lifelong monogamous marriage. Serious commitments require trust, shared moral commitments, and a willingness to act for the greater good and for higher principle rather than for our own immediate interests and impulses.

2. The emphasis on autonomy tends, over time, to expand the role of the state in supporting individuals, rather than having them supported more cheaply, but with greater interdependence, within the family. It is already the case that a woman can, if she so chooses, raise children with the support of the state rather than with the support of a husband.

3. The view of the family as a social technology is too limited. Yes, social function matters and no doubt played a role in shaping the family. But this ignores the way that aspects of our natures are fulfilled within closely bonded familial relationships, particularly those based on kinship that span generations. This ought to be acknowledged as part of the "common good" that a society seeks to uphold, rather than relegated to the field of private moral goods that the state is indifferent toward.

4. The contradiction between easy, no fault divorce and the justification for the family as a mini welfare state will not so easily be solved by compelling ex-husbands to continue their former provider role even after the dissolution of their families. Over time this will erode confidence in marriage as an institution.

The Swedish theory of love

In 2016 a documentary about life in Sweden was released with the title "The Swedish theory of love". A preview of the documentary summarises it this way:

In February of 1972 a group of Swedish politicians gathered together to define a new idea for the future. Motivated by a strong need to challenge traditional social structures, they outlined a new goal. Their vision was to create "a society of autonomous individuals". A manifesto was written in which it was concluded that no "citizen should be dependent on another." Cut to present day, forty years later. Scandinavia is the loneliest region in the world. Sweden statistically has the highest number of people dying alone and tops the chart for single households with 47% of people living alone.

The 1972 manifesto referred to above was called "The Family of the Future". According to the documentary the manifesto called for a liberation of individuals from the traditional family with its dependent relationships. In the future there would only be "true" relationships, formed by wholly independent, autonomous individuals. As an academic explains in the documentary:

The Swedish theory of love. What does it say? It says that all authentic human relationships have to be based on the fundamental independence between people...The ideal family in Sweden is made up of adult individuals that are fundamentally independent, working for themselves.

But instead of authentic relationships, the plan led to a loss of human relationships, with large numbers of Swedes living a solitary existence. If you look at the following chart you will see that more than 50% of households in Sweden consist of a sole resident, well above most other countries:

The documentary presents some of the more dystopian aspects of the Swedish emphasis on autonomous relationships. It is now the case, for instance, that more than 50% of the clients of the region's largest sperm donor bank are single women. The manager of this bank has a futuristic vision in which women could have a virtual reality experience of being with a man whilst impregnating themselves without needing to have any physical contact with a man during the process.

And what of life for these single women? Here is one of the women featured in the documentary with her child (on a swing):

I think in comparison of the beautiful family homes built in Melbourne in the 1800s and early 1900s and cannot see much evidence of progress in the photo above. The Swedish state might provide for these single mothers but it does so along coldly functionalist lines.

It is also the case that 25% of Swedes die alone, having no contact with family members. We are shown in the documentary the work of agents of a specialist Swedish government agency tasked with investigating these deaths. These workers comb through the dead person's apartment, looking for clues for any family relationships. (As a point of comparison, when my first Australian ancestor died in the early 1900s she had over 80 surviving descendants.)

Why does the Swedish theory of love not work? It is true that when people depend on each other in marriage that they might stay from necessity rather than love - and that this is something not to be desired.

This does not mean, though, that if people have no need for each other, that there is a stronger and more pure emotional bond. The psychology of relationships tends not to work this way. Modern women, who have been "liberated" by the state from any need for masculine support, often talk about no longer needing a man. It tends to make such women feel less impelled toward serious relationships; to be less attracted to what ordinary men have to offer; and to feel less of a sense of gratitude toward men (toward individual men and men as a class). Some women end up confused; they have a nagging idea in their mind that they should be in a relationship, but nonetheless don't feel compelled to actually commit to one.

In contrast, when men and women do fulfil distinct roles within the family, and rely on each other for support, there is a more positive expectation of what a relationship might bring to one's own life, leading to a greater desire at an earlier age to make a serious commitment, as well as a stronger sense of gratitude (and the love that flows from this) towards one's spouse.

It's even the case that if the state steps back, so that the family is the key source of support for individuals in a society, that the family then also brings a greater measure of independence for its members. The family might then allow, for instance, a young woman to leave her parents' home to form a family of her own, or it might allow a more stable accumulation of wealth with the financial independence this creates, or it might give to the individual a degree of material and emotional security within which life goals might be more confidently pursued.

The emphasis on autonomy when it comes to relationships has also made it easier for individuals to treat relationships casually. If we don't need family relationships, because the state guarantees our independent existence, then we can more readily play the field.

But the experience of recent decades suggests that this leaves significant numbers of people jaded and more emotionally distant from others, rather than primed for pure and authentic relationships as the theory suggests. People left in this condition are, if anything, even more likely to feel that they are "settling" if and when they do eventually form a more longstanding relationship.

One final point. Sweden is the end point of most Western societies. As the narrator in the documentary puts it,

The idea that we should be able to manage our lives on our own autonomously, that's not a Swedish invention, it's part of a belief in individuality that has been defining life in the whole Western world for some time. But here in Sweden we've been unusually effective at turning words into reality.

I think that we can expect our own societies to develop along lines similar to Sweden - unless there is a change in the political philosophy (i.e. the state ideology) which currently dominates in the West.

Below is the best version of the documentary I could find. The sound falls away occasionally and there are only Croatian subtitles when Swedish is spoken. But much of the documentary is in English.

Shelley & the machine

I'd like to take you back to 1820 again, this time to a manifesto written by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley titled A Philosophical View of Reform.

In this manifesto, Shelley praises Sir Francis Bacon for increasing "the powers of man" by initiating the perfection of "the mechanical sciences" but complains that the existing "forms of society" prevent these newly acquired powers from being applied in a utilitarian way to increase the overall happiness of society.

Fortunately, continues Shelley, the "political philosophers" have laboured to overcome the problem by thinking up new forms of society based on liberty and equality. Shelley puts his liberal/technocratic vision as follows:

"Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed. The result of the labours of the political philosophers has been the establishment of the principle of Utility as the substance, and liberty and equality as the forms according to which the concerns of human life ought to be administered." 

I think we need to pause and carefully consider what Shelley is arguing for. Shelley believes that human society is to be thought of like a machine, one made powerful by man's increase in power over nature, and that this machine is to be geared to whatever is thought to increase utility, which can only, in Shelley's mind, mean that human life is to be administered according to the forms of liberty and equality.

Note how society itself is assumed to exist to fulfil a kind of Baconian mission of increasing power via technological organisation. Shelley might have been a poet of the romantic era, but this is already that rationalist, technocratic view of society that James Kalb writes about ("Liberal modernity tries to turn the world into a machine for manufacturing satisfactions")

The traditionalist mind doesn't conceive society this way, as a technology to procure an end according to a formula. A human society is, for us, a body of people to which we belong, one that carries with it a tradition, a culture, and a history. It has a value in what it is and as the larger body within which we express our social being.

The forms exist, in part, to maintain the society, but they also express aspects of our social natures. The family, for instance, exists not only to produce the next generation, and to enculturate this generation to successfully carry on a tradition, but it also allows men to fulfil that part of their masculine nature which is expressed in being a husband and father, and a woman likewise to experience being a wife and a mother. Each family also has the potential to embody a good within its own existence: it has a value in being a unique expression of human community.

Therefore, if a Shelleyan liberal were to say "the family fails as a form of society because it does not administer human life according to the principles of liberty and equality" a traditionalist would not see this as failure, as family is supposed to allow us to express aspects of our natures as men and women; to secure a future for a lineage, a nation and a tradition; and to be a unique and meaningful community in itself, one that helps to form identity, attachments, loyalties, commitments and a connection to past and future generations.

Society is not a machine to administer human life according to a single level formula. It is not a technocratic system to give power to such a formula. The pity, again, is that Shelley's view was to become the modern one; to give Shelley credit, he picked up very early on where liberalism would, if followed in a principled way, take a society.

(I had intended this post to be focused on Shelley's understanding of equality but got sidetracked. Will return to this topic soon.)

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Modern Family

In my last post I criticised Sarah Vine for suggesting that the freedom of Western girls to "be whoever" is what defines the West.

It led to a brief discussion on parenting which clarified for me one of the problems we face. Mark Moncrieff (of Upon Hope) commented that:

I think the most important word here is the word "raise", children need to be raised. But "being free to be whoever they want to be" implies that children can raise themselves.

Which led to my own (disjointed) comment in reply:

That's a good way of putting it. And you can imagine why this is so. If you are a liberal and you think that there are no objectives purposes in life and that people should just "be themselves" however they see fit, then there is little purpose to parenting your child - there is nothing definite to raise them toward. Parenting just comes to mean accepting unconditionally. Not imposing anything. Giving the child confidence to "be anything you care to be". The parents are just there to ferry the child around as a kind of support crew, rather than transmitting culture, identity, purpose, wisdom, values.

This is not the only reason why the traditional role of the parent has been undermined. It's more difficult now for parents to set the tone within the family home, given the arrival of portable, wi-fi devices (at least 20 years ago you could simply change the TV channel). But 20 years ago, many middle-class parents were happy enough if their children were raised for the purposes of educational qualifications and career, and so the traditional role of parents in socialising their children was largely left to schools.

This is clearly one issue where it is not enough to be "conservative" (in the sense of conserving the good in society) - we have to be restorationist. We have to restore an older understanding of the parental role, which means giving parents confidence that transmitting ideals of character, of natural sex roles, of identity and loyalty, and of life wisdom are significant to the development and the future well-being of their children.

When you have to get your wife's permission

Dalrock has a tragicomic post up about an evangelical organisation in America running a programme called "Stepping up". The programme calls on men to "courageously lead at home, at church, at work, and in their communities." But here's the catch: the evangelical men leading the programme talk at length about how to get wives to "give permission" so that husbands are allowed to attend the "courageous male leader" seminars.

I laughed at the situation, even though it highlights just how far things have deteriorated. Modern marriage restricts men from carrying out the role they are supposed to play not only within the family but also within society. In this sense it is emasculating.

Men should, without fear of committing a fatal marital "infraction,"  be able to:

1. Step in when their sons are still young in order to begin the process of socialising the boy toward a successful masculine adulthood (you would be surprised by how many mothers intervene to prevent this, pushing the father away from this paternal role).

2. Dedicate some of their time and energies to their civilisational role outside the home, even if this is unpaid.

3. Socialise with other men, or else have leisure time for masculine pursuits (e.g. hiking, gym).

This should be so embedded within the culture that it becomes an expectation rather than something requiring a special dispensation from women.

Maybe one day Western men will not be nervously asking permission from their wives to "courageously lead at home, at church, at work, and in their communities."

A different understanding of marriage

In a previous post on marriage a reader left this comment:

The traditional concept of Marriage in Christian (an indeed all major religious) tradition is of a social institution and not a personal relationship. Marriage, like other social institutions, must have a vision and goals which are in line with the common good of the society and families from which the bride and groom originate.

The principle functions of marriage are the procreation and enculturation of children, and the care of the elderly and the sick. Marriage does not, therefore, exist primarily to fulfil personal emotional or sexual gratification needs. Its primary purpose is the preservation and perpetuation of the social order.

The Christian view of Mary and Joseph as the model family requires that the righteous man marries within his own tribe. Husband and wife should, as Mary and Joseph, be of common ancestral descent. Thus the genetic heritage and gifts which God created in each ethnic group be preserved.

I do understand the point being made here. It is a reaction against the current failing understanding of marriage. When people marry now, they still often say the traditional vows, but do not really mean them. For instance, whilst it is undoubtedly true that women at their weddings want their marriages to succeed, what many are really vowing is to stay with their husbands as long as they still have a feeling of love toward them, with love understood as a romantic feeling. If the feeling goes, then the marriage was not "fated" to last, it simply wasn't meant to be, and it is then thought right to move on.

Obviously, this way of doing things means that many marriages will fail. It only takes one bout of marital weariness and it's over (see here).

My reader puts forward a different model, one based on an authoritative assertion of marriage as a social institution, rather than a personal relationship. Would it work? Well, one thing in its favour is that most people do follow whatever moral beliefs are authoritative in their society. So as long as the belief in marriage as a social institution retained moral authority, it would most likely be more successful than the current model.

Even so, I'd like to put forward a different way of framing marriage, one that ties together the personal and the social. First, for a culture of marriage to succeed there needs to be a sense of the "offices" of husband/father and wife/mother. These offices are part of what fulfil our created natures as men and women; they add a sense of meaning and accomplishment to our work in the world; and they bring a sense of fruition to our lives.

These offices are a deep expression of our manhood and womanhood and, as such, tie our personal identity closely to our social roles within the family. They also give us a reason to commit to marriage and family in a stable way over and above the romantic relationship we have with our spouse.

But these offices are no longer as effective as they once were in anchoring our family commitments. One problem is the emphasis in liberalism on "freedom as individual autonomy". If the aim is to be an autonomous, self-determining, self-creating individual, then inherited social roles, particularly those based on our unchosen biological sex, will be thought of negatively as restraints on the individual. So over time marriage will be reconceived as an increasingly personal union alone, minus the social offices.

A second issue is the feminist idea that the offices of wife and mother were constructed for oppressive purposes; i.e. that rather than being part of the fulfilment of a woman, or of a fruitful life, that they are the very opposite, a way of women being subordinated in society. Therefore several generations of women have been raised not necessarily to reject marriage itself, but rather the significance or worth of the role/office of being a wife and mother.

This is especially true of the wifely role which has been widely cast as being old-fashioned or disempowering. In contrast, there do still exist some women (including women with careers) who uphold some of the older culture attached to the motherhood role and this does help to cement their marital commitments. There are some women, in other words, who might not stay in a marriage for the sake of their husbands or societies, but who will do so for the sake of their children.

For a culture of marriage to succeed there also needs to be a certain understanding of love. Emotional feeling is not the only test of love; the love we are called on to cultivate in marriage is one that should be settled in the will and be expressed, in part, as fidelity and service. Nor should we see love as being passively fated, but rather as something that we are actively oriented to, i.e. that we will love the spouse we are with, with all that this entails (e.g. the emotional maturity to forgive).

Finally, our stable commitments to marriage and family can also be reinforced by our perception of the good. Our commitment to community or tribe or nation is drawn partly from the identity and connectedness we draw from them, but partly also from the good that we perceive in them. This good can be understood in a secular way (e.g. the positive role that family plays in the emotional development of the young), but also in a religious way, as a transcendent good, by which I mean a good that exists independently of human agency and which might be experienced as something like "the eternal in the moment of perception".

Romantic love can be experienced as a transcendent good (finding your "soul mate"), although this is not what anchors family commitments. But so too can the life and character of a family - this can be experienced as a unique expression of a transcendent good, something of inestimable value, that you would not then ordinarily choose to dissolve (just as you would not ordinarily choose to dissolve your own tradition if you saw in it a unique expression of a transcendent good).

Where is liberalism taking the family?

She's a 21-year-old with no more influence in society than I have. But even so, she's picked up the liberal attitude to the family and run with it, so her views are interesting for that reason.

Isabel Chalmer's parents divorced when she was a young girl. This is her idea now about "what family truly is":

I believe in the cliché that states that family is who you chose as much as it is who you are biologically related to. I have some friends who I would consider family, based on the length, dedication and unconditional love within our relationship and some blood relatives who I do not consider family because of the lacking of all those previously listed qualities.  Family to me is anyone whom you unconditionally love and whom unconditionally loves you...

Family is really indefinable. It is much less tangible than people are led to believe. Family is a feeling you get with certain people in your life, much like home is never actually a place. Family is whatever you choose it to be and is to be felt more than seen. It is wherever you feel loved and secure and is a very subjective and personal experience to each and every person. [italics mine]

There's something of a contradiction in this, as Isabel claims that family is indefinable but then proceeds to give a definition ("it is wherever you feel loved and secure").

Still, you get a sense of where liberalism is taking things. There is an insistence that the family is something that has no fixed character, but is fluid and evolving; its character is vague and not something that can be objectively defined.

The point of this liberal drift is to make family relationships a matter of personal choice and to keep as open as possible the idea that family relationships can be defined subjectively (so that we don't impinge on the freedom of others to self-define how they live).

The problem, of course, is that not much is left of the family at the end of all this. If the family can be whatever I choose it to be, then it has little real meaning or significance. It has become formless. At best, if we take the definition allowed to us by Isabel Chalmer, family is a circle of friends we feel supported by.

It's a long way from the very particular family relationships of husband and wife; father and mother; brother and sister; grandfather and grandmother; uncle and aunt and so on, with each of these roles having a particular character, set of duties, form of loyalty, and experience of love which form part of the way we fulfil ourselves as men and women.

Can Elle Hardy's definition of the right hold?

I was interested to come across a post at The Guardian titled "What's wrong with the Australian right - and how to fix it." It's written by a young woman named Elle Hardy. She claims to be a rightist, but here's the problem. She attempts to define the right as follows:

It is of course difficult to define the range of views held under the banner of those who consider ourselves "right", as it spans conservatism and liberalism. But broadly, we can class our fundamental beliefs as follows: limited government, belief in the rights of the individual, and the desire to preserve the institutions that make our democracy function.

This is the problem with attempts at "fusionism" between conservatism and liberalism. The fundamentals of liberalism remain untouched, and the role of conservatism is limited to preserving liberalism itself.

That's why Elle Hardy has not escaped that limiting framework of politics, in which the big debating point is still how to best regulate a society made up of millions of abstracted, interchangeable individuals each in pursuit of their own self-interest.

For left-liberals the answer is regulation by an interventionist, technocratic state. For right-liberals like Elle Hardy the answer is regulation by the free market (and along the formal lines of statements of individual rights). She sees the market as a source of morality and freedom; her politics is a vision of Economic Man. And so she writes:

Intellectual and moral leadership is required to bridge the gap between populist policies, with which we must grapple as ardent democrats, and the promotion of fundamentals such as free markets and natural rights.

She complains about the left,

rejecting the benefits of technological advancements such as fracking and necessary workplace relations changes to compete in a globalised economy. We need to build the intellectual heft to prosecute the case against the propensity for government intervention.

And that,

As many of the left devote their time to demonising capitalism, posting comments from their iPads, it is crucial that we continue to endorse its benefits and inherent morality...Foreign ownership of farms, and the natural shift of our economic base away from manufacturing are both positive things, and we cannot allow a selective fear of Chinese capital to flourish.

Even when she writes to defend civil society, she does so in reference to the market:

A strong civil society helps to keep government out of our lives, strengthens our interactions with the free market, and aides inclusiveness

Which leads me to the main point I want to make. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this right-liberalism is a suitable vehicle for defending the traditions we belong to. To help prove my point, take marriage as an example. What does someone with Elle Hardy's mindset think about marriage?

Not much. She writes:

Historically, the institution has much of which it should be ashamed. Marriage likely evolved due to men’s desire to secure their agricultural and human property, and ensure legitimate succession...

Marriage has been antithetical to liberty for the majority of human beings who have inhabited earth throughout the ages, most notably women (or girls, as so often has been the case). Today, in many parts of the world, legalised marriage continues to be a tool of oppression...

The history and traditions of marriage show it to be a patriarchal institution of the highest order. 

Why, then, are Western liberal democracies so polarised between defending and fighting for something which has been such a pejorative concept to so many, for so long?

According to Elle Hardy all that matters is the right to choose whatever we want as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. Therefore, the state should not restrict who may or may not marry; marriage should be a private matter in which we might marry a group of people if we so desire:

When Kevin Andrews preached his views to us last year, he disguised socio-economic disparities to make the case for marriage in his book Maybe “I do” – Modern Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness. Central to his argument was the logical fallacy of the slippery slope: “Once the state can no longer insist that marriage involves a commitment to a member of the opposite sex, there is no ground (other than superstition) for insisting that marriage be limited to one person rather than several.”

There is no justification in his diatribe as to why government should play a role in enforcing this view. The principles of liberal democracy hold that consenting adults should be able to make any union they so wish, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others.

There is simply no role for state regulation of group marriage, homosexual marriage, or heterosexual marriage in a democracy

Finally there's this:

That which we know as marriage – a nice, albeit expensive, celebration of commitment, which comfortably dissolves into drunkenness and bad dancing – is not a bad thing in and of itself. On a semantic level, it would be futile to try to stop the use of the word marriage, or to change its heteronormative nature. But it is important for people to be able to define marriage of their own free will.

We must immediately, symbolically, give all people the right to marry whoever they choose.

I rest my case. This is liberalism and not anything that can truly be termed conservatism. She does not want to conserve an institution that is inherently meaningful, she wants to uphold the right of the individual to self-define what the institution means. It is the right of autonomous choice that matters to her and this leads her to take a very negative view of marriage as being an impediment to individual freedom, rather than an institution which fulfils aspects of our natures as men and women; which provides a relatively stable environment for the expression of marital and parental love; and which encourages individuals to invest in the societies they belong to.

France resists

The French state is attacking the traditional family, but there is a continuing resistance from thousands of ordinary Frenchmen and women.

The attack is not exactly a subtle one. I reported a debate in the French Senate in which the Minister for the Family admitted that he was attempting to bring about "a silent revolution." One senator then stated that the aim was "to lead the family out of the fantasy of one mother, one father and one child" and to tackle the problem of the "idealized hetero-patriarchal-white family." Another senator then chimed in with this:

The child needs a father and a mother? Pure ideology, just like the concept of a traditional family, the pattern of "daddy-mommy-child" is a broken model

Well, look at the photo below. It was taken at a demonstration against the French Government's family policy that took place in Paris on Sunday. Organisers estimate the crowed at 500,000, police gave a lower but still substantial figure of 80,000.

That's a great, iconic photo. The flag of the traditional family is being raised aloft, alongside the colours of France. It represents a determination to uphold a culture of family life, in which the roles of both father and mother are considered vital, rather than dispensable.

The demonstration was also against the imposition of gender theory in French schools. The banner below simply reads "No to gender theory".

What is gender theory? Marguerite Peeters explains it well:

According to the social engineers who have been fabricating the gender theory since the 1950s, the feminine and masculine identity, the ontological structure of the woman as spouse, mother and educator, the anthropological complementarity of man and woman, fatherhood, heterosexuality (“heteronormativity”, dominant in all cultures), marriage and the traditional family would not exist per se, would not be good in themselves, but would be social constructs: sociological phenomena, social functions constructed over time, stereotypes to deconstruct by way of education and culture as they are deemed discriminatory and contrary to equality.

The French Government has begun to implement a policy (The ABCD of Equality) to push along the process of deconstructing gender. This has led to an effective protest in which parents have withdrawn their children from schools for one day a month. At some schools, about one third of students have been withdrawn.

Thousands of French parents kept their children at home on Monday following warnings that schools were introducing "gender theory" classes that would teach pupils they could choose their own sexual identity.

The government was forced to deny what it called "totally false" rumours that children would be told sexuality was a mere "social construct", after a nationwide boycott of classes.

Well, it's difficult to accept that the claims are totally false when the ABCD of Equality is explained this way:

The program provides detailed advice online for teachers about how they can challenge young children's views about what is typically seen as "girlish" or "boyish." In acting out fairy tales, for instance, boys should be encouraged to play the part of Little Red Riding Hood, and girls the part of the wolf.

The program also urges teachers to encourage reflection on gender issues in other areas such as physical education, art, and history. They might examine the Renoir painting Madame Charpentier et ses enfants, the government suggests, and note that poor Mrs. Charpentier is forced by convention to wear a suffocative corset, and that little boys, as well as little girls, used to wear dresses.

In history lessons, the ABCD of Equality suggests teachers point out that Louis XIV wore high heels and ribbons.

And there's this:

There was anger last June when a primary school-teachers' union suggested pupils should be read a book called Daddy wears a dress about a boxer who becomes a ballet dancer.

And a report by the IGAS (General Inspectorate of Social Affairs) recommends:

"replacing the terms 'boys' and 'girls' by the neutral terms 'friends' or 'children', telling stories in which the children have two dads or mums, etc." According to the report, the aim is to "prevent sexual differentiation and the interiorisation by the children of their sexual identity"

It is an agenda that ought to be resisted and that is what thousands of French people are now doing.

You can't say fathers are essential if...

In 2008 Barack Obama gave a Father's Day speech in which he lamented the absence of so many fathers in African American families:

...if we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing - missing from too many lives and too many homes...

You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled - doubled - since we were children. We know the statistics - that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Ryan T. Anderson, a scholar from the Heritage Foundation, has drawn the same conclusion from this that I have done many times at this site:

“If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States is absentee dads,” Anderson said, “How will we insist that dads are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional?”

There are mixed messages being sent to men. On the one hand, Obama is using the authority of his office to encourage African American men to believe that without their input there will be a destructive breakdown of family life within their community. Men, he is saying, your involvement is necessary - get to it.

But Obama also believes that marriage should be legally redefined so that it is no longer between a man and a woman. The message to men here is that families do not need fathers. The paternal role is a merely optional one.

How will this contradiction be resolved? Early indicators point to a victory of the "men are optional" side of things.

When Australian Senator Cory Bernardi argued that children being raised by both their biological father and mother was a gold standard to aspire to and that boys from single mother homes were statistically more likely to end up before the courts an avalanche of criticism descended on him.

His views were described as nonsensical, judgemental, offensive and old-fashioned with "no place in Australia of today."

And that's what you have to expect. A society cannot forever run on contradictory lines. Either fathers are merely optional within families or they aren't. Our society has decided that fathers are optional.

That is going to have momentous consequences over the next couple of generations. In the meantime, traditionalists will be distinct in insisting that the paternal role is a necessary (a foundational) rather than an optional one.

I'll finish with a brief extract from Senator Bernardi's book, summarising his views:

"Social policy should continue to advocate for the best possible social environment for children. More often than not, as studies have shown, that environment is a family with a child's married biological mother and father. Of course, there will always be exceptions to this - some traditional families fail miserably at childcare and some step-families do a wonderful job of raising children - but it should not deter society as a whole from encouraging its citizens to pursue the traditional family model."

Germany: no right of exit

This is an extraordinary story (hat tip: Laura Wood). There is a German family (the Wunderlichs) whose children were being homeschooled - that is, until the German state sent in a team of 20 special agents, police officers and social workers to forcibly seize the children from their parents (homeschooling is illegal in Germany).

The children have been returned to their parents but are under the legal custody of social workers. A judge has rejected the idea of returning legal custody to the parents, even though the children now attend a public school. Why?

The answer: in part to prevent the parents getting visas for their children and moving to another country in which homeschooling is permitted. In other words, to prevent any right of exit from Germany.

In a shocking verdict regarding a homeschool case in Germany, a family court judge has refused to return legal custody of four children to Christian parents to prevent the family from obtaining visas that would allow them to travel to a country where homeschooling is permitted.

The judge made this decision in the name of liberal morality: he fears that if the children are homeschooled they will not become sufficiently tolerant of others:

In his decision, the judge ruled that it was necessary to keep the Wunderlich children in public school for their own “well-being,” arguing that if the children were homeschooled in Germany or abroad they would “grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.”

Here is a prime example of how a liberal morality doesn't work. In the name of tolerance, a German judge has told a family that they have no right to leave Germany. This brings to mind the situation in the former East Germany, in which citizens were likewise forced to stay. When the Berlin Wall went up in the early 1960s, outraged West Germans called for it to be torn down as an affront to freedom. But now it is not communists but liberals who are denying German citizens a right to exit.

The Wunderlich family

And this is despite the fact that a right to exit is the key qualification that liberals themselves specify when considering whether non-liberal communities are acceptable or not. From a liberal discussion of this issue we learn that,

Susan Moller Okin has [said that] "any consistent defense of group rights or exemptions that is based on liberal premises has to ensure that at least one individual right – the right to exit one's group of origin – trumps any group right.' Exit rights, then, are thought to limit the repression of group members and thus to be either sufficient for or necessary to compliance with moral principles.

So "the right to exit one's group of origin" is considered crucial by liberals when determining whether or not a community meets liberal moral standards. The German judge is contravening one core liberal principle (the right to exit) in the name of another (tolerance). He is also imposing an authoritarian principle (no right of exit), previously associated with East German communism, in the name of tolerance.

Liberal morality is not proving to be internally consistent here.

The problem goes back to the fundamentals of a liberal morality. Liberals begin by assuming that an objective good can't be known and that therefore people must self-determine their own subjective goods. For this to work, though, individuals have to be careful not to infringe on the moral choices or the self-defined goods of others - to do so means denying those people their moral agency (disempowering them).

And so liberals have gone on to emphasise as virtues qualities of non-interference, such as respect, openness, diversity, non-discrimination, tolerance and so on. But once these became the liberal virtues, they became the focus and the standard of human moral life, i.e. the new public standard of the good.

But they are problematic as a standard. As pointed out above, it means that moral discrimination is enacted in the name of non-discrimination and that intrusive or authoritarian acts of the state are carried out in the name of tolerance.

Furthermore, these moral standards are too narrow. There is a recognition of "non-interference" as a moral standard, but what about, say, the importance of the connection between parent and child? How can moral decisions be weighted or balanced when only one aspect of a moral situation is considered in terms of moral principle?

This is not to say that there were not moral standards in traditional societies. They tended, though, to be less connected to the state. For instance, let's say that in a traditional society there is an ideal of masculinity, which includes virtues of courage and honour. These are connected to character: a man who was considered cowardly or dishonourable might have been judged negatively, which was no doubt discomfiting, but that would have been thought of as a personal failing - there was no need for the state to get involved.

Liberals, however, have created a state morality: it has become the aim of politics to impose the moral standards of non-discrimination, inclusion, tolerance etc. on society. This aim will inevitably be intrusive and authoritarian, as it requires the state to break apart the usual inclinations of human association - as well as diminishing the authority of non-state institutions and loyalties, such as those of the family.

The German ruling gives us an idea of where all this is going to take us. It is not going to be a place of freedom. It will be a place where we, as disconnected and disempowered individuals (relieved of most of our social functions), will have to accept our place within a closely managed system administered by the state.

Oh, and it seems you won't be allowed to leave for somewhere better.

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.

Will they ever learn? Commune vs family

I wrote a post once about the Oneida commune titled Was free love really so free? It dealt with a commune set up in America in the 1840s in which marriage was abolished and replaced with free love.

Despite having the aim of freedom, it ended up as an authoritarian system in which 300 people were governed by 27 standing committees and in which the older men decided who would be allowed to pair off (and they decided to pair off very young girls with themselves).

Now a documentary film traces a similar attempt to establish such a commune in Austria in the 1970s and 80s. The documentary was made by a man who grew up as a child in the Friedrichshof commune, Paul Julien Robert.



Paul Julien Robert, grew up in the Friedrichshof commune

The Friedrichshof commune was founded by an artist named Otto Mühl. The aim of the commune was to dissolve marriage and the family and to abolish private property. "It was about free sexuality and communal property," is how one participant described its goals.

Paul Julien Robert's mother signed up because she thought she was joining "a nice commune." Paul Julien was not allowed to know his biological father; he lived with his mother until he was four and then she was sent away by the commune to Switzerland to earn money. He was made to chant slogans like "My mum drove off to Zurich. Since then, I feel better and better every day."

Members of the commune were expected to perform symbolic acts of matricide and patricide in order to overcome "their authoritarian generation". The founder of the commune, Otto Mühl, in addressing the members of the commune, would say things like: "We have already been able to break free and save some from this nuclear family filth."

But destroying the family did not create free love or an absence of authoritarianism. Instead, it replaced the authority of loving, caring parents with that of a single man, Otto Mühl. He has been described as "cruel, controlling and authoritarian." He created a hierarchical structure with himself at the top and several women competing for power below him. He allowed himself a wife and was the only one with the authority to punish the children. When the commune dissolved in 1990 he was arrested and convicted of sexual abuse of minors.

One book on the commune paints this picture of Friedrichshof:

The fact is that the alternative community trial of the 70's more and more led to a totalitarian system of mutual spying and sexual abuse of minors, rape, forced abortion...

Nor did free love engender love. Paul Julien Robert says of his time in the commune after his mother left:

"I was very lonely. Other women replaced her, but they were never close to me. The ideology was that all relationships were bad for the group, so it was never possible to truly bond with someone."

Did he feel loved? "Never. I grew up believing love was something bad. The feeling of being loved, and of expressing love, was something I really had to learn and to accept later."

..."There was a general lack of affection from the adults – no one held me or was tender towards me as a child."

There is a lesson here for all those who preach an indistinct, universal love - this is not likely to lead to real love. Real love flourishes within particular relationships; it is particularly fostered within close family relationships. If we grow up within a loving family, we are more likely to love our neighbour and community, which makes us more likely to love our nation and people, which makes us more likely to love a wider humanity.

If you chop away at the closer loves, you don't clear the way for a universal love of humanity, you diminish the capacity for love altogether.

The preview video below is worth watching but is slightly NSFW. The documentary itself is called "My Fathers, my Mother and Me" or in German "Meine keine Familie" which means something like "My not a family." If you're interested in more there's an interesting review of the documentary here.

French socialists plan a "silent revolution"

I always feel a bit on the back foot when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. A lot of Australians have been persuaded already that gay marriage is a matter of conferring a right on a group of people and that there will be no negative consequences.

If you're one of those Australians I would ask you to read on with an open mind. Tiberge at Gallia Watch has translated part of a debate in the French senate on the family. France recently legalised same sex marriage, despite very considerable public opposition. Now a further new law is being considered, one that will promote a "diversity" of family types.

The debate begins with a comment from the ruling Socialist Party Minister for the Family, Dominique Bertinotti:

I am convinced that the Senate's efforts will be towards the consolidation of this advancement for equality. This law is part of a silent revolution.

She states openly in the French senate that what is happening in France is a "silent revolution." She is not arguing that nothing significant will change; rather it is a revolution from above - from socialists like herself.

Alain Gournac, from the more conservative UMP, then reminds her of the mass, popular demonstrations in defence of the traditional family that have taken place in France:

The silence of a million people in the street!

But the socialist lawmaker is undeterred:

Sexuality is henceforth disassociated from conjugal life and from procreation.

She is saying that marriage and having children is no longer based on the heterosexual couple of husband and wife.

Another female Socialist Party senator, Michelle Meunier, then chimes in:

This bill is part of the slogan of our Republic. It allows homosexuals to have a family. Let's admit it. It leads the family out of the fantasy of "one mother, one father and one child"...

She labels the traditional family a "fantasy." The debate has reached a point at which the traditional family is denigrated in the French senate.

Charles Revet, again from the UMP, then calls out to object:

It's not a fantasy! What are you saying!

But the Socialist Party senator continues:

...because that family has never been universal. In all periods, parents have brought into the world children that they couldn't or wouldn't accept responsibility for. In all periods, children have been raised by persons other than the father and mother. What causes the problem is this idealized "hetero-patriarchal-white" family, that is further and further removed from reality. The law must adapt. (...)

Again, she reveals her hostility to the traditional family: she labels it the "hetero-patriarchal-white" family and states that it is increasingly removed from reality.

The more right-wing senators reacted with indignation to her comments, but yet another left-wing female senator, Esther Benbassa, a Green, continued along the same theme:

Protect the child? Everybody is for it! The child needs a father and a mother? Pure ideology, just like the concept of a traditional family, the pattern of "daddy-mommy-child" is a broken model which recomposed and single-parent families long ago abandoned.

She states that it is "pure ideology" that a child needs a father and a mother. This is, in effect, dissolving of family relationships. If a man, for instance, believes that his presence within a family is a necessary one, and that by abandoning his wife and children he will do harm, then he is much more likely to stay and to invest a lot of himself in his roles of husband and father. At the same time, if his wife believes his role to be a necessary one, both for her sake and that of the children, she is likely to act to keep him involved within the family.

But let's say a man really believed what Esther Benbassa claimed in the French senate, that a child doesn't need a father. If that is true, then why would a man put much effort into fatherhood? His children don't need him to do this, at least according to the women socialists. So why, then, make such sacrifices for the sake of the family?

The logic of the new family is male disinvestment in family life. It's possible that the female socialists do intuitively grasp this and welcome it as part of their attempts to dissolve the "hetero-patriarchal-white" family. It's possible that there are ordinary French people who grasp the same thing, hence the mass demonstrations against the socialist laws and the abysmal approval ratings for the French President, Francois Hollande.

It seems to me that the only way things might work out in France is if there is a disconnect between what is officially approved and what ordinary men really think and believe. If the state takes as a principle the idea that families don't need a father, but ordinary men hold to the opposite view that their role is a significant and necessary one, then society might be able to hold together.

But isn't there a risk that men will be influenced over time by what is held at an official level to be true? Isn't there a risk that men will be drawn into a state sponsored culture in which the presence of a father within a family is thought to be unnecessary?

The Atlantic on single motherhood

There's a column at The Atlantic which looks at the income of married mothers compared to single mothers. It turns out that the married women earn a lot more (a difference of $19,000 per annum).

What conclusion do the authors draw from this income disparity? They came up with the following:

Hence the rise of single parenting, particularly single mothers, represents both a promise and a problem. If this is the path forward for society, we need to do all that we can to ensure that for these families single parenting is in fact a dream, and not the enormous challenge that it currently is today.

I find it interesting that this was written by a data analyst and an economic policy researcher. It shows that even for people like this it is possible to suffer from the "let's reshape society detached from reality" mindset typical of liberals.

Do they really believe that single parenthood might be "the path forward for society"? Do they really want society to expend its resources to ensure that "single parenting is in fact a dream"?

I still manage to be surprised at times by the way that moderns think about things. Here we have several intelligent men who seriously entertain the idea that you could advance society on the basis of single motherhood. Have they thought about what might happen to the men who would previously have been the husbands of these women? Have they considered what might happen to the work ethic of men who have no wife and children to support? Have they considered what might happen to the social behaviour of men who have no reason to commit to society?

And what does it mean to believe that single motherhood might be a "dream"? Does this mean that marital love has no role to play in women's fulfilment? Does it mean that children are as happy and as well socialised without a father as with one?

I've written before that liberals seem to want to pursue a creative spirit in the making of themselves and the reshaping of society. Unfortunately they don't want to do this within the constraints of the givens of human existence - neither what is gifted to us as part of our condition, nor the fallen aspects of human nature.

Nor does the liberal attempt to be "detached creative spirits" really lead to imaginative concepts about how human life might be. The assumption of liberal thought is often that there is only one true end of life and that is to work at a job. Therefore, think our Atlantic writers, if only single mothers were as well-employed as everyone else, then single motherhood could be a path forward for society and a dream for women. It's not a very sophisticated view of what makes a human life worthwhile.

Finally, I'll point out that many of the comments to the piece don't follow a liberal mindset. Not everyone has gone that way.

Can't we beat this?

Lauren Sandler is an American woman who advocates that women should have no more than one child. She does so on the basis that more than one child hampers a woman's autonomy and so it is liberating for women to have just the one.

Here is a sample of her writing:

What if, for those who didn’t feel otherwise compelled to have more kids, they decided instead to opt for greater pleasure and autonomy, for other opportunities for personal advancement and self-fulfilment?

...To be sure, low fertility accompanies a weak economy without fail. But to blame the markets for what happens in our bedrooms misses a radical reshaping of our worldview. It’s not just the economy, it’s liberation. The pursuit of happiness has emerged as our new national ideology, trumping the age-old belief that parental duty is the very definition, of adulthood.  Some think it’s the height of selfishness; I say it’s progress.

...Over the past century, adulthood has come to promise more than just duty, but pleasure...we envision a liberated existence, one of satisfaction and fulfilment, a life built upon intentionality and individualism rather than obligation and role-filling. This liberated adulthood exists at odds with parenting...Instead of making a choice to enlarge our families based on stereotypes or cultural pressure, we can instead make that most profound choice our most purely independent one. It might even feel like something people rarely associate with parenting: it might feel like freedom.

That is exactly the kind of outlook you'd expect to emerge from within an advanced liberalism. If the aim is to maximise your individual autonomy, then you're going to have a problem when it comes to family life. Family life makes demands on us. It requires stable commitments that restrict what we might choose to do at any particular time. Family life, in other words, impedes our autonomy.

So what do liberals do? They try to recast the family to make it fit in better with autonomy. They can do this in a variety of ways. A commitment to family life can be delayed. Divorce can be made easier. There might be calls for the having of children to be "fitted around" a woman's life rather than be a core aspect of it. Lauren Sandler's solution is to have the absolute minimum number of children.

(A more radical solution would be to have no children at all; and the most radical solution is to simply live alone.)

The important thing to recognise is that within the framework of liberalism it doesn't make sense to commit to large families.

A traditionalist movement would therefore have a very considerable demographic advantage. If we were able to maintain a more traditional culture of family life, we would almost certainly have a much higher fertility rate than the surrounding liberal culture.

(Of course, that would only be an advantage if we were able to educate our children along traditionalist lines rather than having them become the next generation of liberals.)

Lauren Sandler's views are more evidence of what a dead-end road liberalism is for the society which adopts it. If we can operate within a different framework we will have a strength that liberalism lacks.

The state drifts ever closer in Scotland

This is a disturbing development:

Under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, every child from birth will be given a “named person”, charged with keeping an eye on that child’s interests until it reaches adulthood.

Every child will be assigned a named individual by the state to oversee the interests of that child. This role, of overseeing the interests of a child, once fell naturally to the parents of that child.

What is this named individual going to do? According to the Bill, the named person is responsible for:

doing such of the following where the named person considers it to be appropriate in order to promote, support or safeguard the wellbeing of the child or young person—

(i) advising, informing or supporting the child or young person, or a parent of the child or young person,

(ii) helping the child or young person, or a parent of the child or young person, to access a service or support, or

(iii) discussing, or raising, a matter about the child or young person with a service provider or relevant authority

The politicians who have queried the measure seem most interested in how a personal relationship will be developed between the named person and the children they are responsible for:

SNP MSP John Wilson asked how children would be made aware that they had a named person, and how that named person would be identified to the child.

"How do we make sure that this named person is actually identified to the young person, and the young person has the confidence and the ability to actually directly speak to that named individual?" he said.

Conservative MSP Jackson Carlaw suggested the measure is "a very huge enterprise".

"How many named persons do you anticipate there will be? What will the turnover be in named persons? And how in practice does that really establish a bond of confidence on which people feel they can rely?" he asked.

The main intent seems to be to have a personal contact between a child in need and one named individual responsible for the child's welfare. For children from highly dysfunctional families who are in some kind of danger, that might be a good idea.

But it's an unnecessary and dangerous extension of the role of the state to have a named individual for every child. Can we really trust the modern administrative state to direct its intervention only to those children in real danger, once an administrative structure and authority has been established over all children? Especially when the role of the named individual is defined so broadly, as being to promote the wellbeing of the child they have been appointed to look after.

It's dangerous too to have such a measure at a time when the family is being redefined in a way that diminishes the importance of the "filial" connection between child and parent. This is not the time to further undermine the significance of biological paternity in establishing in normal circumstances both authority and responsibility in relation to a child.

So what do the German green youth want?

The German Greens get a bit over 10% of the vote. They are apparently one of the more radically leftist parties around. Last month, their youth wing passed a resolution called "Queer your world". When I begin quoting it, you'll understand how radical it is. But at the same time it can also be seen as fitting in with trends in modern society.

Here is the part where sex distinctions are discussed:

8.9 Overcoming the sexual binary

The categories "man" and "woman" are social constructs, but the idea of two sexes does not accord with reality. We understand a human not as a person who is subject to a lifelong gender identity as a man or a woman. Our goal is to create a society in which everyone can freely decide for themselves which gender identity they would like to adopt. As Green Youth we argue for the diversity of gender identities to be finally recognised. A first step to envisage this is a third option when specifying sex to government agencies and in official documents. There should also be the opportunity to refuse to specify. Our perspective is that specifying gender should completely disappear as a category.

Such ideas are no doubt attractive to those homosexuals who do not have a clear identity as men or women. But they also fit in with the liberal idea that our lives should be individually self-determined and that predetermined qualities, such as our sex or our race, are artificial social constructs that should be made not to matter.

The Green Youth resolution is more radical than the typical liberal attitude: when liberals want to make our sex not matter they do so by advocating unisex parenting and such like rather than wanting the categories of man and woman to be abolished. In some ways, though, the Green Youth position is the ultimate expression of the liberal position: it demands a diversity of freely chosen sex identities to replace the binary of man and woman.

And is the Green Youth position all that much more radical than where liberalism has taken us when it comes to our communal identities? For Westerners, at least, these identities have been declared to be social constructs and abolished in the name of diversity. The Green Youth want to complete the job already begun in a liberal society and abolish our identities as men and women in the same way.

The Green Youth also have ideas on how marriage could be "queered":

3.3 As Green Youth we reject the privileging of marriage between "man" and "wife" and are committed to a family contract that allows all people to express their love equally and to take responsibility for one another. Since intimate relationships exist outside heterosexual and monogamous partnerships, it must be finally legally recognised when non-heterosexual couples or people living in polyamorous relationships or female friends take over the care of children together. Queer people shouldn't be discriminated against any longer in tax law nor in adoption law. In respect to this, we also demand that more than two people should legally qualify to be regarded as parents of a child. Family is when people care for each other and take on responsibility. We therefore demand that any form of family is supported and valued by society and before the law to the same degree. However the protection of marriage should no longer be anchored in the Basic Law. We want to abolish marriage as a state institution. Families deserve state protection, not marriage.

What's to be said of all this? First, note how open-ended the definition of family has become. It is just any arrangement of people who care for each other. And note the radical consequences of accepting such an open-ended definition. You can have any number of people being recognised as the parents of a child; you can have groups of friends becoming parents to a child; you can have polyamorists doing the same. The link to biological paternity and maternity is entirely disregarded, as is the role of motherhood and fatherhood. Literally any form of family will do.

Again, this is a more radical expression of ideas that are already fairly mainstream within a liberal culture. A lot of people now understand marriage to be a "love ceremony" and that tends to suggest the idea that a family can be anything. An Australian newspaper columnist, Andrea Burns, expressed the modern view well when she wrote:

the days of the white bread, nuclear family are over. There are many ways to commune, love and create a home ... It’s inconsequential who makes up that circle of love...

There is a weakening or a loosening of ties in all this. Just consider the definition of family offered by Sam Page as executive director of Family Relationship Services Australia:

The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

I'm not sure that toothpaste sharing quite measures up to fulfilling your masculine nature in the role of a husband and father, or the biological relationship of paternity connecting father and child, or the complementary union of a man and a woman within marriage and family.

Roebuck on women and marriage

Alan Roebuck has written a post at The Orthosphere on what the attitude of men toward women and marriage in a liberal culture ought to be. I think it's very good, particularly in outlining why marriage continues to be of importance. It's not just that the arguments are compelling, but that he models a spirited response to the difficulties of the age.

There was some debate in the comments about advice that Alan Roebuck gives to men facing divorce; that perhaps is inevitable given the difficulty of men in that situation (i.e. no easy solutions).

If you haven't already read it, I encourage you to do so:

Can Man Live Traditionally?

A man who supports his family now a bad thing?

The Sydney Morning Herald has run an article by a senior writer, Mike Wade, complaining about the survival in Australia of.... the male breadwinner.

Yes, the idea of a male breadwinner is offensive to contemporary liberalism:

An economic dinosaur lives on in Australia: the male breadwinner. Despite decades of sweeping social and economic change he's survived surprisingly unscathed. And there's evidence our male breadwinner model is especially potent.

Researchers have found the male breadwinner is proving much more resilient in Australia than many comparable countries...
 

Why the panic about male breadwinners? It seems that new research shows that only a minority of mothers with young children choose to work full-time:

The male dominance over full-time employment is most pronounced among parents with small children. About 85 per cent of all fathers with a youngest child under the age of five work full-time - but for mothers in that category, the rate is about 19 per cent.

There are also signs the long-running increase in female participation rate, under way since the 1960s, has stalled. The proportion of women aged 15-64 in the workforce is now lower than it was four years ago.
 

I've pointed to this trend many times at this site: in my workplace there are no women with children of any age who work full-time - they are all part-timers (about a third of Australian women overall return to full-time employment in the long-run).

What do liberals think the solution is? Here's one suggestion:

Patricia Apps, professor in public economics at the University of Sydney, argues that if childcare worked more like the school system, women's workforce participation would surge...
 

She wants the care of children to be entirely socialised. And then we get this comment from Mike Wade:

The dominance of the male breadwinner means men have far more retirement income than women because they spend more time working. The superannuation industry estimates nearly 90 per cent of women have insufficient super to support a comfortable standard of living in retirement.
 

Mike Wade might feel woozy having to recognise the fact, but the super that husbands earn will help to support those 90% of women. It is family income, not husband income.

How did we get to the stage where it's thought wrong for men to go out to work to support their families and wrong for mothers to look after their own young children?

Well, part of the answer is that liberals believe that career is more important than family. And one reason for this is that they believe that women achieve more autonomy - more independence from men - through careers. Sweden's EU minister, Birgitta Ohlsson, recently attacked housewives on the basis that:

Having your own money is a source of both power and independence for women.
 

So if career is necessary for "equal freedom" then that is what liberals will push for: they will want more career involvement from women and less from men. It doesn't really matter to the political class if women are choosing to work part-time, that is considered the wrong outcome and so action is taken to get a different result.

There are any number of problems with all this. For instance, if independence really is the aim then why marry in the first place? And if you value autonomy above all else, then why have children? Little wonder that in Sweden, where such liberal values have been pushed the hardest, a record 47% of people live alone.

And the liberal view glosses over the fact that we are not just interchangeable units of labour, but men and women, and that part of our fulfilment in life comes through distinct paternal and maternal roles.

And is it really in women's overall interests to discourage a culture of the male breadwinner? Won't larger numbers of women just end up going out to work to support an unemployed partner? Won't there be fewer men earning that superannuation to support women in their retirement?

But, most of all, what kind of society pushes against men working to support their families?