From the Office for National Statistics yesterday:
Between 1996 and 2004, the number of cohabiting couple families increased by over 50 per cent to 2.2 million, while the number of lone-mother families increased by 12 per cent to 2.3 million.
The Office for National Statistics gave this and other information the headline, "Married couple families still the majority". It was as if the Office was trying to follow a government line of "Don't panic!", emphasising that most people do still marry. This is all spin. The news is obviously that a larger and larger proportion do not marry. A rise of a half in the number of cohabiting couples in only five years is a massive and very rapid change. The governemtn is presiding over the major reduction in the incidence of marriage which all the evidence (see The Welfare State We're In) suggests will inevitably have damaging effects on children and ultimately, through the least fortunate of these children, on the levels of crime and incivility. A further social decline in Britain with yet higher levels of criminality seems very likely.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting
Comments (1)
TrackBack (10)
Comments
Warning: file(http://63.247.138.2/~bartholo/randomquotes.dump) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No route to host in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/07/marriage_under.php on line 277
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/07/marriage_under.php on line 277
I'm going to tentatively suggest that people who like the family values parts of Bartholomew’s work may like to read Robert P. George's "The Clash of Orthodoxies." The book defends Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy against what George calls "secular orthodoxy," it does this by reason alone without any appeal to faith. I think that his arguments for the intrinsic rather than instrumental goods of marriage may be of interest to people who like this site. This does lead to the conclusion that both sex and children should be saved for marriage, but I'm sure everyone already knows the conclusions the arguments; the arguments themselves are the reasons for reading this book. George is American so parts of it go off about their court system etc, he's a Catholic so it contains some things relevant from the American Catholic perspective towards the end. None-the-less I think the first half has a good defence of traditional values (including marriage) and of how they should be argued for in the public sphere, against people (secular liberals) who believe that the state should be "morally neutral," on every issue.
Posted by: Jack Gunning at July 9, 2005 11:27 AM