THE MOVEMENT TOWARDS GOVERNMENT-MANDATED MARRIAGE

Post lifted from Biased BBC

This BBC news article (link) appears to have swallowed completely the line the government is pushing about "giving more rights to cohabitees". There has been a suggestion from liberal lawyers that cohabiting couples should have the same "rights" on separation as divorcing couples. The BBC article buys completely the canard that this proposed interference in people's lives is somehow in pursuit of giving them rights. It completely fails to state the obvious intellectual challenge to this proposal, which is that imposing the same terms on cohabiting couples by default actually *removes* rights from them.

Oh yes it does. At present, cohabitees have the right to live together without a lifelong financial commitment to each other, if that's what they want. If they decide they do want to make such a commitment, they can always go and get married. At present they have complete freedom of choice.

If this mooted law ever happened, it would mean the *removal* from people of the right to live together in an informal way and a reduction of freedom. what would happen is that by default, and after some wholly arbitrary period of time, they would be forcibly connected financially. They have thus lost the freedom to live the way they do now, and would instead be forced to live in a way the Government decrees.

Nowhere in his article does the writer confront this. Instead, he cravenly accepts all the guff he has been spoonfed. 'What legal protection do cohabitees currently have?' worries Mr. Silverman. But wait: 'On separation,' he goes on, 'a claim to a share of property can be exercised only by using complicated trust law. By contrast, married couples can go to court to "divide the spoils"'. Well spotted, Jon! I think you just answered your own question there! That's right - the legal protection they have is that at any time they like, they can choose to become one of those married couples. Then there's no nasty trust law, see?

So if the BBC put two and two together it would work out that the answer here is for cohabiting couples who want a finacial piece of each other to get married. Meanwhile, those who don't, don't. Oh but wait. That last suggestion - well, that's how things are now. And that sounds a bit, well, pro-marriage, doesn't it? And we can't have any of that mucky talk on the BBC.

I could go on. For example, when someone lives with a family member who dies, what rights do they have to stay in the property? Answer: none at all if they can't pay the inheritance tax without selling it - a problem that has been solved for same-sex couples and is about to be forcibly solved (even though no problem may exist) for unmarried couples. Yet somehow, it isn't on the BBC radar at all as an issue for, say, maiden aunts sharing a house, or for children looking after elderly parents in their own home.

There is also a story arc embedded in this about the instability of the Left's attitudes to, well, everything really, but the family in particular. It was the left that pushed for the abolition of the family unit as the basic building block of society; it was the Left which thought it was somehow liberating for people not to have to get married before they had children. Now the Left seems to have decided that anybody who does will be forcibly treated as though they had got married. Now if you're the BBC, what to do, what to do? Should it agree with this (it's more "rights" after all, so it's right-on), or should it object to it because it's pushing marriage?



Who's the hypocrite?

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy O' Connor, has sacked his press officer after discovering that he was an active homosexual. He has been attacked for 'hypocrisy', as a result. Can this be right? Many churches, especially the Roman Catholics and the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, seem to attract homosexual people. We can only guess at the reasons for this, but it means the issue is always rather dangerous for them.

So they have developed various subtle ways of coping with this. The most obvious one, taken by Rome, is to say that having homosexual inclinations is just one of those things, but it is wrong to do homosexual acts. In practice, this allows quite a lot of looking the other way. It may not be wholly principled, but allows for a fair amount of personal kindness in return for discretion.

To a non-religious person, this may seem a bit daft. But that is the problem with modern society. It has no patience with religious notions, such as self-restraint. We all want total liberty to do what we want, when we want to, while desiring the full force of the state to descend on people who do things we don't like. The old-fashioned idea, that we should place chains on our own impulses, has practically vanished, and restraint is generally dismissed as mad, or as weakness.

Now, the RCs have taken a pretty strong and clear stand against any persecution of people for being homosexual. And it is this that is getting them into trouble. On the face of it, sacking a man for being rather obviously homosexual looks like crude personal intolerance. But is it really? Stephen Noon, described as a 'devout Catholic' is reported to have run into trouble when his 'long-term partner' visited him at the office and was introduced to the Archbishop. It would have been interesting to have been present at this encounter.

Did Mr Noon or his friend really expect that Cardinal Murphy O' Connor would be delighted to discover that his press officer was following this lifestyle? If he is a 'devout' Catholic he presumably knows the rules better than most. So surely he could have worked out that a meeting with this gentleman would place his boss in an awkward position. If they had wanted to, couldn't the two men could have kept the news from him indefinitely? Had they done so, wouldn't the Cardinal have left it at that?

Then we learn that Mr Noon did not take his case to an employment tribunal because - according to a 'friend' - he 'wanted to fight to change the Church's attitude to homosexuality from the inside'.

Well, I could have told him not to bother. Leave aside the fact that the Roman Catholic church doesn't work that way, some organisations just don't change certain things. If you worked for an Islamic organisation you would have a hard time campaigning against Sharia Law. If you worked for the Labour Party I think a campaign to get them to back restoration of the death penalty would be foredoomed. And if you were working as their press officer, I think it might lead to employment difficulties.

What baffles me, actually, is that a person who disagrees profoundly with the principles of an organisation, and actively ignores them in practice, should go to work for that organisation as a spokesman in the first place.

Now, if we still lived in 15th century and the Church controlled all employment and all ideas , as it once did, there would be an issue here. But as Mr Noon has shown, his skills as a press officer immediately led to him being employed by other organisations, Britain in Europe and now the Scottish National Party. I can only hope that he is keener on the policies of the SNP than he was on the policies of the Roman Catholic Church.

Source



FAT TYRANNY

Like Communism, it MIGHT work some day

It's been two years since Arkansas schools started sending letters home to parents with their kids' report cards - letters telling them if their children were fat. Plenty of parents weren't happy. But a lot of them did something about it. Suddenly there were more visits to the pediatrician for talks about weight problems. Fitness class attendance is up. Diet pill use by high-schoolers is down. And more states are following Arkansas' lead, including California, Florida and Pennsylvania, which have adopted similar programs.

Dr. Karen Young, medical director for the pediatric fitness clinic at Arkansas Children's Hospital, told of a mother upset when she got word from school that her child was overweight. The mother wanted a second opinion from Young, but in the meantime, she cut sweets from the family diet and slimmed the child down before the appointment. "Even though she was upset with the letter and felt it was wrong, she still changed the family's lifestyle," Young said. "A lot of positive things have come out of those letters."

The letters record each child's body-mass index, the same weight-height formula used to calculate adult obesity. The first batch went out in the 2003-04 school year. Across the state 57 percent of doctors said they had at least one parent bring in their child's letter from the school for discussion during the last school year. Young said she's had more visits from parents seeking help for the entire family. "I don't care what size their siblings are or their parents, everyone in the family should eat healthy and exercise," she said. "What's good for them is good for everybody."

A local TV news report on Young's clinic led Marsha Simon-Younger to enroll her 11-year-old daughter Nasirah in fitness classes. Since Nasirah joined this spring, she's felt better and is eating healthier, her mother said. "At first, my daughter was really reluctant to go because she thought of it as a fat camp," said Simon-Younger. But once Nasirah arrived, she saw a friend from church and Girl Scouts and felt at ease. "She has more self-esteem," and she tries different foods, the mother said. "Sometimes we might fall off the wagon, but we get right back on."

It's still a little early to see big results from the state's weigh-in program. After the first year, the percentage of overweight schoolchildren remained where it was at the start - 38 percent. "We think probably, since there's been no change, that's probably good news," said Jim Raczynski, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. "We may have stopped the increase."

And the state has found that most parents and children are comfortable with the weigh-in program - 71 percent of parents and 61 percent of adolescents, according to a survey. "Once they realized we didn't hand (the letters) to kids to wave around the schoolyard ... a lot of the original concerns were alleviated," said Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has championed healthy diets after dropping more than 100 pounds himself. "This was not an invasive procedure where a child is asked to lift a shirt and be pinched with calipers."

Raczynski noted that only a tiny percentage of parents - 6 percent - have put their overweight children on diets that aren't medically supervised. Schools are reacting, too. Following state Board of Education guidelines, schools in the last two years have banned using food as a reward, are offering more fruits and vegetables on lunch menus, have removed deep fryers and increased low-fat and low-sugar drinks and snacks.

Huckabee and former President Bill Clinton - known for his Big Mac excursions while Arkansas governor - helped announce this year that soft drink manufacturers had voluntarily agreed to remove sugary sodas from school vending machines. Childhood obesity, Huckabee said, is "a real serious health and economic issue." Arkansas' effort provides a scientific baseline to look for progress. Over time, "we'll honestly be able to know if this is something that has lasting value."

Source



Book review of "The Strange Death of Moral Britain" by Christie Davies

Excerpts only. I think the "she" below should be a "he"

It is the rare sociology book that warrants the epitaphs "exciting" and "brilliant." Such is Christie Davies' The Strange Death of Moral Britain, a book that deserves to be read by readers on the political right and left. The book's argument is that between 1950 and 1960 a new form of political reasoning replaced the old ideology or "logic" of "moral Britain," which underlay legal and social sensibility. The new outlook the author identifies as "causalism," and it has insidiously become the ethos of modern British society. The consequences of "causalism" as a political ideology are that the tradition of individualism, the legal principle that a just society rewards just behavior, and even national sovereignty, all concepts based upon the idea of moral hierarchy, have been radically undermined.

Davies' book largely consists in an analysis of the debates surrounding three controversial subjects of late 20th century British politics: capital punishment, abortion and homosexuality. While in Britain today there is little debate over these subjects, Davies audaciously asks: How was it possible for there to have been a debate in the first place? Modern wisdom assures us that to believe in capital punishment or to oppose the right to abortion is a vestige of barbarism - an atavism from the ancient world. Davies has reexamined the language of these debates and, from careful construction of the language of the losing side, has discerned the vestiges of what she calls "moral" and "respectable" Britain.

The central concept in Davies' book is causalism. At times she defines it in terms that imply it is an ideology of a ruling elite: "The causalists are . . . consequentialists and indeed utilitarians. . . .They are only concerned with the minimizing of pain, harm and suffering and not with the promotion of happiness or pleasure." At others, she defines it as a political ideology: "They seem to assume we all have a common and equal capacity for suffering. They are concerned only with the short term, with the immediate effects of legislation in removing a particular group of individuals from harm or the threat of harm and not with the long term or indirect consequences from such measure." And still in another place she implies that causalism is a sort of popular mass ideology: "Causalists place greater importance on the visible harm experienced by particular persons, than on that inflicted on mere `statistical' persons."

The advent of causalism demanded that the old moral functioning of the law be answerable to a utilitarian calculus of the law's involvement in inflicting pain: if it could not be argued that the law's function prevented more pain in the long term than it inflicted, then the law should be discarded. Modern arguments for the death penalty in America, for instance, are often countered by the position that they do not serve as a deterrent and even if they do, the cost of such a deterrent is prohibitive. Both positions entail causalist arguments to "refute" what was once a matter of moral principle.

This leads to another tenet of causalism. Whereas the moralists assumed that individuals are autonomous agents, making free choices both good and bad, the causalist sees their actions as "caused by external pressures." (p. xiv) Hence the notion of "autonomous moral choice" rendering the actor "wicked" or "good" is absurd. To the causalist, "wicked choices" are simply a function of social injustice or some other societal abstraction. However, by denying individual responsibility, the causalist also must disregard individual autonomy.

Davies' first chapters trace the decline of the "cultural of respectability" and the "culture of morality" in 19th and 20th century Britain. She then uses this as a context for examining the shifting attitudes towards capital punishment, abortion and homosexuality in the period. She concludes by arguing that the decline in the moral culture of Britain is more than merely a shift in particular views of the world. With the disintegration of Britain's moral understanding of itself comes a decline in the moral basis for Britain's political autonomy. By substituting a causalist way of thinking about its problems, Britain's ability as a nation state to define itself in unique and moral terms is radically undermined. The recent success of unelected European "human rights" courts in dictating their views onto British society by appealing to causalist reasoning is a symptom of Britain's increasing subordination to foreign control.

In her first chapter, the "Decline of Respectable Britain," Davies introduces the figure of the "U Curve," which she argues describes the decline in crime at the end of the 19th century and accounts for its increase at the end of the 20th. Inversely, it describes the rise of moral Britain and then its subsequent decline. Her empirical bases for this are indexes for violent crime and other aspects of life (moral behaviors for instance) she claims have to do with the cultural value of "respectability" ("moral behaviors"). She argues against criminologists and sociologists who have claimed that there was a rise in crime towards the end of the 20th century due to inequities brought about by "capitalism." The culture of respectability exerted an influence on behaviors that were not directly monitored by the state. For instance, drug use and alcoholism declined during the "U-Curve" era because the culture of respectability condemned them both; subsequently the British health care system was overwhelmed with drug addicts in the sixties because there was no longer a culture of respectability which held their abuse in contempt.1

The modern abolition of capital punishment and legalization of homosexuality have little to do with the language of tolerance, Davies argues. She cites many polls, for instance, indicating that most Britains believe in the necessity of capital punishment - and continue to do so. The transformation of the penal code with respect to these issues reflects not the will of the British people but rather the application of causalist reasoning. Causalist reasoning quickly determined that the utility of capital punishment and stigmatizing homosexuals was hardly justifiable in terms of social utility. Unsurprisingly in both cases, the "rights" of the condemned or the homosexual individual were never invoked as a basis for the legal and penal changes involved.

The law restricting abortion in England was liberalized in 1967 for reasons that likewise had little to do with individual rights. While previously abortion had been illegal and the penalties severe, the mother was rarely prosecuted. It was generally assumed that the mother's "immoral deed" was due to insanity. When performed by physicians it was assumed that there were medical circumstances in which abortion might be necessary. British judges and prosecutors were reluctant to try a doctor acting in good faith. Abortion remained an immoral act.

When the causalist mentality took hold in the late sixties, it was only a matter of time before causalist logic applied itself to the question of unsanitary abortions. While there was no mention of "woman's right to choose," as in the United States, abortions were legalized on causalist grounds. The rationale was that more harm was caused by preventing abortions, than by permitting their safe and controlled execution.

Finally, liberalized divorce laws also followed the same logic. Originally the divorce hearing was to establish who was at fault in bringing about the tragedy of divorce. However, the causalists immediately pointed out that the process made acrimony and bitterness on the whole greater than the problems that resulted from ignoring the question of moral culpability altogether. In the long run, they argued, more stability was brought to the family by avoiding establishing "fault" (a relic of "moral" Britain) and finding ways to mediate harm in the future.

The culmination of causalist reasoning should have been the Conservative Party's 1995 Family Law Bill, which introduced no-fault divorce in its pure form. However, neither Conservative nor Labour party wished to put the law into practice.

Remarriage after divorce produced even more divorce since second marriages tended to be less stable than first ones. Fatherlessness with the serious problems this created for children became even more widespread, a state of misery that greatly dwarfed any decrease in the amount of transitional distress that made one route to divorce preferable to another. (p. 100)

The irony that causalist reasoning had refuted itself on its own terms was hardly lost to MPs: a bill to "protect the short term suffering of the family" that would effectively destroy it brought a temporary halt to causalism's triumphs.....

And yet causalism is not an ideology generated by civil society, either. British attitudes towards capital punishment, homosexuality and abortion remained intact long after causalism abolished the former and adopted liberal attitudes towards the latter.

Causalism jettisons two key components of western thought. First, it abandons the traditional idea that the "people's representative" should indeed represent them. Representation implies that the representative speak on behalf of those who are absent. The causalist politician speaks on behalf of those who are most visible in the media at a given moment. His function is to translate complex social and historical issues into the opposition oppressor/oppressed and to align himself with the latter. In this the causalist is not the spokesperson for a political or ethical community composed of individuals (what makes the dyad oppressed/oppressor meaningful in the first place), but serves to articulate the transient sovereignty of unelected media culture. The current vogue of soliciting "celebrity" opinion on "political issues" is hardly surprising: the celebrity is closer to causalist politics than the politician.

Second, causalism abandons the idea that the individual should be the basis of sovereignty. The ethical individual was at one time the universal individual for whom laws of society once rested upon. To causalism, this individual is an abstraction and need not be considered when the causalist alters the rules of society to "minimize the pain" of the individuals presented by the media. Certain images, to the causalist, create such an overwhelming image of suffering that society may be assumed to concur with the pieties of the causalist - without, of course, a democratic vote. In modern society, paradoxically, the image of the oppressed is sovereign, not the individual being oppressed.

More here