The War on Marriage? It Is All About Controlling YOUR Children

Mr Hitchens writes on the British situation, but it is closely paralleled in Canada and the US.

From Peter Hitchens's Blog

Why does our new power elite hate lifelong marriage so much? Why does the legal arm of that elite, the Supreme Court, hand out what is left of the privileges of marriage to those who won’t get married, as it did with the widowed parents’ allowance on Thursday?

Why does the propaganda arm of our ruling class, the BBC, promote a drama called Wanderlust with publicity which, in the BBC’s own words, ‘asks whether lifelong monogamy is possible – or even desirable’. You know as well as I do that they’re not really asking.

They are saying, amid countless wearisome and embarrassing bedroom scenes, that it is neither possible nor desirable. This is a lie, as millions of honest, generous and kind men and women proved in the better generations which came before this one.

Our modern upper crust hate marriage because it is a fortress of private life. They hate it above all because they can’t control it, because it is the place where the next generation learn how to be distinct, thinking individuals instead of conformist robots.

It is where they discover the truth about the past, the lore of the tribe, the traditions and beliefs that make us who we are. It is where they become capable of being free.

But our new rulers don’t want that. They don’t want fully formed people who know who they are and where they come from. They want obedient, placid consumers, slumped open-mouthed in front of screens, drugged into flaccid apathy (legally or illegally, the Government don’t care which), slaving all hours in the dreary low-wage, high-tax economy they are so busily creating.

Much better if they’ve never heard of the great golden drama of our national history and literature, so they don’t know what they’re missing and don’t care.

They would prefer the young to be brought up in a sort of moral car park, knowing nothing except what they are told by authority and the advertising industry. In this brave new world, sex is a spectacle and a sport, solemn oaths are worthless, and duty is a joke.

In this, they are much like the Soviet Communists, who deliberately made divorce as easy as crossing the road, and made absolutely sure that hardly any parents could afford to stay at home to raise their own children.

They have not yet gone quite as far as them – Soviet children were encouraged to worship, as a martyr, a semi-mythical figure called Pavlik Morozov, who was supposedly killed by his grandfather after informing on his own parents to the secret police. Russian friends of mine brought up in this vicious cult shuddered at the memory. But if you look carefully, you will see a ghostly shadow of this culture of denunciation growing up in our midst. And, as we forget all our long history of freedom and justice, it will become easier for such things to happen.

After all, we have long been used to the sight, on TV, of police officers smashing down front doors, or conducting dawn raids – and of being expected to approve of it.

An Englishman’s home is not his castle. And his life is not his own. That is what all this means, and will mean.

Amid the grunts and the creaking of bedsprings, and the pompous phrases of the judges, listen hard and you can hear them weaving Britain’s winding sheet.