Tough language, but it has to be said. From British journalist Melanie Phillips on the irony that in caring for the disadvantaged (supposedly a virtue of the Left) one must lament the disintegration of traditional families (a virtue of the Right). An Excerpt:
I always believed a good journalist should uphold truth over lies and follow the evidence where it led.
Trudging round godforsaken estates as the paper’s special reporter on social affairs, I could see the stark reality of what our supposedly enlightened liberal society was becoming.
The scales began to fall from my eyes. I came to realise that the Left was not on the side of truth, reason and justice.
Instead, it promoted ideology, malice and oppression. Rather than fighting abuse of power, it embodied it.
Increasingly, I saw how journalists on highbrow papers write primarily for other journalists or to impress politicians or other members of the great and the good.
They dismiss them as narrow-minded, parochial and prejudiced (unlike themselves, of course).
But I always wrote with ordinary people in mind.
Just as they were sceptical of intellectual abstractions, fantasies or Utopian solutions, so was I.
Bit by bit, I saw through the delusion of the Left’s supposedly ‘progressive’ politics.
Increasingly, I turned away from their stupidity, hypocrisy and moral blindness.
They, of course, dismissed me as contemptibly ‘Right-wing’, as if that was sufficient to destroy my argument.
But I am not ideologically driven. I hate the way political debate has been polarised into warring camps, with each side circling its wagons and striking ever more inflexible, dogmatic and adversarial positions.
My battle with the Left has never been from ‘the Right’, despite what they say.
How can I be ‘Right-wing’ when I am driven by the desire to make a better world, stand up for right over wrong and look after the most vulnerable in society?
Rather, I fight the Left on its very own purported moral high ground, which I once believed we all shared, but which I came to realise it had most cynically betrayed.
The defining issue for me — the one that launched me on a personal trajectory of confrontation with the Left and with my colleagues and friends — was the persistent undermining of the family as an institution.
By the late Eighties, it was glaringly obvious that families were suffering a chronic crisis of identity and self-confidence.
There were more and more divorces and single parents — along with mounting evidence that family disintegration and the subsequent creation of step-families or households with no father figure at all did incalculable damage to children.
‘Too many children lack a consistent mother or father figure,’ researchers told me.
Poverty, the Left’s habitual excuse, could not be the culprit since middle-class children were also not receiving the parental attention they required.
For me, the traditional family is sacred because it embodies the idea that there is something beyond the selfish individual.
But it was being turned into a mere contract that either side could break more or less at will.
I listened to the evidence of those with no particular ideological fixation or agenda, but who simply spoke of what they saw was happening.
From Zelda West-Meads of the marriage guidance counsellors Relate, I learned that, though many single mothers did a heroic job, it was the absence of the father that did such terrible damage to their children. So I described how fathers were vital to the emotional health of children.Fatherless families were also at least partly responsible for a national breakdown in authority and rising levels of crime.
My view was backed in 1992 when three influential social scientists with impeccable Left-wing pedigrees produced a damning report.
From their research, they concluded that children in fractured families tend to suffer more ill-health, do less well at school, are more likely to be unemployed, more prone to criminal behaviour and to repeat as adults the same cycle of unstable parenting.
But instead of welcoming this analysis as identifying a real problem, the Left turned on the authors, branding them as evil Right-wingers for being ‘against single mothers’.
‘Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?’
Eventually, he admitted that the authors’ research was correct. But he said it was impossible to turn back the clock and wondered why there was so much concern about the rights of the child rather than of the parents.
He turned out to be divorced — revealing a devastating pattern I was to encounter over and over again. Truth was being sacrificed to personal expediency. Evidence would be denied if the consequences were inconvenient.
Self-centred individualism and self-justification ruled, regardless of the damage done to others.
Surely, though, the essence of being ‘progressive’ was to protect the most vulnerable?
Yet these ‘progressives’ were elevating their own desires into rights that trumped the emotional, physical and intellectual well-being of their children — and then berated as heartless reactionaries those who criticised them!
The more this was being justified, the more it was happening. Rising numbers of people were abandoning their spouses and children, or breaking up other people’s families, or bringing children into the world without a father around at all.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2319192/Why-Left-hates-families-MELANIE-PHIILLIPS-reveals-selfish-sneers-Guardianistas-Left-actively-fosters–revels–family-breakdown-.html#ixzz2SXIRZwnk
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