It's not often one sees in a web site's comments thread a piece so outstanding it really should be shared. But these words from Johnathan Singh as he takes on the Liberal Conspiracy crowd, really deserve a wider audience. Why, he asks, do so many on these lefties ignore "very clear evidence that, on average, even when all other social variables are held constant, children are badly harmed by being deprived of the kind of stable, (if often flawed) family arrangement that most of them enjoyed for, say the first two thirds of the 20th century"?
"[Y]ou don’t have to read any of it, and I doubt that any of you have or should wish to do so because it would call into question many of the shibboleths of liberal social policy for the last 50 or 60 years — beliefs that give you all a strong sense of moral superiority. Unless you have the courage to patiently consider this information which is often thoroughly detailed, you can quite easily continue as you are; insulting and swearing and changing the subject because no conservative is going to come onto Liberal Conspiracy and sustain a argument about family policy for more than a few days.
"Therefore you can always resort to explanations which are not quite as distressing to your pre-held beliefs eg. as long as there’s more public spending everything will be all right. Even if social welfare policies encourage the creation of Shannon Matthews-style households, how can conservatives object to more welfare spending to reduce the harm done to children in them? You see you never actually need to be held accountable for your opinions. Only the children need suffer, but better that they should suffer than you should have to alter your world-view.
"So you can continue to shout that it doesn’t matter if children either have no fathers, or different fathers every few years. If as UNICEF reports, Britain is the worst country in the western world in which to grow up as a child, well, it must be because of ‘relative poverty’. Always an excellent fall-back is placing the blame solely on Thatcher for creating a ‘culture of greed’ (which admittedly has some truth but stops you from looking deeper). What about the fact that 80% of children have a TV in their bedrooms, which is more than have a father present at home? Or that how in the midst of the 1930s depression was not a period of great ‘youth crime’ or crime of any kind? All these are questions that you would prefer not to answer."
