Melanie Phillips on the Left hating families and fostering family breakdown

No wonder Family First's promotion of the traditional family is not considered by the New Zealand Government to be in the public interest. We are operating in a very leftist milieu here, and it affects how many individuals and therefore government departments view the world, and family, in a leftist mindset is just not that important. Only problem is this mindset is incredibly socially destructive, which then affects the economy and the safety of citizens, and yet rather than allowing an alternative point of view to try and make it's way here, it's firmly stomped on.

Here's Melanie Phillips, writing of her realisation that the Left hates families and actively seeks to destroy them.  She started out being a Leftist herself, thinking that it was the correct side to be on:

As a university-educated young woman with hippie-style hair and an attitude, I, too, generally toed the standard Leftist line in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

Poverty was bad, cuts in public spending were bad, prison was bad, the Tory government was bad.

The state was good, poor people were good, minorities were good, sexual freedom was good.

Melanie worked for the Guardian and became the 'perfect little Guardianista'. However, when Margaret Thatcher came on the scene, she started listening to what she was saying and the scales fell from her eyes.

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.

Here in New Zealand, this undermining of the family is more advanced than in Britain, for we have the State being able to interfere in a family where there is smacking for discipline. Something Family First have put a lot of effort and energy into opposing, educating people on and helping those who have been investigated by the government for smacking, of which there have been more than a few.

Their sanity was called into question. ‘What do these people want?’ one distinguished academic said to me.

‘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.

Yep, happening here too.  Evidence is being denied if the consequences are inconvenient.  It is inconvenient to strengthen the traditional family unit because so many want to be able to leave it at will.  They think their responsibility to their spouse and children should only be fulfilled if they are personally happy, and if their spouse and children exist for their own personal satisfaction.  Not that people really think about the consequences of their own thinking to that level, but that's what happens when the sacrificial nature of family life is discarded.

The idea that a woman could be mother and father to her children — more, that it was her ‘right’ to choose such a lifestyle — led directly to the hopeless plight of often inadequate women struggling to raise children while the men who fathered them were, in effect, told they were free to do their own thing.

I was as perplexed by this as I was appalled. I had been brought up to believe the Left stood for altruism rather than selfishness, community rather than individualism, self- discipline rather than the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest.

Instead, society was worshipping at the shrine of the self, and this was causing a rising tide of juvenile distress, crime, emotional disturbance, educational and relationship failure.

The fact that I continued to write along these lines regardless of all the abuse hurled to shut me up seemed to drive the Left nuts.

Yes, they espoused a doctrine of being tolerant and non-judgmental, but not when it came to me. I was branded a ‘moraliser’, which appeared to be a term of abuse.

Ah yes, this whole thing of talking morals to people, which is really calling them to a higher standard, does tend to drive people who disagree a little crazy.  I get it quite a lot, but I ignore it because it really doesn't bother me, and it just shows I'm effective. 

I would guess that the underlying moralising and effectiveness of Family First also bothers the Government, therefore it can only retaliate at this point by refusing to support them in any way by removing financial incentives for their supporters.

Fun and games.


Related link: Why the Left hates families: MELANIE PHIILLIPS reveals how the selfish sneers of Guardianistas made her see how the Left actively fosters – and revels in – family breakdown... ~ Daily Mail UK