Marriage should be cherished
Widdecombe
SORRY, but I do not join in the applause for a ruling of the Supreme Court that an unmarried mother should have been awarded the widowed parent’s allowance following the death of her partner. That is not because I lack sympathy for her plight but because the situation was entirely of the couple’s own making.
It is nobody else’s business if two people decide to have children without being married but if they do so decide then they must decide also to live with the consequences.
Siobhan McLaughlin lived with John Adams for 23 years before tragically losing him to cancer. At any time during those 23 years they could have married and given their children the legal protections that come with that legal commitment but they decided not to.
It is likely that when Mr Adams was ill with cancer he would, as people in that unfortunate position tend to do, have reviewed the financial arrangements for the family he was leaving behind. Yet still they decided not to marry.
That was their choice, not the state’s, but then the bereaved Ms McLaughlin demands that the state treat her as if she had made a different choice.
Her lawyers argued before the court that the system amounted to discrimination against children born out of wedlock but it is the parents who discriminate against them by choosing to CATHY NEWMAN jumps on the rolling #MeToo bandwagon saying she was sexually harassed at school. Apparently some boys used to grade the girls on their looks. What’s new? From conversations in pubs about that woman over at the bar to beauty contests to film casting to workplace gossip, men and women alike comment on the attractiveness or otherwise of the opposite sex.
Then, according to Ms Newman, some of the boys used to grab fire extinguishers and spray water on the girls’ white blouses to turn them transparent. That should certainly have resulted in an awkward visit to the headmaster’s study but it appears the girls didn’t complain.
Then comes the serious allegation that on one occasion at the table a boy unzipped his trousers and forced Ms Newman’s hand against his private parts. That really is sexual assault but again instead of complaining Cathy says she just gave a “comical shriek”. disadvantage them with the refusal to marry.
There are two lessons from this. The first is that all parents should consider the implications for their children if they decide not to marry. The second is the danger of making emotional promises that bind one for life.
The reason this couple did not marry is that Mr Adams had been married before and then sadly widowed and his wife had made him promise her not to remarry.
Mr Adams was 60 when he died so he would have been in his 30s when he lost his wife who was probably of similar years or younger. It is understandable that facing death at such an age they swore eternal fidelity and that Mr Adams would not have denied such an emotional request.
Bound by his word, he fulfilled the promise but it was nevertheless quite wrong to exact it and I cannot believe that his wife would have done so had she realised children would be adversely affected by it, but neither was thinking. They were instead simply feeling for each other in the horror of the moment.
Meanwhile, as I wrote on Friday, if all the benefits of marriage are given to those who reject it, then there will soon be no point to matrimony at all other than for those who regard it as a religious arrangement.
Was that really the agenda of the highest court in the land?
ENCOURAGE GIRLS TO SPEAK OUT AGAINST ABUSE
Yet her father was a teacher at the school. The school itself, Charterhouse, says it has now reported the allegations to the police. Have the boys in blue honestly got nothing better to do than investigate stupid boys turning fire extinguishers on girls nearly 30 years ago? As for the more serious allegation, it should have been investigated and dealt with at the time not used now to ruin someone who may have built a decent life since.
The bigger question however remains. Why didn’t Ms Newman and the other girls complain at the time? For fear of being branded tell-tales? Out of embarrassment? Because they didn’t think it important enough?
I can understand that they may not have wanted to cause a fuss at school but why on earth didn’t they tell their parents? The tragedy is that so many young girls don’t and what is important is not what celebs may have encountered decades ago but what may be happening to girls now.