Easy, pain-free divorce? Not for the children
FAIL to keep up payments on a house or car, or break your employment contract, and see what happens to you. The courts will take the side of the person or company you have wronged, force you to pay up and probably throw in a punishment too. But break a marriage contract and the courts will now take your side and punish anyone who gets in your way, especially anyone who wants to abide by the contract.
The person who wants to stay married and refuses to accept the end of the pact, can – if he or she resists – be dragged by force from the family home, under the ultimate
threat of prison. This strikes me as amazing in itself – that there is one unique area of law where the delinquent person is rewarded and the dutiful person punished. You’d have thought more people would be interested. But, as so often when really strange things happen in our revolutionary society, nobody notices or cares.
The supposedly Conservative government last week revealed that it is to strip away the last shred of legal protection from the former institution of marriage. You may have said all kinds of things about sticking around, but from now you just need to say ‘It doesn’t suit me any more’, and in six months the marriage will be dissolved, no delay.
I understand that some people think this is a good idea, but isn’t it a pity that there’s no major political organisation in the country which is prepared to stand up for the other point of view? Well, there you are, if you like anything traditional and British, you have no friends at Westminster. Get used to it.
Everyone involved will deny this, but the people who pay the real price for this destruction of secure home life are the children. Every statistical measure shows that the breaking of marriage harms them. But they have no voice. It is the adults, liberated from their responsibilities, who write articles in the papers, make the programmes on the radio and TV, and the speeches in Parliament, which claim everything will be fine.
IT WON’T be. Our monstrous taxes, and most of our worst social problems – from chaotic schools to crime and overstretched hospitals full of old, ill people – arise from the very expensive failure of the state to substitute for the stable, solid family which used to be held together by lifelong marriage, and now isn’t.
Perhaps the simplest, most graphic way of showing that neglect of children is now an epidemic, is last week’s news from Walsall, where an infant school has designated a staff member to change the nappies of five-year-old children because so many pupils are not toilet-trained.
These poor children also cannot communicate or hold a pencil properly, let alone use cutlery or dress themselves. What else have they not learned in these vital years? What sort of adults are they going to be? I am not sure I want to be around to find out.
A WONDERFUL revolt took place last week against the miserable dumbing-up of the once-entertaining TV quiz programme University Challenge.
Instead of asking questions which every educated person might be able to answer, the show now spends an immense amount of time asking highly specialised questions about science, which take ages to read out and which only about one person in 100,000 could even guess at.
In the semi-final between Durham and Edinburgh, presenter Jeremy Paxman (whose knowledge of science is, I guess, sketchy) enquired sternly of the Durham team: ‘Give the two-word name of the bacteria from which the following thermo-stable polymerases were first isolated.’ Eh? I bet he understood that. The Durham team simply refused to pretend they even cared they didn’t know, and wisely responded ‘Pass’.
If others would only do the same thing, the programme might become fun to watch again.