Or just a lot of hot air? You decide. I can’t keep up with British politics.
It is true though, that the UK has been much more aggressively anti-marriage than the US, as Patricia Morgan has ably documented. I reviewed her book here and reprinted here.
The Government is all over the place on family issues. In Harman’s equality camp, the mantra is that single parents must not be discriminated against by encouraging marriage in the tax system. That’s not unlike saying that those who don’t go to university shouldn’t be discriminated against in the jobs market, but I’ll let that pass. In another camp, which Balls has just joined, are those who believe, like Cameron, that marriage is a gold standard for the raising of children….
Why in all his years at the Treasury did Gordon Brown preside over the steady erosion of the tax advantages of wedlock, while the burgeoning benefits system positively encouraged parents to live apart? My guess is that, in his instinct to act like Tony Blair when he inherited his office, Brown assumes that matrimony will be associated with all that stuffy, old religious observance, and, like Blair, he doesn’t want to be thought of as a “nutter”.
As yes, the ultimate insult: being thought a “nutter” because you believe kids need a mom and a dad and all that other religious mumbo-jumbo. If religious people are the only ones who can see that moms and dads matter, so much the worse for the atheists!