- Latham must make marriage matter
- By Janet Albrechtsen
- The Australian
- 04/02/2004 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: admin ( 100 articles in 2004 )
PUCKER up, Mr Latham. Conservatives will soon be queuing to embrace the new Opposition Leader. Finally, a Labor party politician talking about social realities and personal obligations. Finally, some real political opposition.
Last week's Labor Party conference signals that Mark Latham has discovered the essential truth: the vast bulk of the electorate is more socially conservative than your standard ALP fare. That is why he is on a winner with his recent, eminently sensible social policy edicts.
Pointing to the 600,000 children who live in single-parent households, Latham has promised to set up a national mentoring program. He told the conference: "For boys without men in their lives this is a real issue: a lack of male mentors and role models teaching them the difference between right and wrong. I see this in my own community: boys who have gone off the rails. And lost touch with a thing called society."
These are fine ideas that will resonate with voters who were left wondering if judgment-shy politicians would ever catch up with the social problems inflicted by a 30-year experiment in fatherlessness.
Latham has also been reminding people about their obligations, repositioning Labor away from a narcissistic rights agenda, to a more community-based notion of obligations. A sure sign Latham is successfully aligning himself with the voters are disgruntled comments over the weekend by left-wing female media commentators uncomfortable with all this talk of obligations.
However, if Latham is genuinely concerned about parenting, building stronger communities and hammering rungs into his ladder of opportunity, he will have to grapple with the most basic rung of all. He will need to talk about the need to promote strong, stable marriages.
Why? Because children raised outside stable, low-conflict marriages do worse on just about every development score. Controlling for race and income, studies show that these children are more likely to have emotional or mental problems, have trouble in school, find friendships harder going, suffer greater risks of physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Teenagers living apart from fathers are more likely to become teenage parents, more likely to commit crimes, take drugs, leave school early.
As laudable as it is, mentoring fatherless boys is just tinkering at the edges. And the beauty for Latham is that if he comes out in defence of marriage, he can do so, unlike US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister John Howard, without it being seen as some Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as some throwback to the 1950s picket fence. He is perfectly placed to transform the picket fence palings into his ladder of opportunity. Even Democrat president Bill Clinton, with his scintillating philanderings, recognised that marriage is bigger than his own personal failings. Hence his Defence of Marriage Act which shored up marriage by excluding the notion of same-sex marriage.
As English conservative journalist Roger Scruton wrote last year, marriage is more than the bond between one man and one woman in time. It is a social contract where the dead and yet to be born are also parties. It is "the principal forum in which social capital is passed on". As with same-sex marriages, the push to equate de facto relationships with marriage is misguided. Co-habitation is not marriage. Most people, when asked, express a long-term desire to get married. They don't say they want to settle down into a good de facto relationship.
The booming industry in thirtysomething angst over being unmarried attests to the fact that marriage is still sought after. Think Bridget Jones, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, or for the more cerebral, Rachel Greenwald's Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned At Harvard Business School. Staying single is not nearly as much fun as Sex and the City would have us believe.
And despite the statistics on divorce, most people enter marriage with a genuine belief of a long term "I will" commitment. For co-habiting partners, it is more a case of "I might" as the statistics on the breakdown of de facto relationships show. None of that would matter except for the growing number of children born into these much less stable homes.
The cultural vandalism already wrought on marriage is palpable. Yet last year David de Vaus, author of Diversity and Change in Australian Families, said it was pointless to describe the drift to single motherhood, and what he calls the "until further notice" mentality in many modern relationships as good or bad. The purpose of public policy, he said, was to reflect societal changes. Ho hum. Another academic preaching moral relativism.
As a senior researcher at the Australian Institute of Family, de Vaus would be well versed on the devastating effects these changes have inflicted on children. Governments spend billions of dollars on health, education and welfare, keeping us safe on the roads, improving our well-being by sponsoring arts and sports. Why not marriage?
Latham's recent pronouncements represent the first thoughtful steps in a revolt against the modern Zeitgeist, where the smashing of taboos was necessarily viewed as progress. But he needs to go further in promoting stable marriages. Marriage education is one option. To encourage people to think about their obligations, some US states offer covenant marriage which commits parties to marriage counselling and makes divorce more difficult.
Doing nothing, continuing down the track of marriage-lite, will only create a larger pool of boys in need of mentoring. The question is, once in power, how far will the Left let Latham go?
Last week's Labor Party conference signals that Mark Latham has discovered the essential truth: the vast bulk of the electorate is more socially conservative than your standard ALP fare. That is why he is on a winner with his recent, eminently sensible social policy edicts.
Pointing to the 600,000 children who live in single-parent households, Latham has promised to set up a national mentoring program. He told the conference: "For boys without men in their lives this is a real issue: a lack of male mentors and role models teaching them the difference between right and wrong. I see this in my own community: boys who have gone off the rails. And lost touch with a thing called society."
These are fine ideas that will resonate with voters who were left wondering if judgment-shy politicians would ever catch up with the social problems inflicted by a 30-year experiment in fatherlessness.
Latham has also been reminding people about their obligations, repositioning Labor away from a narcissistic rights agenda, to a more community-based notion of obligations. A sure sign Latham is successfully aligning himself with the voters are disgruntled comments over the weekend by left-wing female media commentators uncomfortable with all this talk of obligations.
However, if Latham is genuinely concerned about parenting, building stronger communities and hammering rungs into his ladder of opportunity, he will have to grapple with the most basic rung of all. He will need to talk about the need to promote strong, stable marriages.
Why? Because children raised outside stable, low-conflict marriages do worse on just about every development score. Controlling for race and income, studies show that these children are more likely to have emotional or mental problems, have trouble in school, find friendships harder going, suffer greater risks of physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Teenagers living apart from fathers are more likely to become teenage parents, more likely to commit crimes, take drugs, leave school early.
As laudable as it is, mentoring fatherless boys is just tinkering at the edges. And the beauty for Latham is that if he comes out in defence of marriage, he can do so, unlike US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister John Howard, without it being seen as some Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as some throwback to the 1950s picket fence. He is perfectly placed to transform the picket fence palings into his ladder of opportunity. Even Democrat president Bill Clinton, with his scintillating philanderings, recognised that marriage is bigger than his own personal failings. Hence his Defence of Marriage Act which shored up marriage by excluding the notion of same-sex marriage.
As English conservative journalist Roger Scruton wrote last year, marriage is more than the bond between one man and one woman in time. It is a social contract where the dead and yet to be born are also parties. It is "the principal forum in which social capital is passed on". As with same-sex marriages, the push to equate de facto relationships with marriage is misguided. Co-habitation is not marriage. Most people, when asked, express a long-term desire to get married. They don't say they want to settle down into a good de facto relationship.
The booming industry in thirtysomething angst over being unmarried attests to the fact that marriage is still sought after. Think Bridget Jones, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, or for the more cerebral, Rachel Greenwald's Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned At Harvard Business School. Staying single is not nearly as much fun as Sex and the City would have us believe.
And despite the statistics on divorce, most people enter marriage with a genuine belief of a long term "I will" commitment. For co-habiting partners, it is more a case of "I might" as the statistics on the breakdown of de facto relationships show. None of that would matter except for the growing number of children born into these much less stable homes.
The cultural vandalism already wrought on marriage is palpable. Yet last year David de Vaus, author of Diversity and Change in Australian Families, said it was pointless to describe the drift to single motherhood, and what he calls the "until further notice" mentality in many modern relationships as good or bad. The purpose of public policy, he said, was to reflect societal changes. Ho hum. Another academic preaching moral relativism.
As a senior researcher at the Australian Institute of Family, de Vaus would be well versed on the devastating effects these changes have inflicted on children. Governments spend billions of dollars on health, education and welfare, keeping us safe on the roads, improving our well-being by sponsoring arts and sports. Why not marriage?
Latham's recent pronouncements represent the first thoughtful steps in a revolt against the modern Zeitgeist, where the smashing of taboos was necessarily viewed as progress. But he needs to go further in promoting stable marriages. Marriage education is one option. To encourage people to think about their obligations, some US states offer covenant marriage which commits parties to marriage counselling and makes divorce more difficult.
Doing nothing, continuing down the track of marriage-lite, will only create a larger pool of boys in need of mentoring. The question is, once in power, how far will the Left let Latham go?
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