FAMILIES UNDER ATTACK
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The modern godless humanist state hates the family. It sees it as a rival source of authority and a powerful alternative moral influence. It is therefore to be dismantled wherever possible or its bonds broken. The UK government has demonstrated its stance towards family life by appointing a hardline feminist, Dr Kathrine Rake, to head up its heavily government-subsidised Family and Parenting Institute. Last year (2008) this organisation received almost £8 million from the Department for Children Schools and Families.
The appointment of Dr Rake, currently director of the women’s campaign group the Fawcett Society, is like putting a fox in charge of the chicken run. Her stated aims are more about reversing sex roles and breaking up traditional family life than offering any help to parents. She wrote in The Guardian three years ago:
“We want to transform the most intimate and private relations between women and men” (ed. note the order!).
“We want to change not just who holds power in international conglomerations, but who controls the household budget.” She wants to challenge “the traditional roles of homemaker and breadwinner.”
“We want to change not just what childcare the state provides, but who changes the nappies at home.”
Because this woman propagates unbelievable piffle, because her nonsense works against those laws God Himself has placed within the created world and revealed in Scripture, her efforts will ultimately fail but sadly not before she has brought much sadness, suffering and tragedy into the daily lives of our people. It is important that we counteract her insidious, crafty and altogether treacherous endeavours with biblical teaching and resist at every turn her efforts and of those like her. We are under no biblical obligation to submit to godless laws that interfere with our family life.
Since Emile Zola uttered the words, “Families I hate you!” the attack on families has continued unabated. Arguments from those who support the family will often be simply pragmatic ones – it is the basic unit of society and has always worked well. However convincing this line of argument may be, ultimately the family can only be adequately defended as a creation ordinance, as something given of God and binding upon us all. Certainly, a rejection of God will mean rejecting all God has given, including marriage and the family. Social anthropologists see the family as just one stage in human evolution, which, along with a dependence on God, can now be safely discarded. We have outgrown it and there is little point on holding onto something that has outlived its useful purpose. We have no heavenly Father, we need no earthly one.
There are many elements of the family structure that secular humanists find objectionable. Private possessions and wealth is seen as an outgrowth of the family. To abolish this, the family must go. In The Origin of the Family, Friedrich Engels’ gives a distorted definition of the family and monogamous marriage claiming that they are based…
“on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.”
There is power in property. Diminish the property power of families and that power reverts back to the state. Engels goes on to write, where
“…the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair: society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.”
The God-given responsibilities of the family are snatched by the state. Children belong to the state wherever they come from, inside or outside a marriage, it really does not matter. The state governed school is to take over what once was taught in the family. The state’s demands are supreme and take priority over parental rights. The working mother is encouraged, emancipated, freed from the economic complex that is the family. There can be no social penalties for those who choose to have children outside a family situation. Same sex ‘partners’ produce no children, create no traditional family, are therefore to be encouraged. Ultimate authority is now assumed to reside essentially in the state rather than in God. All other authorities, such as parents, rule by permission of the state. Any concept of the authority of parents being derived directly from God, bypassing the state, cannot be countenanced.
The family as described in the Bible is a place where God is to be glorified and where its members under God are able best to realise their own human potential. The command to the first human father was to subdue the earth, to exercise dominion over it.
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:27-30)
In Scripture the father of the family is answerable to God as head of the household. This mandate naturally involves the possession of private property. Without it theft has no meaning. The authority from God within the family and the direct responsibility to God are emphatically not derived from the state. This is something that the modern humanistic with its totalitarian aspirations, its desire and supposed right to interfere in every corner of our lives, cannot permit. The God-centred family as the basic unit at the heart of the nation offends the humanist.
God delegated family authority when devolved to the state produces all the disastrous consequences we observe around us. Education, training and vocation, even religion and discipline the state will subordinate to itself given the opportunity. Parents are then only there in the end to procreate. A godly family can be, and sometimes will be broken up by secular authorities. The family is a fundamental unit within our nation because this is the way God has ordained things. There is an authority for the family only because it is given by God, and not simply because it has been shown to work, and never because it is an authority derived from the state. Of course the family works – God gave it! There is blessing promised for following the Word of God in this sphere as in all others, and death and a curse follow hard upon disobedience and rejection of God.
Throughout the Bible, in Old and New Testaments, it is the duty of parents to provide for their children, materially and spiritually. All must answer to God for the education their children are given. These matters are not the responsibility of the state. Where the state takes over education, particularly where it claims exclusivity, the family will suffer enormously. At the other end of life, adult children bear a responsibility toward their parents as they grow older. Again in Old and New Testaments, any child caring for aged parents thereby becomes the main heir. No ruler possesses any God-given right of seizure or appropriation of inheritance. It amounts to taking that which they have no right to take – theft.
“Moreover the prince shall not take of the people's inheritance by oppression, to thrust them out of their possession; but he shall give his sons inheritance out of his own possession: that my people be not scattered every man from his possession.” (Ezekiel 46:18)
In some countries the state has made itself the main or only heir. Through iniquitous inheritance taxes the state extracts payment for having taken on the roles of the real heirs without fully embracing their duties. This is all part of a secular humanist war on the family.
The British tax system does nothing to encourage married couples to stay together but actively discourages it, paying a higher proportion of their incomes in tax than in any other civilised land. The average family pays 25 per cent more tax than in any other EU country. Tax is particularly severe where Mom stays at home to look after the children. Get out to work Mom! A recent report written by two former Inland Revenue consultants says that in a one-earner family with annual income of £330,800 will pay 40 per cent more than in any comparable nation in the OECD. Elsewhere one-earner families on an average income pay 50 percent less tax than a single person compared with the UK. Single people with no children are relatively better off than families. Couples who break up are better off than had they stayed together. The British tax and benefit system destroys families. In the 1960s a one-earner family with an average wage would have paid 9 per cent in income tax. In the tax year 2006-07 it was 20 per cent. Unlike income tax, benefits are always assessed on combined income. This means that a couple on £18,000 a year pay a ‘penalty’ in reduced benefits of £8,588 a year, which amounts to about 40 per cent of their income before tax. The UK tax system cynically ignores all spousal obligations. Tax allowances for married couples and their children disappeared long ago. Stable families are penalised and undermined, family breakdown and single parenthood is promoted by a system of taxation unparalleled elsewhere and initiated by godless men in authority.
Until recent times the family made basic welfare provision for its own. No nation can prosper that limits the ability of the family by oppressive taxation to care for its own members. Ostensibly for education and welfare, where the state continues to show itself wholly inept, heavy taxation only impoverishes families and makes self-help difficult or well-nigh impossible. Families are strengthened as they are enabled to fulfil those roles given them by God. At no time does this absolve us from some responsibility towards those outside our immediate family circle who for one reason or another are unable to help themselves.
The state has become a father for everyone’s children. In Britain, almost £9 billion a year is paid out in welfare benefit to lone parents, excluding widows and widowers. This is what it cost to build the tunnel under the English Channel. Four in 10 children in the UK today enter the world outside marriage. A quarter of all girls will have visited a family planning clinic before the age of 19 – often encouraged by the schools. The consequence of all this promiscuous activity is well over 100,000 teenage pregnancies each year, just less than half of these resulting in babies being born. This means, presumably, that more than half the pregnancies end in an abortion. What kind a legacy is this for girls all under 19 years old and some as young as 12 and 13? What is the answer given by the answer of the wise guys? More sex education! The Humanist Manifesto II has this to say:
“In the area of sexuality, we believe that intolerant attitudes, often cultivated by orthodox religions and puritanical cultures, unduly repress sexual conduct. The right to birth control, abortion, and divorce should be recognised. …The many varieties of sexual exploration should not in themselves be considered ‘evil’.”
The more the state takes over the role of the family, the more the family is likely to fall apart, the more our nation as a whole will suffer. The family is a child’s first environment; here it experiences love and security. It is the child’s first school; mother is the first and best teacher he or she will ever have. In the days when mother taught her children reading, music, and basic arithmetic, there were more bright children around than is the case now. Some were tutored early in the classical languages or French, unheard of today. The family is the child’s first Church; here it learns about God. In the family a child is taught to obey and respect legitimate authority. The family teaches a child the meaning of work and responsibility. A family that fails in any of these areas fails indeed. If children do not learn these things in a family environment, they most certainly will not learn them outside it. To relieve the family of these duties is criminal. To destroy all respect for authority within the family, all sense of responsibility, is a recipe for national and social disaster. The results run wild nightly on our streets.
The right of a child to misbehave, it would now appear, is enshrined in law. How perverse have things become? At a recent teachers’ conference there was a constant stream of complaints as to how children as young as five were asserting their ‘human right’ to do as they please, to be unruly and violent in school, in effect, to be obedient only to their own law. Lack of respect for older people and authority made it almost impossible to shame the children into better behaviour. This is happening not just in ‘deprived’ inner cities but delightful Cornwall where a teachers’ union liaison officer found 18 of the 20 primary schools he visited last year had problems. Many children as young as five and six are disruptive and violent; they bite and scream and throw furniture about the classroom. Continually the authority of staff is questioned, children quoting their perceived human rights. Once this takes hold there is little the teacher can do and the defiance spreads. Members of the teaching staff are regularly spat upon. In 30 years many of these teachers had seen nothing like it. What do these teachers understand to be the reason for this serious and widespread decline in behavioural standards? One wise guy seems to have the answer – – doughnuts – sugary cakes and drinks, junk food are all to blame. No one mentioned the fact that the moral structure of our nation is rapidly falling apart, in part due to the disintegration of families and no one would dare to suggest that this is directly attributable to a nation defiantly turning its back on God.
David Evans was a quiet-mannered, hard-working builder, who just liked to get on with his work. One day whilst working at a school laying concrete slabs, he and his workmates suffered continuous baiting and taunts from three school pupils. The workmen ignored the troublemakers, but this only made matters worse. When words alone drew no response, the yobs began throwing plastic cones and other missiles. David Evans snapped, having been provoked beyond his patience. He went across, and did nothing more serious than pushing two of them and tweaking the nose of another. In a previous era when sense prevailed, the offenders would have beaten a hasty retreat, but these ghastly little hooligans, knowing their ‘human rights’ ran to a teacher screaming, “Sir, he assaulted us!” The police were called and the full stupidity of the law then swung into action. Mr Evans was told he was likely to be prosecuted for assault. Unable to face the shame of appearing in court, he told his wife, “I am not meant for this world.” Shortly afterwards, David Evans took his own life. At the inquest in Salisbury the coroner was lost for words. What can anyone say about such things?
The mining community in which the writer has lived for almost thirty years has of late been plagued with youngsters dealing in drugs in the street and generally making a real nuisance of themselves, attacking houses and cars. Neighbours in these closely-knit communities often intimidate anyone calling out the police. This is all not just taking place on rundown council estates, but also in smart villages, and nice suburbia. Making persistent calls to the police sometimes works but is not always sufficient action to cure the problem, so that recently one elderly gentleman in the neighbourhood went after the nuisance-makers with a rifle. A teacher in a comfortable area of Manchester actually took pot shots at some louts with an air rifle. Such was her desperation, when, despite continual calls to the police, their taunts and perpetual vandalism and thieving became too much for her. Despite a lot of public sympathy, she was jailed for six months and suspended from her job and was eventually sacked on release from prison. The troublemakers themselves were never brought to justice. We shall read of more such actions and worse should this tide of evil not be stemmed and lawlessness instead increases and people feel unable to do anything to protect themselves.
Garry Newlove, devoted family man, challenged local youths in his own street in Warrington as to who had vandalised his wife’s car. For his pains he was set upon, beaten to the ground and his head kicked so hard that he died of his injuries. The case shocked local people. Brought before the court, the judge spoke of a generation out of control, of a society bedevilled by feral youth. The sale of alcohol to underage drinkers played a significant role in this incident. Cheshire Chief Constable, responsible for this area, made clear that a tide of drunkenness and alcohol misuse along with extended opening hours left the police struggling to cope with violent youths.
According to government figures, crimes committed under the influence of alcohol include: 40% of violent crime, 78% of assaults and 88% of all criminal damage. People who have been drinking account for 50% to 80% of violent crime, including rape and murder. Each year around 5000 people are ‘glassed’ using broken beer glasses to cause injury often to the face. What is the answer of the wise guys running our country? Allow drinking establishments to apply for licences allowing 24 hour drinking!
The teaching of the Bible is that marriage is the voluntary union of two persons, one man and one woman. Arranged marriages require the consent of both parties otherwise they are nothing less than legalised rape. Sexual relationships belong to monogamous marriage and require premarital chastity and marital fidelity. Only in degenerate and degraded cultures is there any room for promiscuity and licence. The Bible insists on only heterosexual relationships and only within marriage. All extra-marital sex is condemned over and over again in the Old and New Testaments, along with even the very thought of it. Adultery is a murderous act that pollutes any healthy society and so cannot be dismissed as a personal matter and hidden away. In the Bible it is put on a par with murder and ought therefore to be dealt with, not as a civil, but as a criminal offence. It is high treason against the family and those who encourage or minimise adultery are as guilty as those who engage in it. It dismantles the foundation of our nation. Adultery is a matter of little importance only where the family is downgraded and its duties are coveted by the state. Until there is a recovery of family life, adultery will be dismissed as a mere peccadillo.
Marriage is today reduced to a tie based only on a romantic notion ‘love’ and so is easily dissolved when that same love fades and we all move on. Divorce is obtainable of the drop of a lawyer’s fee, one contributing factor in the price hike in houses the rest of us have to pay for. Quick divorce is surely the mentality of the immature, those who balk at the first difficulty, which can be as petty as a piece of burnt toast! According to government figures, if present trends continue within the next ten years almost 80% of the demand for extra homes will come from the never-married, divorced and separated. Divorce, births outside marriage and co-habitation have risen to levels here in Britain far above those anywhere else in western Europe. Slightly more than two out of every five marriages fail. Families are irreparably torn apart by thoughtless and selfish adultery. Those in positions of authority set the pace for everyone else, role models in irresponsible promiscuity.
“They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour's wife. Shall I not visit for these things? saith the LORD: and shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?” (Jeremiah 5:8)
Divorce rates today in the UK are at an all-time high at around 140,000 per year. By far the main cause of family breakdown is adultery affecting more than 150,000 children. At least three in ten children experience the divorce of their parents before the age of 16. Extra-marital affairs are not ‘romantic’; they are the cause of incalculable human misery. 90% of juvenile offenders under 16 come from broken homes and half of those excluded from school. Although divorce figures have dipped slightly recently, we can take no comfort from it as the proportion of people getting married has fallen by a quarter over the last ten years. Co-habitation is increasingly becoming an alternative to marriage. What God has commanded can only work for our good and this is what those who set themselves against God fail to recognise. Rebellion against God and what He has ordained brings nothing but human misery in its train.
Many children have an abysmal family life and are set off in the wrong direction from the word go. What an appalling thing it is to misdirect children and train them in evil! One would have imagined that with so little real poverty when compared with the rest of the world, so much education, our children would be thriving. Yet this is evidently not so. Recent research has placed Britain as the worst place in the developed world in which a child can grow up and the USA is only one step higher. It is claimed that children in the UK do not feel wanted, loved, nor cherished. Some have no time in the week when they just talk with their parents, nor do they sit down to a meal together any more than occasionally. Around a third of youngsters between the ages of 11 and 15 say they have been completely drunk on at least two occasions. This is more than any in the developed world. The same is true with respect to the incidence of unmarried teenage moms. British teenagers drink the most, smoke more tobacco, take more cannabis, have more sex, are more obese, dislike school more, and are generally more dissatisfied with life than their counterparts in other western countries, and yet we claim to care for our children?
The little boy was terrified. He was wearing nothing more than a nappy and a T-shirt. He was crying and tried to escape by climbing onto an armchair after being punched in the face by his sister. He was two and his sister three. Was this an ordinary scrap between two siblings? Not quite. Although clearly reluctant, the children had been goaded and taunted into fighting, kicking and punching, by two aunts, a grandmother and the children’s own mother. The adults seemed to find it funny to see the two going at each other as though they were pit bulls. At one point the little boy begins to beat his sister with a large hairbrush. The girl appeals to one of the adults for help, but is pushed back into the fight. This sadistic and cruel event was all captured on a camcorder. The film ends with both toddlers screaming and crying hysterically. Fortunately, the camcorder fell into the hands of the father who passed the material on to the authorities and the adults involved were brought to court. The mother lost custody of her children permanently, but escaped a jail sentence.
More than half of all divorces in England and Wales involve children under 16. Divorce is said to be more devastating for children than bereavement. One in four children will see their parents divorce before they reach the age of sixteen. Despite this, the other side is that 70% of children live in a household with a married couple, but even this needs to be qualified by the numbers remarrying after a divorce. Official rates indicate that one in two marriages will fail. An unscientific straw poll among neighbours or at work will probably suggest the divorce rate for the under 50s is nearer 2 in 3. Before the legalisation of divorce in 1857, an act of parliament was required to obtain a divorce. It was only allowed to the innocent party in a case of adultery. Even then the cost of such a process would have been well beyond the pockets of most ordinary people. Today, of course, things are very different.
It ought not to surprise us that children not being happy at home means that many run away from home. Each year 77,000 run away for the first time, 14,000 of them were thrown out by parents or carers for whatever reason. Family problems, the threat of physical violence, bullying at school are the most common reasons. A quarter of all these children have run away, three times or more, many beginning before the age of eight. Where can they go? As there are only nine refuge bed spaces designated for young runaways in the whole of the UK. Unless they are picked up by charities, they end up stealing, begging or even turn to prostitution in order to survive. It goes without saying that the situation is much more complex than can be accounted for in a single paragraph, but these figures do have something to tell us.
Our state schools are an utter shambles and a disgrace. By the government’s own admission the number of failing schools is soaring month by month. With around half of our children leaving school unable to read, write and cope with simple arithmetic, things were better in the Victorian workhouse where 95% of all children could read and write well. Modern educators cannot achieve in twelve years of schooling what the Victorians accomplished often in half that or less. According to recent research, 25% of all British adults are functionally illiterate. This is what 100 years of ‘free’ compulsory state education has achieved. One-in-eight secondary schools and one-in-12 primary schools are right now, according to government inspectors, failing to provide an adequate education.
Today in our schools, teachers are constantly abused by their pupils. They receive little or no support from the school management. One teacher recently reported that in his primary school in Halifax during the last twelve months colleagues had been bitten, thumped, kicked and spat on – and these are all children under the age of 11. What is going on? One child aged five or under is expelled from a British school every week and dozens more suspended. Bad behaviour is going through the roof. Every day in term time 230 pupils are suspended from primary school and 6 are permanently excluded. Teachers conclude that children of this age group turn up to school with no sense of respect for adults from homes where parents totally fail to exercise any discipline. Are we then better than the Victorians because the tables have been turned on teachers? I think not.
A third of the pupils in any class are likely to be disruptive, preventing their fellow pupils receiving anything like a decent education. Many teachers leave school each day emotionally and physically drained - speak to some of them! The violence apparent in the world outside is reflected in what goes on in school. It is not too long ago that a young female teacher was raped in a classroom by a 15-year-old. There seems to be no halt to the increasing violence in the classroom. On average 120 schoolchildren are mugged each day in school. Statistics are notoriously unreliable as data collated is only recorded if the incident results in a teacher being absent for three days or more.
Marriage is a working partnership, but in our godless society it is often reduced to little more than a convention that provides shelter and a sexual outlet for two self-centred, anarchistic individuals engaging in mutual exploitation. It is then a lawless union, producing lawless children with little respect for any kind of authority or property. Anarchy in the family brings anarchy in society at large. To change the family is essential to societal change. It links past and present. Present day rulers try to alter it and so alter society. It provides a pattern for what our nation will become in the future. Only when the family is founded on biblical teaching can we be sure of a change for the good in our nation as a whole.
David W. Norris
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