There are times when I feel very embarassed about being a Tory. Unfortunately, as I sit here listening to the tax breaks for married couples debate on Question Time, this is one of them.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the Tory policy. I think that the family is one of the cornerstones of society. Thus, whilst we believe in treating every individual person equally and fairly, there is no reason why we cannot support institutions that contribute positively towards society and to the bringing up of children. Let us not forget that these children cannot take care of themselves and that the state has far more forceful ways of defending their welfare.
However, as sensible as this policy is, the only sensible people that seem to support it are the politicians. Everyone else is a nutter! Watching the debate on Question Time, I can see all the supporters of the policy actually foaming at the mouth! If the Conservative Party aren't careful, the only people who will support us are religious fundamentalists and those in their dotage.
I am continually surprised about how the Liberal agenda seems to have the monopoly of the national morality. Why is it that we can either believe that the state can provide for all our material wants or that it has absolutely no business interfering in anything that we do and nothing in-between.
Of course, the government has to be very careful before it assumes the role of 'society', of which it is only distantly representative and which shouldn't really be dictating to individuals anyway. However, part of this role is surely protecting children from instability and protecting the rest of us from crime and social disorder. These are almost certainly symptoms of the breakdown of local, people-sized society, of which the family is an inherent (although not the only) part.
Whilst I have some sympathy with the argument that we should not be dictating to people how to live their lives, I do hope that a few more normal people outside the religious establishment will actually get that the Conservatives aren't actually trying to marry us all off - they are just trying to encourage social responsability.
2 comments:
Its interesting that the only people apparently supporting the tory marriage policy are probably the same people who were spitting feathers over Cameron's views on "gay adoption" (a silly phrase, as we are talking about children being adopted, not gay people).
The two look antithetical at first but they are not. They are about the same thing - stability of upbringing. Many people opposing the Catholic adoption agency opt out pretended it was about freedom of religion but really I think it was to do with revulsion at the idea of gay couples adopting. These people said that it is better for children to be brought up by a married straight couple. ALL other things being equal, I would agree (although of course they never are). However, this would only be relevant if the situation was that children were removed from being cared for by a straight married couple and handed over to the wicked clutches of a gay couple. This is obviously ridiculous. Children are placed for adoption because they have no prospect of a stable home life otherwise. So the question is not one of the relevant merits of straight and gay couples, but of the relative merits of a child being brought up in a loving stable household by two men or two women, or them being shunted from pillar to post until they are 18, never having anyone to call mum/dad or anywhere to call home.
Anyway, that fairly off-topic riff was meant to illustrate the following point: some people think Cameron is not a tory. I think that the link I've described between the marriage/adoption issues demonstrate that Cameron IS a thinking tory, but he has come to non-obvious conclusions on many issues.
Yeah, I agree with most of that however...
I do think that, whether or not the opt-out is about religion or knee-jerk reactionism/revulsion, I am very against the State trying to force a moral standpoint onto people - hence, whilst I find their views abominable, I'm not sure that I could support the state seeing them as invalid
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