Muslim Family Values

Following on from David Cameron's latest bout of idiocy, I've written a post on Muslim Family Values over at ATW.

And, on the subject of family values, defeated French socialist Segolene Royal is now trying to steal her boyfriend's job:

Ms Royal, 53, and her partner, François Hollande, the Socialist leader, kept up appearances throughout the campaign. On Saturday it appeared that détente may have broken, with Ms Royal using a post-election conference to assert herself as a future leader. She also demanded that the Socialists should install their 2012 presidential candidate within months — and that it should be her.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in their house.

Academic Idiocy Watch

Every now and then, some obscure academic at one of our great seats of learning comes out with something indescribably stupid. Usually, this has some relationship to the far-left political views which are the norm in academia. Today, Professor Ann Jacoby of Liverpool University has produced quite the most ridiculous piece of "research" that I have seen for some time. The purpose of this research: to demonstrate that villages - all of them - are hotbeds of that most evil of sins (indeed, in the post-modern world, the only sin), prejudice!

Professor Jacoby, a social scientist, said: "The rural idyll is very nice so long as you fit into certain categories, but problematic if you don't.

"You should be married, have children, and live in this conservative family unit."

Well, there's a statement I can quite agree with. I don't think she's talking about her own views, though.

How did Professor Jacoby reach her deeply profound conclusions:

For the study, the professor's colleague, Francine Watkins, spent some time living in Stonycroft, a village with a population of 450, somewhere between London and Birmingham.

The village's name has been changed to protect the identities of those interviewed.

Life in the 16th-century village revolves round the thatched inn, church and village hall. Most of the residents are white. Three-quarters are married or co-habiting.

Heaven forfend! White, married heterosexuals! Such wicked people can't help but be prejudiced.

But, to return to Professor Jacoby's methodology: it seems that her colleague, Miss Watkins, went to one village, found a few malcontents, and then used their whining to smear everyone who lives in the countryside. Not, perhaps, the most accurate method. Rather like tossing a coin once, and then declaring that a coin will always land heads up. But more inaccurate than that.

Obviously the learned professor really earns her £60,000 or so of taxpayers' money per year.

The rise of the single parent

Almost 25% of children in Britain are being raised by a single parent, the Telegraph reports. The problem is found particularly among blacks, where approximately 50% of children are raised in this manner. At the same time, fewer than 37% of all "families" actually consist of what I would think of as being a family: mother, father, and children.

Of course, such an unfortunate situation is sometimes unavoidable. Sometimes one parent dies, and sometimes a feckless father will simply walk out on his wife and children. But, while many single parents are very good parents, no one can pretend that this is the ideal situation. Children raised by single mothers (the more common kind of single parent) are more likely to be raised in poverty, to suffer physical and mental health problems, to fail at school, and, ultimately, to become criminals or single parents themselves. Perhaps if the black community in particular did not have so many absent fathers, we would not see so many children being murdered by their peers.

The decline of the family is yet another effect of the destruction of traditional values by the left. They have taught that being raised by a drugged-up lesbian single mother is just as good as being raised by a mother and a father. Indeed, possibly better, since it's 'diverse'. They have attacked the institution of marriage, encouraging people to have children out of wedlock, despite the fact that non-marital relationships are more less durable than marital ones. And they have encouraged some deeply selfish women to deliberately have children on their own, without a father. The victims of all this are the children themselves. But, once again, the leftists are prepared to sacrifice the futures of the nation's children, in order to make themselves feel warm and fuzzy, secure in the knowledge that they've promoted 'diversity'.