General

"The current Left-inspired practise of going to great lengths to shield [children] from experience of failure and to tell [them] only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as 'special' are going to be sorely disappointed" [source]

"ITV's poignant record of several real lives began 49 years ago with Seven Up! and has now reached 56 Up. Hardly anybody can watch this account of disappointed hopes, redemption and human fortitude without tears. But what makes me saddest of all is to see the faces of the original children. You don't see seven-year-old children with faces like that anymore. The innocence has already gone. How did we let that happen?" [Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 20 May 2012]

"Once, there was a world without teenagers. Literally, 'teenager', the word itself, doesn't pop into the lexicon much before 1941. That means that for all but this most recent period of history, there were children and there were adults. Children in their teen years aspired to adulthood; significantly, they didn't aspire to adolescence. Certainly, men and women didn't aspire to remain teenagers. Today, turning thirteen, instead of bringing children closer to an adult world, launches them into a teen universe. And due to the hold our culture has placed on the maturation process, that's where they're likely to find the adults. Most of us have grown up - or, at least, grown - into this new kind of adulthood, this perpetual adolescence so much the norm that it's difficult to recognize it as the profound civilizational shift that it is" [source]

"Men, Protect Your Daughters!  Picture this: Some 17 year old snot nosed punk comes over to take out your daughter, and you say, 'No you aren't worthy of her.'  Immediately everyone is up in arms over your 'judgmental' and 'harsh' position, and for 'breaking your daughter's heart'.  Ok, so let's put it another way now: You have a beautiful, brand new $200,000 Ferrari Testarossa in front of your house, and a snot nosed 17 year old punk comes over to take it for a spin. Would you hand him the keys? See, what your problem is, is that you value a car more than your daughter" [Dr. Voddie Baucham at source]

"Many would argue that Barbie-type dolls are not sexy, but the real world says something else. It is very common in men's prisons and military barracks to find Barbie dolls in various stages of undress sitting in prominent places. It is a kind of hands-on pornography which they seem to find very gratifying. Did you know that some of Barbie Dolls' biggest fans are middle age men? Somehow, parents are badly deceived, and their children are the victims. ... It is a healthy and natural instinct for little girls to love babies and to imagine themselves in the role of loving mother. Role-playing is preparation for the future, but there is absolutely no similarity between playing baby dolls and playing Barbie dolls. They are two different kinds of dolls with two different purposes. What are you training your little girl to be?" [source].

"[B]y the time they are 14, only two-thirds of British children will be living with both their parents in a stable family environment. ... the coalition has actively undermined the traditional family ... the family is the greatest institution known to man. Strong families produce responsible, aspirational, self-reliant citizens. Strong families are potent bulwarks against totalitarian and over-mighty states. Strong families provide their own welfare, education and personal care systems" [Note from Bayith: Precisely the reasons, of course, why governments undermine the traditional family] [Daily Mail Comment, 29 December 2012].

"A newspaper puff for the TV snob opera Downtown Abbey says that the character Lady Mary, whose 'husband' was killed off in the Christmas episode, will be 'coming to terms with her role as a single mother' in the new series. See how language is twisted to hide the truth? The correct expression is 'widow', which you may have noticed we don't hear so much any more. Lady Mary, ... did not have a child outside wedlock. She was married. This matters. One of the great triumphs of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was to deny the importance of marriage. The expression 'unmarried mother' was abolished, and replaced by 'single mother'. But a widowed or deserted wife's position is and always be utterly different from that of a woman who deliberately has a child outside marriage. The difference is a moral one, and that's what the revolutionaries want to abolish - morality" [Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013].

"Our opium is our children. Ours is a culture not of ancestor worship but of descendant worship" [Tory MP Rory Stewart, Mail on Sunday, 27 October 2013].

"The BBC last Tuesday got excited about two reports - one said that attitudes towards sex had become much more 'fluid' - or, as would once have said, more promiscuous. In short, lifelong faithful marriage is dead. One impartial BBC commentator openly expresses pleasure at one aspect of this report. The other document said that gang-infested neighbourhoods are now seeing levels of sexual violence as bad as those in war zones. Girls as young as 11 are being raped. Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children's Commissioner, complained that many simply would not accept that this was happening, warning there was a long way to go 'before the appalling reality of sexual violence and exploitation committed by children and young people is believed'. There's also a long way to go before people (especially the BBC) will see any connection between the state-sponsored destruction of strong married families, and the growth of gangs and the cruel exploitation of the young and weak. These follow naturally from our moral collapse" [Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 01 December 2013].

"All modern Western politicians enforce tax, social and welfare policies that have almost destroyed lifelong, faithful marriage. They are especially brutal to marriages in which the parents actually bring up the children, instead of farming out the job to paid strangers. Nowadays, such arrangements are an eccentric, costly lifestyle choice adopted only by the old, the unfashionable or by the very rich. So what's hypocritical about ... France's President Hollande? [He's] only doing what [he is] urging and helping everyone else to do. It would, of course, be different if [politicians] headed governments that gave real incentives for marriage, and which penalised the unmarried. But they don't. So it's not. The real hypocrisy of modern times is the way that candidates for high office like to pose as members of ideal, smiley nuclear families (the nanny, of course, is always left out of the pictures). Maybe this is a true image of their private lives. ... But it's a completely false picture of their policies - the mad, giant subsidies for fatherless homes, the irresistible pressure on mothers to go out to work five minutes after the midwife has cut the cord, the divorce laws rigged against the innocent. They should openly live the cruel, inconstant, child-unfriendly lives they force millions of others to follow. And if they're not prepared to do that, and to let their children suffer the consequences, they should change their policies" [Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 19 January 2014].

"Heard for the first time, 'partner' as a verb. An expert on housing, on the radio, explained that people were buying houses later in life because they were 'partnering' later. Not long ago, she would have said 'marrying'. Not long in the future, nobody will say 'marrying'. It matters" [Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 13 April 2014].

"We know that as the family goes, so goes the nation. No society can survive without strong families. That is why the enemies of society in the West have always worked so hard, targeting families. Once the family is weakened or destroyed, so will be the nation.  All the radicals have known this. Vladimir Lenin said, 'Destroy the family, destroy the nation.'  Simone de Beauvoir said the family is an 'obscene bourgeois institution'. All these radicals worked overtime to see the family undermined and decimated. Thus the defence of the family is always a fundamental task of the rest of us. ... [O]ur first duty is to protect and promote the most enduring, the most valuable, and the most child-friendly institutions known to man" [source].

"Family is about children and their welfare. An attack on family is an attack on children, for family is the fortress and well being of children" [Comment at: source].

"I wrote a book a few years ago about religion and science and I summarised the difference between them in two sentences: 'Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean'.  And that's a way of thinking about culture also. Does it put things together or does it take them apart? What made the traditional family remarkable, ... is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love. For a whole variety of reasons, ... some to do with moral change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state, and other and more profound changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that marriage once brought together has now been split apart. ... This is creating a divide within societies the like of which has not been seen since Disraeli spoke of 'two nations' a century and a half ago. Those who are privileged to grow up in stable loving association with the two people who brought them into being will, on average, be healthier physically and emotionally. They will do better at school and at work. They will have more successful relationships , be happier and live longer.  And yes, there are many exceptions. But the injustice of it all cries out to heaven. It will go down in history as one of the tragic instances of what Friedrich Hayek called 'the fatal conceit' that somehow we know better than the wisdom of the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology and history. ... [O]ur compassion for those who live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family, man, woman, and child, is not one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations and enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn the delicate choreography of relationship and how to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next, ensuring the continuity of a civilization. For any society, the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children's future, we must be its defenders" [source].

Teenagers

"Once there was a world without teenagers. Literally. 'Teenager,' the word itself, doesn't pop into the lexicon much before 1941. This speaks volumes about the last few millennia. In all those many centuries, nobody thought to mention 'teenagers' because there was nothing, apparently, to think of mentioning. In considering what I like to call 'the death of the grown-up', it's important to keep a fix on this fact: that for all but this most recent episode of human history, there were children and there were adults. Children in their teen years aspired to adulthood; significantly, they didn't aspire to adolescence. Certainly, adults didn't aspire to remain teenagers" [Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up, (2007), p.1].

Generation Snowflake

"The term 'generation snowflake' started in America. Parents cherished their offspring as 'precious little snowflakes', each alike but unique, or 'everyone is special' ... When those smothered infants grew into adults they were lampooned by the same parental generation for melting at any small amount of difficulty. 'Snowflake' is just a fancy word for 'drip'" [quoted at source].

"[W]e have a mega-teen culture which the entire world orbits around, and we have millions of adults who are stuck in perpetual adolescence, seeking to remain teens. Coupled with all this is the out-of-control offence industry which says we have a fundamental right to never be offended, never to feel bad, and never to have our feelings hurt. That has resulted in a generation of wilted dandelions and precious pansies. A bunch of spoiled brats ... coddled, spoiled narcissists" [source].

"What to do? It's not enough to yell, 'stop,' or even 'grow up'.  It's a start, though, if, ... we withstand the likely excruciating growing pains to undertake a serious, candid reexamination of the human condition ... as parents who need to guide children to maturity; [and] as individuals who need to reimpose boundaries on personal behaviour" [Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up, (2007), p.217].

"Thank Freud and Jung and the Christians who 'incorporated' these insights from God-rejecting immoral intellectuals into their own true views of man which came from a holy God. Grieve for these adult kinds who cannot see what they have lost because of the faithlessness they have inherited. Only the gospel which sanctifies will heal the hurt of the daughter of My people says the Lord" [comment at source].

"[T]his was all prophesied. The scriptures tell us about the lack of respect [for] and input from fathers and the general disrespect for men (Isaiah 3:12). This generation suffers from a completely irrational hatred of anything 'paternalistic'.  See also Malachi 4:6 and Luke 1:17" [comment at source].

UN 'Children's Commissars' Call for Ban on Smacking

"This would be a great idea, but it simply will not work. Let us take the analogy a bit further. Will the state promise never to use violence on it s citizens? No, I thought not. If the state will not renounce violence to enforce its will on its citizens, why would that be? Surely it is not because, ultimately, the only means of enforcing the will of one party on a recalcitrant other is by use of force. Anyone who has had children and whose children are more than ten years old will know of the problems often referred to as the 'terrible twos' when the child throws a tantrum and its favourite word is 'No!'" [comment at: source].

"What's unnerving about this, taking it further, is that it's seeking to remove the respect and authority of parents, which goes hand-in-hand with the threat of force and punishment, and in doing do securing the state's monopoly on the use of force, and thus securing its respect and authority" [comment at: source].

"Of course no one wants to see children beaten up by their parents, or for that matter the all too common parenting style which sees adults laughing at children being undisciplined, and in the next breath ... finding the same behaviour annoying, and then reacting in anger without thinking with violence - both physical and otherwise. That said, pain works. It's been working for millions [sic] of years, since [God] introduced a central nervous system with pain receptors. For aeons living things learned don't do that, it hurts. What matters as long [as it's] with reasonable force, is that the discipliner has a cool head" [comment at: source].

"A child does not have the ability to recognise the outcome of their actions, sometimes fatal (fork in socket). Or they do recognise their actions (which are disrupting all around them), are preventing education or creating distress but it is much to their amusement because they are the centre of attention. This all stops with a corrective smack as a last resort at an early age. This is a short shock but instils respect. This feminisation of our schooling and removal of competition (so the darlings can't lose) is the problem, hence poor education and the inability to find work. The real world gives both" [comment at: source].

"You can't teach a two-year old by 'reasoning'. If you ban smacking all that will happen is that your children will learn about violence from other little children at school. It won't be pleasant, and they won't learn the right lesson. Rather than: 'don't misbehave' they will learn that 'might makes right'" [comment at: source].

"These people should mind their own business. I don't care what they think, they have had no part in raising my kids nor is it any business of theirs to interfere in the family home. Far too many people social engineering in this country. If it's not the state trying to enforce acceptance of deviancy it is some other busy body trying to interfere with family life. There is a case for a few violent parents who need the current law used against them but that's it" [comment at: source].

"I was belted in school for being a cheeky wee bass and guess what it made me think about my actions in the future, always at the back of my mind was the probability of the belt for misbehaviour. When I stepped out of line at home I was slippered, it taught me right from wrong and to obey set rules and instilled respect for my parents and elders, etc. Now we don't have corporal punishment in schools the 'kids' are running amok and even assault and stab teachers, now there is a lack of good discipline in the home thanks to liberals constantly interfering in family life, children are growing up with a lack of respect and unable to understand boundaries and basic rules in society. This is what happens when you spare the rod and spoil the child and our children are the most spoiled in the world it seems" [comment at: source].

"These people have obviously never had children"   /   "The best children I've seen are the ones that have discipline. I don't know a single parent that smacks their children that ever enjoys smacking them either, but sometimes it has to be done, and it's done as a very last resort, sparingly"   /   "Parents today seem to want to be friends with their kids rather than, well, parents"   /   "Don't smack them - take them to McDonald's and make them obese"   /   "Spare the rod, spoil the child. Just another attack on Christendom"   /   "Would that parents smacked their little darlings a little more regularly. If they had perhaps we would not have so many spoiled-brat liberals telling the rest of us what to do" [comments at: source].

Identity Politics

Extracts from the article: The Origin of 'Identity Politics' & 'Political Correctness'

"The central 'theory' [of 'identity politics'] was a development of the anti-family rhetoric of nineteenth century socialists taken up and further radicalised by Marx and particularly Engels to conceptualise the family as an aberration resulting, it was imagined, from 'capitalism' somehow 'repressing' 'the workers', to the extent that supposedly they became psychologically dysfunctional. Marxism per se was supplanted by a theory of culturally based personal relations, popularised later most notably by Marcuse amongst many others"

"In the transition to 'identity politics', the quintessential form of 'oppression' (sic) in Marxian imagination changed with the family replacing the workplace as the putative key locus of conflict; transferring from 'the boss' lording it over 'the worker' to the man 'dominating' the woman"

"The aim was to eliminate what were seen as the mere 'roles' of the mother and father, so that, it was envisaged, all distinction between masculinity and femininity would disappear, taking with it the 'patriarchy' (sic) supposedly the foundation of 'capitalism'. This 'theory' re the family lacked even internal consistency. With the family mistakenly considered a product of 'capitalism' ... then merely removing the family hardly thereby removes 'capitalism', which by the rationale of the 'theory' surely would manifest in other ways to either 'oppress' or somehow 'fool' 'the workers'"

"As the head of the family, the man (husband/father) was held to be the incarnation of 'oppression' from which the woman (wife/mother) needed to be 'liberated'. So it was that 'the workers' as formerly considered 'the agents of change' and the group destined to be 'liberated', were replaced in Marxian imagination by women, heralding the 'feminist Marxism' we see today"

[End]

The Frankfurt School

"The Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief - or even the hope of belief - that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution.

Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judaeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what they saw as the 'oppressive' order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus - 'continuing the work of Western Marxists by other means' as one of their members noted.

To further the advance of their 'quiet' cultural revolution ... the [Frankfurt] School recommended (among other things):

(1) the creation of racism offences,
(2) continual change to create confusion,
(3) the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children,
(4) the undermining of schools' and teachers' authority,
(5) huge immigration to destroy identity,
(6) the promotion of excessive drinking,
(7) emptying of churches,
(8) an unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime,
(9) dependency on the state or state benefits,
(10) control and dumbing down of media,
(11) encouraging the breakdown of the family.

One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud's idea of 'pansexualism' - the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women. To further their aims they would:

(a) attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children,
(b) abolish differences in the education of boys and girls,
(c) abolish all forms of male dominance - hence the presence of women in the armed forces,
(d) declare women to be an 'oppressed class' and men as 'oppressors'."

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil;
that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!"
(Isaiah 5:20-21)

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