How can the top family judge not believe in the family?

Jun 4, 2018 by Jill

by Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman:

Judges are no longer custos morum (keepers of morals) of the people, and if they are they have to take the people’s customs as they find them, not as they or others might wish them to be – Sir James Munby, speech to the University of Edinburgh Law School, March 2018.

The collapse of the nuclear family is no longer a cause of mild regret but of celebration. Its demise should be welcomed and applauded because of the new reality of single and same-sex parents. So says the head of the Family Division of the High Court, Sir James Munby. It should perhaps come as no surprise from a man who’s made his pragmatism a virtue.

By any other standards it was an astonishing statement for someone in his position; all the more so in a week that saw two alarming reports on the consequences for children of this very collapse of the nuclear family – euphemistically known as family breakdown. Liberally defiant, yes. Socially responsible, no.

Sir James’s assertion of high-minded liberal moral neutrality is not new. He is not the first, nor will he be the last, judge to celebrate the modern libertarian era – to thank God that the perceived function of the judges is no longer ‘to promote virtue and discourage vice and immorality’, or to insist that the present-day judicial task is ‘to assess matters by the standards of reasonable men and, of course, women’. What counts as reasonable being left unsaid.

What, however, is quite unreasonable is that a man with all his erudition and family court experience cannot (or refuses to) connect the collapse of nuclear family with children turning up to school not toilet-trained, unable to speak or to feed themselves. What is unreasonable, to the point of stubbornness, is not to draw the connecting line between the two. What is unreasonable, to the point of negligence, is to celebrate a collapse that’s led directly to a child welfare and health crisis. For, make no mistake, that negligence is exactly what he is celebrating.

Read here

Read also: Families: Why should we ‘welcome and applaud’ the second best? by Andrew Tettenborn

Let the nuclear family explode, says Britain’s top family judge by Ann Farmer, MercatorNet

Hooray: the family is no more by Alexander Boot