“In 40 short years, the reputation of the divorced single mother who lived across the street from me when I was a boy went from neighbourhood Jezebel to socially acceptable status quo.
“Question: Is this is a bad thing or a good thing?
“Our polite moral relativists of today would be loath to answer, but I suspect they would lean toward the latter.
“Little of this has caused much alarm. The [Canadian] census story had a half-life of exactly one day. The tone of reportage on it was that the family was changing, yes, but that society will muddle through. Leave It To Beaver might be a dying archetype, but Will & Grace and Friends and Two and a Half Men will pick up the slack. Families come in all shapes and sizes, dontcha know. And after all, all you need is love! Yay!
“Which is, I want to volunteer, a heaping load of crap.
[…]
“What the 2006 census showed was not that the family was changing: It showed that the family was dying. It showed a society in deep dysfunction. It delineated, statistically, a very real danger to the future of the nation-state itself.”
