Jewish Chronicle, 23 December 2005

When, back in the mists of time, I first started writing controversially about family breakdown (the world fell in on me because I thought children were best served by being brought up by their father and mother) there was one particular insult that was hurled my way which stood out from all the others.

‘You’re just an Old Testament fundamentalist’ my assailants hissed. Hmmn, I thought, no sooner do they disagree with me than they’re reaching into the box marked ‘creepy Jew’. I thought it was just a low blow by nasty people, and left it at that.

But now I think differently. It was not a random bit of bigotry at all. It was a highly specific bit of bigotry. For what I was defending was not just traditional family life but a code of behaviour which followed rules and precepts laid down in what has been called the Judeo-Christian heritage. And at the heart of that was the Mosaic code.

The onslaught on traditional family life, by those who promoted lifestyle choice and said that anyone who disapproved of serial promiscuity and children with no fathers was a fascist, was being mounted by people who wanted to overturn that heritage and replace it by secular ‘human rights’.

This doctrine said that everyone had an absolute right to personal autonomy — in other words, make up their own moral rules. This was supposed to usher in a new dawn of happiness and self-fulfilment. Human rights were the way to end all the horrible things in the world like prejudice and hatred. Freedom of choice was the holy of holies that would create the new Jerusalem.

Anything that prevented this freedom, like religion, was considered an affront to decency. Religion was oppressive because it put constraints on human appetites. And the people who first invented those constraints were the Jews.

The only problem with this analysis was that the Mosaic code is actually at the root of our human rights. That’s because it gave the world the concept of morality, the sense of obligation to others which is what makes a civilised society rather than a bunch of savages all trying to knock each others’ eyes out.

Real human rights derive from the belief that we are all made in the image of God. That’s what gives us our belief in human equality. Take away the Torah and equality — the dignity of every individual — goes out of the window.

This line of argument doesn’t go down with secularists at all well. We don’t need religion to tell us how to behave well, they cry. To listen to them, anyone would think that they spend their entire lives in a bubble completely insulated from the culture that makes all of us what we are. The fact is that secularists also derive their values from the surrounding society, and like or not (they do not) the principles that our society most values come in the main from Judaism and Christianity.

Nonsense, they riposte: our liberal values, human rights and so forth, derive from the Enlightenment which was a revolt against Christianity. Not so fast. Yes, it was a revolt against the abuse of clerical power which separated church from state, allowing the development of tolerance, privacy and all those good things. But the architects of liberalism also knew that freedom depended on laws and that it was Biblical morality that kept the whole show on the road.

What’s happened now is that it’s come off the road. The secular onslaught against religion replaced freedom by licence. The notion of individual equality before God, the core of personal liberty, was replaced by the identical value of groups.

Since all lifestyles were of equal value, moral judgments between different lifestyles became discrimination, and duty was replaced by entitlement.

So behaviour such as sexual promiscuity or the abandonment of children became regarded as normal. Anyone criticising it was a bigot because the overriding requirement was that no-one should feel badly about themselves. Alternative lifestyles thus became mainstream. The counter-culture became the norm.

But this created victims among the most vulnerable — particularly children — and produced misery and harm. Far from being progressive, human rights doctrine is actually deeply reactionary because it prevents what is absolutely central to progressive values: encouraging the good in people and discouraging the bad.

Religion gets a bad press, particularly at present. And without doubt it has been, and still is, responsible for terrible things in the world. But secular societies tend to be very nasty places and secularists are among the most intolerant and illiberal people I have ever met.

A society without religion is a society without a soul. This weekend, we celebrate the victory of religion over a tyranny that tried to deny it. Religion gave us human rights. Don’t let the tyranny of the ‘human rights’ movement destroy it.

Posted by melanie at December 30, 2005