Further evidence that the Civil Partnerships Act, which bestows the contractual and legal benefits of marriage on same-sex couples, is part of an agenda to destroy marriage altogether. The Daily Mail reports (no link available) that register offices have been instructed to purge the words ‘marriage’ and ‘wedding’ from signs inside their buildings. They are being forced to remove signs directing couples and guests to ‘marriage’ or ‘wedding suites’. References to marriage will be retained only where they are a legal requirement; signs outside will now say ‘Registrars of births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships’. The order has been given by the government’s Women and Equality Unit which is run by Angela Mason who, as the former chief executive of the gay pressure group Stonewall, has been a leading proponent of the wildly successful agenda of destroying Britain’s fundamental moral values, a process over which she now has oppressive invigilatory powers.

The marginalisation and progressive undermining of marriage has destroyed civil order in Britain and in due course will bring the country to its knees. I have been writing about the lethal effects of family breakdown and mass fatherlessness for more than fifteen years. During that time, articles by mainstream journalists in the British press expressing concern about this gathering catastrophe have been about as rare as airborne pink objects with trotters. Things must be really bad: today there’s not just one such reference but two. In a comment in the London Evening Standard (no link available) about Tony Blair’s ‘respect’ agenda, Nick Cohen observes of the proposed extension of parenting orders that there are now simply too many children whose upbringing is going pear-shaped, and for one very good reason. As the probation officers’ union spokesman Harry Fletcher told him:

pretty much every poor child whose parents had split up was a potential problem.

Meanwhile in the Times Alice Miles writes a propos the ‘respect’ proposals:

With the new Tories sounding more and more like new Labour, who is going to talk about the missing element? Fathers. Where are the fathers? Look at acceptable behaviour contracts. Some 13,000 of these have been signed, twice the number of ASBOs. Drawn up individually between youth workers and individuals, they warn a child, under threat of an ASBO, to avoid a range of actions from writing graffiti to hanging around in stairways, throwing things or swearing. They are doing the job traditionally done by a father: don’t do that again, or else. 'There aren’t any fathers' is what you hear when you talk to members of teenage gangs and those who get involved in crime at a young age...

Somehow the women’s rights movement, and the extension in the legal powers of mothers over their children that followed it, have hurried or forced fathers out of the picture and then accepted the relegation of their responsibilities. Make it a legal responsibility if necessary, with severe penalties for walking away from a child, and use that signal to create a social stigma (one that must apply too to any parent preventing access to a child).

Hey, great idea, Alice! We can give it a whizzy new name too. I know – let’s call it marriage!