In response to Will Jones: Marriage isn’t just an ‘option’ – it’s the gold standard for family life,
Groan wrote:
Brought up in a single parent family, by a devoted and hardworking mother widowed in her thirties, I know there is a difference between individual experience and the general. I have never taken it as somehow a slight to me or mine that there are general differences that should be considered when advising folk in general.
It is one of the most understood issues in terms of evidence. On issues from prisoners to anxiety in teenage girls, the evidence has piled on and on for decades. Yet the reluctance to let this guide either advise for people, or public policy, remains as securely in place as ever. It’s one of those issues where it’s crystal clear that, however it’s done, it is quite possible to hide things in plain sight.
As a ‘liberal’, I don’t think one should force people to do things, but not to give them the facts so their choices are informed is just perverse. Even more perverse is the fact that in children’s services the desperate hunt for foster parents and adoptive parents to recreate a family demonstrates the importance for children of a stable family home (and despite the odd bit of virtue signalling, fostering and adoption is built on two parents and if they’re same sex there will be a need to have ‘role models’ of the opposite sex). On the one hand public policy claims to be ‘free’ of judgement, but it isn’t when picking up the pieces.
