Sir, - Without batting an eyelid, Kathryn Holmquist remarks (TheIrish Times, May 25th) that "women have been having children outsidestable, heterosexual relationships for years and nobody bats an eye anymore".
In the world of the mass communications media that certainly appearsto be the case, but there is a life out there outside the media and itseyelid is in constant bat mode.
One of the results of childbearing outside stable, heterosexualrelationships was neatly characterised by the Times Literary Supplementin a review of Farewell to the Family by Patricia Morgan Institute ofEconomic Affairs, London, 1995): "The rise of disorder and criminalconduct among young men has exactly coincided with their release fromthe social controls that formerly made husbands and fathers."
Radical tinkering with the machinery of society in the 20th centuryhas been exercising the minds of sociologists for many years in the US,Canada, the UK and Australia and a great deal of research has takenplace over several decades on the remorseless challenge to the validityof the conjugal nuclear family.
Ms Holmquist is invited to consult some of the literature arisingfrom this research. Here are a few suggestions, at random, for a start:Who needs Parents? by Patricia Morgan; The Sex-Change Society byMelanie Phillips; The Fragmenting Family: Does it Matter? and TheFamily: Is it just another Lifestyle Choice?, both by various authors,published by The Institute for Economic Affairs, London. The Waragainst the Family by William D. Gairdner.
The titles of these books speak for themselves. All contain copiousbibliographies showing that many writers are busy batting eyelids allover the West on a matter of fundamental social importance - thefamily. There are also many Internet websites expressing concern at therelentless changes in social behaviour and its threat to the family.
Closer to home, in The Irish Times of August 19th, 1995, Dr GarrettFitzgerald wrote that "while many former taboos had been thrownoverboard in recent decades - with much self-congratulation in liberalcircles about the end of repression - sex is much too complex andemotive an issue to be freed from all restraints".
Again in the Irish Times (December 1st, 2001), he stated: "It is. ..distressing that so few Irish politicians have shown sensitivity tothe adverse consequences of changes in the role of the family in Irishlife that have taken place under their noses during the past one-thirdof a century." (He was commenting on Finola Kennedy's recent bookCottage to Crèche - Family Change in Ireland.)
Many observers are convinced that what passes for progressive socialengineering is merely misguided and self-indulgent experimentation.Rapid radical change cannot be taken lightly lest it nurture the seedsof future calamity. Remember the celebrated warning of Edmund Burke:"Human institutions evolve and are sustained by deeper forces than anysingle generation can comprehend."
Commenting on Burke's remark, Charles Murray, US author of TheUnderclass + 10, wrote: "Trying to reinvent the social order byrational calculation, as the French revolutionaries were the first toattempt, is a fool's game.
"After the disaster of communism. . .Edmund Burke's insight is nolonger much argued. The Communists' claim that they could create a NewMan is a laughing-stock of history. And yet what is happeningwilly-nilly throughout the industrialised West is in its way just asmassive a social experiment as anything that Robespierre or Lenin hadin mind." - Yours, etc.,
S. O'CONNOR,
Green Road,
Newbridge,
Co Kildare.