The Fruits of Liberal Social Ideology

We Reap What We Sow

Yesterday we blogged on a piece by Garth McVicar on crime and punishment.  McVicar went on to discuss what he believes is the most significant driver of criminality in New Zealand.  

We strongly endorse his argument.

I was born in 1951, a time when New Zealand's crime and prison numbers were incredibly low — in fact, the country was averaging one or two homicides a year until the early 1960s.  So what went wrong? How did one of the safest countries in the western world end up spiralling to a totally unacceptable level of crime? Why is it that even locking people up doesn't stop new criminals emerging? What is different about our country now that is creating this new breed of criminal?

The one common denominator that [Minister of Justice] Little and his colleagues won't dare talk about is the traditional family. I'm talking about a stable family unit — two parents and the children they bring into a loving, cherished relationship ... where the child grows up being taught right from wrong to become a law-abiding, contributing citizen.

The figures speak for themselves. In 1961, 95 per cent of children were born into a traditional family with married parents. By 2015 only 53 per cent of children were brought into the world by parents who were married.  A child that grows up without a father is five times more likely to commit crime.  The evidence shows more children are abused in de-facto-type households and a child who has been abused is 20 times more likely to end up in prison when an adult.

For Māori the figures are worse. In 1968, 72 per cent of Māori children were born to married parents. They had both a mother and a father as role models, just as the vast majority of Pacific Island children do today.  By 2015 only 21 per cent of Māori children were born into a traditional mother and father married-to-each-other family. The stark, staring fact is that the mantra "all forms of family or whānau are equal" is clearly absolute nonsense, and the statistics clearly prove that to be so.

The evidence is clear that a child needs a father who wants and loves them. This is the best way to raise a child to become a law-abiding, contributing member of society.  Little's justice summit won't dare say anything like that. They fear they might offend the left-wing liberals who have been at the forefront of breaking down the family unit.

These liberals would rather focus on the problem of prison numbers than face the reality of what their social ideology has created.  [NZ Herald]

• Garth McVicar is founder of the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

The causes of crime are a multi-headed hydra.  But we believe McVicar had identified the Big One.
  There are doubtless many reasons why not just the present Labour Government, but many former administrations, have chosen to ignore it.

The major reason, we believe, is that were the government to acknowledge the age-old traditional nuclear family, consisting of one man and one women living in marital fidelity, to be  the essential foundation of a just and free society, its present ideological bent would collapse.  So, it's not going to happen any time soon.

The only remedy we can think of is a recovery of the Christian faith at the grass roots, at the community level.  Until communities accept the Christian directives and structure for marriage and family, despite what government ideologues prattle on about, things will not change.  Why?  Because secular humanism took over a long, long time ago--in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in fact--throughout Western societies.  Its fruit has been long in the ripening, but the crop is now harvest ready.  Our augmented rates of crime and criminality are an intrinsic part of that harvest.

As W. B. Yeats put it:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Until circumstances force us to stop putting our trust in Man, and repent and humble ourselves once again before King Jesus, we will not escape the pits into which our society has fallen.

The incoming tide of criminality--"mere anarchy . . . loosed upon the world" emerging out of the break down in the family (the centre)--will not begin to ebb.