Magic Statistics

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has criticised the UK government for encouraging the ongoing debasement of marriage as a social institution.  Giving legal recognition to cohabitating couples, as the Law Commission has proposed, will only make the problem worse.

Rowan Williams said marriage had “suffered a long process of erosion” and warned that plans to give legal rights to cohabiting couples risked worsening the situation. He added that the decline of marriage had led to colossal social problems.

“The concept of cohabitation is an utterly vague one that covers a huge variety of arrangements,” Williams said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “As soon as you define anything, you are creating a kind of status that is potentially a competition with marriage or a reinvention of marriage.

“I think one of the problems is trying to solve individual and infinitely varied problems by legislation.”

The London Telegraph's editorialist concurs with the Archbishop.

Even shorn of its higher value, marriage remains an important and public declaration. Both parties know what they are getting into. It is, to quote the [Book of Common Prayer], "not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly".

Once courts start bestowing rights on the basis of what they consider to be reasonable, we are in the realm of arbitrary government. Even in purely utilitarian terms, marriage is a first-rate institution: it provides education, healthcare and social services, sparing the state a good deal of effort. That is something that even this administration should appreciate.

The Law Commission would be well-advised to take a good look at the incoherent mess that has become of Canadian family law since the courts arbitrarily disregarded the value of marriage.

Dr Mahfooz Kanwar, criminologist and professor of sociology at Mount Royal College, Calgary, has "no doubt" that multiculturalism and political correctness threaten Canada.

"Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK. It is not," says Kanwar, a devout Muslim.

"And political correctness threatens us because we can't fight something we refuse to label and understand."

"Everybody was tripping over themselves not to state the obvious, that these men mostly attended the same mosque."

The obsequious efforts of Toronto police Chief Bill Blair not to "offend" Muslims are, in Dr Kanwar's view, contemptible.

"That is an absurdity. Political correctness has gone too far. Political correctness threatens our society," said the Pakistani-born Kanwar. "It is the responsibility of the minorities to adjust to the majority, not the other way around," added Kanwar.

The parents of the accused terrorists share some of the blame for not visiting the mosque to monitor who's influencing their children.  Dr Kanwar also rejects the claim that Muslim youth are susceptible to being radicalised because Canadian society marginalises them.  "They marginalise themselves", he retorts.

He tells immigrants who complain about Canada to go back where they came from. Whew!  Dr Kanwar pulls no punches.