Preaching or social responsibility? Why governments are allowed to tell us to do some things, but not others.
Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
Suggest, as I sometimes do, that it is a bad idea to undermine marriage through the tax and benefits system, and you will only have to wait about 45 seconds before someone accuses you of 'moral preaching'. Within ten minutes you will have been sprayed with accusations that you are 'making war on single mothers'. Argue that schools really have no business demonstrating the use of condoms to the young, and once again you will be denounced as a would-be televangelist, suspect and disreputable, with no business in our value-free national debate.
In fact. almost every conservative position is dismissed in this way. Anyone who tries to express it is portrayed as if he imagines he is holier than others, and hustled off the stage to hoots of mockery - many of them coming from what ought to be his own side.
What is far, far worse is that so many people so easily fall for this. Liberals, as it happens, preach constantly. What is sex education, but preaching for a removal of Christian moral restraints? What is modern 'drug education' but the same? What is the growing cross-party support for state-subsidised baby-farms but an attempt to compel women to prefer wageslavery to motherhood?
These views, given huge amounts of official support, money and standing, are not neutral. Sex-ed programmes implicitly deny that the young have any choice about how they behave. By not mentioning marriage in sex-ed classes ( allegedly so as not to offend the children of the unmarried) they spread the message that sex outside marriage is normal and usual. There is no need actually to denounce the married state. All you need to do is to sideline it, to assume that it is not necessary or important, and you have achieved the same end. Readily-available abortion, the distribution of contraceptives to girls without their parents' knowledge, and hand-outs of morning after pills reinforce the message. The state has taken over from parent as the judge of how children should behave. The main purpose of sex is pleasure.
In 'harm-reduction' drug programmes, the same effect is achieved. Advice is given on how to take drugs 'safely', which is of course impossible. The many individuals who will be irrevocably damaged by these substances do not know that this is their fate until it is too late. The idea that taking drugs is wrong in itself is never addressed. And, once again, by ignoring the possibility of moral self-restraint, the authors of these programmes destroy the very idea. There's no need to put out propaganda saying "take drugs " - the rock music industry does that quite effectively already. By acting as if such a choice doesn't exist, you remove it from the range of options and effectively abolish it.
Perhaps worst of all, the tax-breaks and general state support for 'child care' is a specific and targeted attempt by the state to enforce its preference - that women put their children second and the economy first.
These are all covert moral preaching, if you like, unwilling to declare openly what they are trying to achieve because official morality still disapproves of such ideas and they cannot - yet - be openly stated. Yet they are highly effective and have done a huge amount to change the moral behaviour of young Britons over the past 40 years.
Then there is the open moral preaching of the state, involving campaigns plainly based on the idea that persuasion - sometimes backed by punishment - can be effective in altering opinion , and that it is worth spending money and effort on it.
Why are some things chosen, and some not? It is hard to puzzle it out. Drunken driving, for instance, is a grave menace. It has been discouraged for decades by powerful propaganda campaigns and by severe prosecution of offenders, backed up until quite recently by a highly-visible police presence. The same could be said for the equally rational effort to persuade car drivers and passengers to wear seat belts. Even buying a TV licence, portrayed as a kind of civic duty, is thought important enough to warrant the buying of fleets of detector vans, supported by costly advertising campaigns and frequent prosecutions.
If it works for these causes - and it generally does - then why has it not been used to stop the use of dangerous drugs? Drugtaking causes as much misery as drunken driving, in its own slow way, and what's more I suspect that, once reliable instruments are found to check the state of drivers at crash-scenes, we will find out that many road accidents in modern Britain are caused by dope smokers and cocaine snorters. Nobody produces work sheets on how to drink and drive safely.
Then there's smoking, a nasty, evil-smelling and unhealthy habit which brings misery to many of those who do it. Quite reasonable, a lot of effort goes into persuading people to stop doing it. The idea that there might be such a thing as 'safe' or 'safer' smoking is heresy.
Yet other causes, which might also increase the sum of health and happiness, don't get this sort of uncompromising support. Why not? Given that all the social evidence shows that children from stable homes with two parents are more likely to do well at school, more likely to do productive work when they grow up, less likely to take to crime than those who come from fractured and fatherless homes, why doesn't the state use the sort of efforts it uses to curb smoking, to encourage marriage?
In logic, all these things are a mystery. If those who are in charge of us were consistent, or even honest, then they would see that these contradictory polices were a nonsense. But they don't, because they don't want to know. To think seriously about modern Britain is to realise that liberal solutions have failed, not just by the standards of people such as me, but on their own terms. We should have got to utopia long ago, if these ideas worked. But they don't , and they never will, which is why some of us will continue to preach against them from our pulpits, no matter how much slime we are pelted with.