Barbara Kay: The Grassroots, Not Politicians, Can Re-moralize Our Youth and Curb Family Erosion

Commentary Another Mother’s Day has come and gone. As florists, jewellers, and purveyors of brunch all across North America happily tot up their profits, it’s a good moment to reflect on our culture’s changing attitude to motherhood. In my era, the creation of a family was still a natural and desirable follow-on to love and marriage, which, we believed, went together “like a horse and carriage,” as the peppy old song had it. Pretty soon after my cohort embarked on that traditional route, though, it became apparent that the old song pointed to a bitter irony rather than to the presumed eternal verity that inspired it. Between the cultural dominos fashioned from the contraceptive pill and Playboy Magazine, the whole notion of sexual morality and the biology-based family as fundamental pillars of a healthy society came under interrogation—and worse....