At which point was it that family life, in particular parenthood, came to have the sanctified position it appears to have arrived at. By ‘sanctified’ I mean that the family has become a place of moral righteousness by virtue of itself. It is almost like no more needs to be said in justification of oneself if one is a parent. “It’s for the sake of the children,” you’ll hear said as someone justifies their actions, “I’m only thinking about my family.”

The UK Home Secretary had the temerity to make use of this rhetorical function the other day when forced to resign his position due to a relationship debacle. From his reference to ‘that little lad’ we were supposed to infer that he was sacrificing his career for the sake of fighting a disputed paternity. Bullshit of course.

A journalist who some months ago was seriously wounded in a war situation said that when he was lying with half-a-dozen bullets in his body he survived ‘because of his family’. He couldn’t die and leave them alone. Here is a man choosing survival, near terminally wounded, and of all the factors that might sustain life, he reflects upon it and points to family as the thing above all else that kept him alive. I suspect the people who got him to a hospital and took the bullets from his body had something to do with it. And not a little luck.

Moral issues play such a lesser role these days when justifying a case. Self-interest, competitiveness, brute instinct, primal drives, acquisitiveness, consumption etc. are preferred. Yet people seem to sense an opportunity to score points when they can in the old fashioned way by producing the family/parenthood ticket and waving it around so to collect the free kudos that comes. This is more opportunism than morality I would argue. It’s an opportunity to exalt oneself by attaching to something that appears altruistic in a world that in all other respects is characterised by selfish motivation. A greater travesty of any genuine moral code I can’t imagine.