Family Lives Matter – by Elizabeth Francis writing for Conservative Woman UK

Today is the ‘Global Day of Parents’. The United Nations has affirmed that, in celebrating this day, nations around the world should recognise that the family has the primary responsibility for nurturing and protecting children. This day appreciates parents for their ‘selfless commitment to children and their lifelong sacrifice towards nurturing this relationship’.

The UK has been keen to pay lip service to numerous resolutions and reports which honour the role of parents. Mothers and fathers have clear parental duties, responsibilities and rights under English law. Yet, as concepts of child welfare and rights have come more to the foreground, parental primacy in core areas of a child’s best interests has gradually, but conspicuously, been eroded in practice. After a series of legal challenges and policy shifts by government in recent years, the guardianship of parents is now almost obliterated in some key policy areas.

Continue reading “Family Lives Matter” by Elizabeth Francis here (Conservative Woman UK).

The unstoppable march of state censorship

Vaguely worded hate-speech laws can end up criminalising almost any opinion. Paul Coleman is the executive director of ADF International, a human-rights organisation defending the right of people to freely live out their faith. He is the author of Censored: How European Hate Speech Laws are Threatening Freedom of Speech.

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The stealthy cancelling of Mummy knows best

It used to be agreed that parents were responsible for their child’s best interests in matters of personal, emotional and physical development, but now it is seemingly becoming an assumption that the State is a better overseer of these interests. Official busybodies are increasingly creating opportunities to talk to children beyond the earshot of parents. They say that if you’re doing nothing wrong, why worry? But that’s not the point. It’s intrusive. And it’s creating an ever-increasing wedge in the parent-child bond, since the topics of conversation are personal and private. The more apathetic parents are to this interference with their natural authority, the more it will spread.

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Lizzie Troughton writes for ADF UK and can be found on Twitter at @francis_ea