DEAR Lord Rothermere,
Your newspaper is now clearly anti-marriage and anti-family.
If Julie Bindel’s article in the May 8 edition of the Daily Mail, ‘I know the real reason so many women are giving up on men to be LESBIANS’, had just appeared on page 34 of the femail section, that judgement might be too harsh.
However, her piece was puffed on the front page under the masthead with a different headline: ‘The REAL reason so many middle-aged women are leaving their husbands… for a woman.’ The headline was accompanied by what can unfortunately be described as a pornographic image of two young women.
This passage in Bindel’s piece reveals the anti-marriage and anti-family agenda your paper is now promoting:
‘According to ONS data, the proportion of young women in the UK who say they are attracted to the same sex rose above 10 per cent for the first time in 2022. Statistics specifically on women swearing off men later in life are hard to come by – but anecdotally they are everywhere.
‘Take the woman I met, who attended a week-long Open University summer school on the history of feminism. Away from the kids, the cooking and the infuriating reality of endlessly picking up her husband’s socks from the floor, she could relax and think about herself for possibly the first time in years.
‘She met a woman in the pub on the final evening – and they ended up in a relationship that lasted far longer than her previous heterosexual relationship.’
Away from the kids. What a brutal dismissal of the impact of their parents’ divorce on the children in this marriage.
What is also revealing in this passage is the simple past tense verb about the woman’s lesbian relationship: ‘They ended up in a relationship that lasted far longer than her previous heterosexual relationship.’ Not has lasted, but lasted. So, like many homosexual relationships, it did not last.
It is certainly true that providing stable homes for children involves much mundane hard work for parents and self-sacrifice. Married men make sacrifices for their families as well as women. As Berlinda Brown put well it in an article for The Conservative Woman in 2022, ‘In Praise of Marriage’:
‘Marriage is a demanding relationship. It is not just about loving and cherishing another. This is perhaps the easier part. It involves risking one’s life and wellbeing because one has to trust that one’s spouse will love and cherish in return. Risk and trust are essential to the marriage contract and may explain why marriage produces high rewards.’
The impact of parental divorce is not just devastating for young children. When middle-aged parents get divorced, that is also very damaging for their children as they enter into young adulthood. The loss of the stability and support that married parents can give their children as they embark on employment and form their own families is significant. When I was a parish minister in the Church of England for 23 years, I witnessed the impact that parental divorce had on the children of these marriages at various stages of their lives.
One of the best things I did as a vicar, by God’s grace, was to help save a marriage. She was getting fed up with him for reasons not dissimilar to those disillusioning the woman in Bindel’s piece with her marriage. She told me she was on the point of leaving him. She had a well-paid job and did not need him financially, but I believe my question to her about the impact their split would have on their young children – ‘Do you really want them seeing him on the divorced father’s McDonald’s run?’ – was a factor in her decision to stay in her marriage.
Her parents thought so and were kind enough to thank me for my help. Grandparents must not be forgotten as casualties of their children’s divorces. The major factor in the long-term survival of the marriage was probably her husband’s decision to get his act together and recommit himself to his family.
Another passage in Bindel’s piece was highly revealing of the anti-family propaganda your paper is now happy to air: ‘All my straight female friends have, at some stage, had either a fleeting sexual attraction for, or a major crush on, another woman. Then perhaps, one day, they find themselves fed up to the back teeth of their boyfriend, or lazy husband, and decide to branch out. So why shouldn’t women get sold on Sapphism in middle age?’
Away from the kids. The fact that the Daily Mail was willing so blithely to dismiss the human misery that parental divorce causes surely reveals your paper’s total surrender to the permissive society and the anti-Christianity that sadly pervades it. I sincerely hope for a change of heart in your paper’s editorial leadership.
