Below I quote some excerpts from Melanie Phillips' article in the Sunday Times (`1st July 2001). If I am not being presumptious I think I can say that its thrust is in harmony with things I have written in earlier short articles in my `Society Today' pages.

Her article gives a devastating critique of the politically correct doctrine of `tolerance'. 

We don't tolerate stealing and murder because they have their victims. But cannot our supposedly private lifestyle choices, in the long term, also have victims?

Melanie Phillips is aware of research that shows that cohabitation leads to more physical and mental ill-health than marriage and more family breakdown, even when marriages follow.

Her article refers to the words of Kenneth Clarke (a candidate for the Conservative Party leadership). He said: "Conservatives should all be social liberals, accepting personal liberty to choose different lifestyles and welcoming the cultural diversity of modern Britain." 

Melanie Phillips comments:

"... That sentence encapsulates the destructive confusions of current thinking. This social liberalism is supposed to represent the centre ground of politics, that holy grail of electoral success. But it is nothing of the kind. Words such as "tolerant" and "moderate" have been turned inside out....

... Social liberalism has come to mean instead an "anything goes" approach. This is not liberal and it is not social. It is in fact an anarchic, antisocial doctrine that does harm and creates victims....

... The "tolerant" approach to the dismembered family means more children with shattered emotional lives and poorer life chances, more ill health, more child abuse, more domestic violence between adults and more crime in general ...." 

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