Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice for England and Wales, has said society should “welcome and applaud” the collapse traditional nuclear family life.
“What is the family?” asked the wealthy 69-year-old at in a lecture at the University of Liverpool.
“Time was when most people probably thought the answer was not merely clear but obvious. Today it is more complex,” he suggested.
“In contemporary Britain the family takes an almost infinite variety of forms. Many marry according to the rites of non-Christian faiths. People live together as couples, married or not, and with partners who may not always be of the other sex.
“Children live in households where their parents may be married or unmarried. They may be brought up by a single parent, by two parents or even by three parents.
“Their parents may or may not be their natural parents. They may be children of parents with very different religious, ethnic or national backgrounds, [and they] may be the children of polygamous marriages,” he suggested — likely in reference to the explosion in Islamic polygamy in Britain, which is flourishing in spite of the country’s long-standing anti-bigamy laws.
“The fact is that many adults and children, whether through choice or circumstance, live in families more or less removed from what, until comparatively recently, would have been recognised as the typical nuclear family,” the judge continued.
“This, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.”
The shocking statement is not the first controversial commentary on the state of British family life by England’s most senior family judge.
In 2014, Sir James gave an equally charged speech in which he issued a damning and partisan indictment of “Victorian values” and railed against “the dominant influence wielded by the Christian
churches” in the past.
He also celebrated the role played by the contraceptive pill and abortion on demand in removing “the fear of unwanted pregnancy [and] the fear of the consequences of contraceptive failure,” transforming sex into “something to be enjoyed, if one wished, for purposes having nothing to do with procreation” by the end of the 1960s.
“A fundamental link – the connection between sex and procreation – [was] irretrievably broken,” he gloated. “But for all this, much remained still to be done.”
British judges like Sir James are almost entirely self-selecting and more or less unaccountable to ordinary people, not being subject to judicial elections, retention races, or recall mechanisms at any level, as they are in many U.S. jurisdictions.
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