Progress and the death of man

News from Blighty, none of it good:

Single women and lesbian couples won landmark parental rights last night as MPs voted to remove the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will replace the rule with a “need for supportive parenting” after opponents were defeated in two votes by unexpectedly wide margins.

The Government had been prepared for defeat but won the free votes by majorities of 75 and 68. The decisions mean that the legislation will grant the most significant extension to homosexual family rights since gay adoption was sanctioned.

It will stop fertility clinics turning away lesbians and single women because their children will not have a father or male role model. While the current law does not block such therapy, it is sometimes used to justify refusals.

More:

MPs who backed the fatherhood amendments said the traditional family would be undermined. Iain Duncan Smith, who proposed enshrining the importance of a father and mother, said that the new law would amount to telling couples that “fathers are not important, or are less important than mothers”.

The former Tory leader said there was overwhelming evidence that children without fathers were more likely to have problems at school and with drink and drugs. He also questioned whether the existing law led to genuine discrimination, as many IVF clinics already treated lesbians and single women.

His criticisms were backed by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’ Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, in an interview with The Times. “I think it strange that the Government should want to take away not just the need for a father but the right for a father,” he said.

Deliberately creating by artificial means fatherless families, because nothing whatsoever can be allowed to stand in the way of the autonomous desiring individual. Because, you know, fatherless families created by natural means have worked out so well.

Next up for Britain: will it be okay to create man-beast genetic hybrids without fathers? Har har.

Honestly, the suicide of our civilization, accomplished by dismantling every barrier to the realization of the individual's will to power, is astonishing to watch. What connects these two stories from the UK? Here's Ken Myers, quoting eminent sociologist Daniel Bell, on the meaning of modernity:

"The rejection of a revealed order or natural order, and the substitution of the individual—the ego, the self—as the lodestar of consciousness. What we have here is the social reversal of the Copernican revolution: if our planet is no longer the center of the physical universe and our earthly habitat is diminished in the horizons of nature, the ego/self takes the throne as the center of the moral universe, making itself the arbiter of all decisions. There are no doubts about the moral authority of the self; that is simply taken as a given. The only question is what constitutes fulfillment of the self."

If there is no such thing as an intrinsic order to the natural world, then life is infinitely plastic. We can do away with anything that gets in the way of individual self-fulfillment. Fathers. Human nature. This is the death of man. Man is dying, and we are killing him in the name of our own pleasure and will to power.