Marriage is not better for children, says official
By Ed West

17 July 2009

The head of a Church-funded marriage agency has told a conference that marriage is no better for children than other family set-ups.

Terry Prendergast, chief executive of Marriage Care, a diocesan-funded organisation, told Quest, a group for gay Catholics, that married heterosexuals were no better at raising children than anyone else.

"Statistically, children do best in a family where the adult relationship is steady, stable and loving," he was due to say in a speech this weekend. "Note that I stress adult, not married, since there is no evidence that suggests that children do best with heterosexual couples."

He told the gathering in Leicester that "many families, and the individuals that make up these groups, other than married man, woman, and added child, find themselves discriminated against or denigrated... all these attempt to live out good, Catholic lives whilst being judged and bracketed by those in authority, or those who appear to have reached the Kingdom already.

"It is ironic that the state appears to be much more pastoral and compassionate in its acceptance of what family is. The fact that there are all kinds of benefits available for different family forms, and legal imperatives to support families suggests that the state is even more concerned for families than Church."

He also criticised ideas of the Holy Family that have their roots in "evangelical, Right-wing religious thought".

He said that many families who pray together "then prey on other people through their self-righteousness", and said that abuse is "rampant" in the traditional family, citing the cases of Josef Friztl, who raped his prisoner daughter over a period of years, and Fred and Rosemary West, the serial killers.

Mr Prendergast last year presented Pope Benedict XVI with the English and Welsh bishops' document on marriage, Home is a Holy Place and Marriage Care has its own section in the Catholic Directory.

A spokesman for the bishops' conference rejected Mr Prendergast's arguments.

He said: "Defining 'family' is a notoriously difficult task. Yet the views expressed by Terry Prendergast about the definition of family and marriage are clearly not a reflection of the Church's teaching, nor those of the Bishops' Conference.

"Responding to the needs of children is also complex. The Church's vision is that the crucially important quality of stability in family life needs gender complementarity and role modelling too. ."

Victoria Gillick, the family campaigner, said: "The state "loves people who are dependent on it, socialist states in particular. It has nothing to do with love and compassion, because it is the Government itself that has encouraged the breakdown of marriage in the past four decades through its policies of denial of the Christian value of marriage ... all the evidence shows that children do better in every way when born and brought up in a stable married family."

Patricia Morgan, a sociologist, said: "I can't believe that someone has come out with this. "We've had 20 years of very well-controlled statistics and all the time we get this repeated conclusion - children do best educationally, behaviourally and in every other sphere when raised by two original biological, married parents.

"Problems tend to be two or three times as likely with single parents, and with step-parents it varies on whether they are married.

"Marriage is the gold standard. We've had so much research and so much evidence. The child does better throughout the economic ladder and throwing money at the problem even makes it worse. Abuse is massively higher with lone parents and stepfathers."

A report called Every Family Matters, by the Centre for Social Justice this week concluded that family break-up cost the taxpayer billions of pounds every year, and that children brought up by two married parents were more successful in every way.