From "Age of Consent" by one of Canada's finest essayists, David Warren.

We are living, today, in the most child-unfriendly society that has existed. There is little room for children in public life, and little time for them in the double-income structure of the “modernâ€? family, even when it remains intact. Children are actually banned from many apartment buildings and upscale residential environments, and where they are permitted, grow up in neighbourhoods physically adapted to cars and other heavy machinery, but not to them.

Play areas are allotted in public parks, where they are tolerated under conditions of intense supervision, and daycares now proliferate where the smaller ones can be warehoused during office hours, so that they do not become an impediment to their mothers’ professional lives. The older ones continue to be warehoused in unionized and bureaucratized public shelters, which are misleadingly identified as “schoolsâ€?. There, they become the subjects of government experiments in social engineering, designed to make them politically correct.

But our repulsion from children begins much earlier, and is quite literally murderous. Under Canadian law, mothers may have their children aborted at any point during pregnancy -- even on the delivery table -- and that boundary will soon be stretched with “liberalâ€? laws on euthanasia. Parents are, moreover, under social encouragement to eliminate a child promptly, should intrusive medical procedures determine that the creature in its mother’s womb is imperfect in any way.

At the other end of childhood, when adolescents are progressively released into urban and semi-urban surroundings that resemble the old red light districts, they are now commonly deprived of the crucial parental influence of a father, by family law that effectively enables their mother to exchange him for cash. But this is only the end-point of legislative innovations that have anyway transferred nearly every traditional paternal function, except the earning of a paycheque, to the state.

It should thus be no surprise that our young -- where they survive at all -- are turned out today wearing the faces you may see on public transit and the sidewalks. Unhappy, empty, and cynical, would be among words most apt to describe many I see pass me every day, from a society that has delegitimized childhood.

The upshot of the essay is that a bill was recently squelched in Canada that would have "raised the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16 years of age. This would have brought Canada into line with most Western countries, where it is at least 16, and sometimes 18 years..." Please read the whole thing here.
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