Cameron fails his own test

What can we make of British PM David Cameron? First thing to note, of course, is that Cameron identifies as a liberal. He spoke last year of the need for,

a much more active muscular liberalism

He has also urged that the UK participate in the EU as,

a champion of liberal values

So he's not pretending to be a conservative. What he has recognised, though, is that Britain is in many respects a "broken" society. And he has laid the main blame for this on the growth of fatherless families in the UK. After the recent riots he said that he had,

a clear idea about why some of these young people were behaving so terribly.

Either there was no one at home, they didn’t much care or they’d lost control.

Families matter.

I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home.

Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad…

…where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures, filled up with rage and anger.

So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.

I’ve been saying this for years, since before I was Prime Minister, since before I was leader of the Conservative Party.

So: from here on I want a family test applied to all domestic policy.

If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keeps people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it.

How seriously should we take a pledge like this coming from the liberal David Cameron? I would suggest the chances of Cameron abiding consistently by his pledge to be very low.

Consider this. It has been reported that Cameron has personally intervened to ensure that gay marriage will become legal in Britain by 2015. What this means is that Cameron is endorsing the idea of lesbians marrying, in other words, a vision of family life in which there is no father.

The message this sends is straightforward: marriage is not a lifelong union of a man and woman after all. It is just people getting together to form a household, whether a biological father is there or not.

Cameron is failing his own test. He pledged that if a measure undermined commitment he wouldn't do it. And yet here he is personally intervening to get a measure passed that sends a message to men that their role within a family is dispensable and that a fatherless form of family life is endorsed by the state.

Cameron is engaging in doublethink. At the very same time that he was declaring a drive to "bring fathers back into the lives of all our children" he was manoeuvring behind the scenes to redefine the nature of marriage to include fatherlessness.

Mr Cameron, do some children not deserve a father?