The row over whether or not Sikh members of the Garda Reserve should be allowed to wear their turbans raises a number of questions. One concerns the rights of minorities. A second concerns the right of the host community to make minorities conform to certain norms in the interests of social cohesion and national unity, while the third has to do with religious freedom.

A new survey by, of all organisations, MTV, has found that sexually active teenagers are less likely to be happy than their non-sexually active peers. This finding has to be contrary to all the propaganda thrown at teenagers which tells them it simply isn’t possible to be happy without having sex. In turn this means the finding is contrary to the entire philosophy of MTV itself which is entirely and uncritically accepting of all the dogmas of the sex revolution.

A headmaster of a Catholic school in England enters into a gay civil partnership and his school can do nothing about it. A lesbian couple in America manage to force their local YMCA to recognise them as a couple.

Libertarianism is an ideology that stresses personal freedom even more than liberalism does. Liberals, of the left-wing variety at any rate, also place great emphasis on equality and sometimes argue that liberty should give way to equality.

As reported in our news section, a toddler at the centre of a row between two sets of adults is to be taken from his natural mother and her husband and will be given instead to his natural father and his wife. We’ll call the first couple, Couple A and the second couple, Couple B.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin achieved national headlines with his call for the urgent agreement of a national consensus to deal with the crime epidemic. It is good to see the media paying attention to the views of an individual who may be willing to provide moral leadership to 21st century Irish society.

A letter in the London Times attacking this week's Tory pro-marriage policy report challenges the interpretation of the data upon which the report is based. The letter, written by a Mr David Hunt, acknowledges that the data “appears to show that children of married parents do better than children of unmarried parents”.

The prestigious Pew Survey Centre has just issued the results of a major survey on American attitudes to marriage, sex and the family accompanied by a 91 page analysis.

‘Ideally a child should be raised by both of its biological parents’. Until fairly recently such a statement was not controversial. Now it is controversial on three grounds. One is that it is offensive to lone parents, the second is that it is offensive to gay parents, and the third is that it is offensive to parents of IVF children.

New regulations being introduced in England will prevent anyone who smokes from fostering children who are under the age of five. The reasoning is that if the children develop smoking related health problems in later life they might sue the relevant authorities.

The London Economist reported recently that, even in a secular age, the church has considerable influence in Italy. It has won three big battles in the past three years: (1) it drastically restricted the scope of fertility treatment; (2) it won a referendum on the same issue; and (3) it stopped legal rights for the unmarried, including gays. Its next fight is against living wills (dangerously like euthanasia).

Former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald has always had a head for figures. A trained economist, he bewildered many in the 80s by telling the nation that “inflation was increasing at a decreasing rate”. He has continued this penchant for analysing data into his career as a columnist for the Irish Times.

There are encouraging signs that common sense is beginning to prevail with regard to the debate on the family. UNICEF recently declared that family structure matters and that mothers and fathers living together have beneficial effects on their children over and above those to be found in other family forms, including step-families.

Recent news from the UK illustrates that gay rights legislation is threatening the right of the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, to teach their faith. The row over Catholic adoption agencies being forced to treat homosexuals as prospective adoptive couples was the most well-known example.

Recent figures from the Central Statistics Office indicated that more Irish people are marrying in a registry office instead of in church, so as to be able in the future to avail of the easier divorce from civil marriages. How sad. And also how silly, because every secular source I know proclaims that married people, and their children, are happier, healthier, and richer.

There used to be a time when radical individualism was the future. This impulse remains very strong. During the 60s, all the energy and passion was on the side of those who wanted to maximise personal individual freedom, often at the expense of the family. Those who argued against this trend, for religious reasons, or because it would lead to radical societal fragmentation, were thought of as out of touch. Besides, the radical individualists said, where is the evidence for these dire predictions?