To overturn a prejudice is not to destroy prejudice as such. It is rather to inculcate another prejudice. The prejudice that it is wrong to bear a child out of wedlock has been replaced by the prejudice that there is nothing wrong with it at all. Interestingly, the class that first objected on intellectual grounds to the original prejudice, namely the well-educated upper-middle class, is the least likely to behave as if that original prejudice were unjustified. In other words, for that class the matter is principally one of intellectual preening and point-scoring, of appearing bold, generous, imaginative, and independent-minded in the eyes of their peers, rather than a matter of practical policy. When George Bernard Shaw characterized marriage as a legalized form of prostitution, he was not so much demanding justice and equality for women, as he was encouraging the dissolution, even as an ideal, of permanent bonds between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, mass-bastardy is not liberating for women.
(Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas [New York: Encounter Books, 2007], 25 [first published in 2006])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 