For decades now the radicals on the left have told us of their hatred of the traditional family, and they have done all they can to see it destroyed. Things like easy no-fault divorce, the rise of the porn culture, androgyny, radical feminism, the homosexual and trans agendas, and the sexual revolution have all been part of this.
But of course one especially effective way to destroy something is to completely redefine it. The old saying about verbal engineering preceding social engineering certainly applies here. Thus a great way to demolish the institutions of marriage and family is to redefine them out of existence. So far down this path have we gone in recent times that we can no longer even use words like “mother”. We are now being forced to use moonbat concepts such as “birthing persons”.
As mentioned, the radicals have been working on this for quite some time now. While Marxists declared their hatred of the family over a century ago, things really came to a head during the 60s counterculture. The feminist and homosexual militants made the family one of their main targets.
And seeking to redefine it was a key part of their strategy. Consider the year 1994: by then several decades of this assault on the family was paying off handsomely. The year was declared to be the International Year of the Family. Working with the Australian Family Association at the time, I was heavily involved in all this.
We held our own international conference on the family that year, and I also did countless media interviews on the question of ‘what is a family?’ Already there was plenty of pushback on the normal understanding of the word. Family had long meant ‘any group of people related by blood, [heterosexual] marriage or adoption.’
So two sisters living together is a family. A man and a woman who married – with or without children – is a family. An orphan adopted by a loving heterosexual couple is a family. That was all basic common sense. But the activists wanted to push the boundaries to include any and all other kinds of relationships – especially homosexual relationships.
Two guys having a sexual relationship had to be considered to be ‘family. So I was constantly defending the usual concept of family against those seeking to obliterate it. I even went to a conference that year put on by the tax-payer funded Australian Institute of Family Studies.
The AIFS also happily pushed the revisionist line that family can be whatever you want it to be. I presented a paper at the conference arguing the opposite, that historically almost all cultures have had the traditional understanding of what family means. In it I offered a number of quotes from experts, including these:
“A family is not an association of independent people; it is a human commitment designed to make possible the rearing of moral and responsible children. Governments care – or ought to care – about families for this reason, and scarcely for any other.” James Q. Wilson
“There never was a society throughout all of history . . . without a family as the central unit for launching the education of children, for character formation, and as the moral agent of society.” Amitai Etzioni
“When we survey all known societies, we find everywhere some form of the family, some set of permanent arrangements by which males assist females in caring for children while they are young.” Margaret Mead
“A substantial body of research suggests that family structure is an independent factor influencing the well-being of children. Even after correcting for variables such as family income, parental education, and prior family history, children from single-parent families tend on average to fare less well economically, educationally, and emotionally, and encounter more difficulties on the road to becoming self-sustaining adults.” William Galston
I am surprised they let me in to present that paper. They certainly would not allow me in today to provide such a point of view. Indeed, some years ago the UN proclaimed that May 15 was to be the International Day of Families. Of course: ‘families’. There is no longer any such thing as family. Instead, we now have anything and everything being labelled as family. When a term is so inflated to include everything, it no longer means anything. RIP the family.
One helpful article by the International Organization for the Family appeared recently discussing these matters and is well worth quoting from. It begins:
The observance of the 2021 International Day of Families during the continuing devastation of a worldwide pandemic calls to mind Ambassador Michael Novak’s warning of a potentially more ominous threat: “Throughout history, nations have been able to survive a multiplicity of disasters—invasions, famines, earthquakes, epidemics, depressions—but they have never been able to survive the disintegration of the family.”
Ambassador Novak further explained why the disintegration of the family would be so disastrous: because “the roles of a father and a mother, and of children with respect to them, is the absolutely critical center of social force.” Or, as expressed in the Vatican’s Charter of the Rights of the Family, “the family is based on marriage, that intimate union of life in complementarity between a man and a woman,” and, as “a natural society, exists prior to the State or any other community, and possesses inherent rights which are inalienable.”
This timeless truth about the family is as old as the human race, as attested in the opening chapter of Genesis: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” The divine blessing upon the marital union of man and woman extends beyond them, for such a family, says Pope Francis, creates the optimum environment “for the child’s growth and emotional development” and results in “a unique, natural, fundamental and beautiful good for people, families, communities and societies.”
No wonder that historian Will Durant hailed Confucius as the world’s greatest thinker for his insight that the world could not be put “in proper order” without first putting in order the family. No wonder that when the wise drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sought to put the world in order following the most devastating war in history, they recognized the foundational and indispensable role of the family, the only group unit possessing human rights: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”
As mentioned, the sexual revolution has been a major means by which the war on the family has taken place. The article continues:
In the words of sociologist Gabriele Kuby, it is the “destruction of freedom in the name of freedom” as “good is called evil, and evil is called good,” all part of a “global sexual revolution” which “affects everyone—man and woman, young and old, our personal existence and the future of society” and “reaches into every home and heart. There is no neutral territory to which we can escape” as it “increases its speed and the fierceness of its attack on democratic freedoms from one day to the next.” Employing “the art of deceptive speech,” the revolution marches under the banner of “rights” and claims to counter “discrimination,” while in reality launching a blitzkrieg of discrimination against the rights of society’s natural and fundamental group unit, the family.
It is the ultimate betrayal of the founding principles of the United Nations, which itself has fallen prey to “influential individuals and NGOs that drive [the revolution’s] global implementation,” as Kuby explains: “Within a few decades, the UN became an institution that would use its power and resources to change the image of humanity as declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to replace universal moral values with relativistic postmodern ‘values’ as the foundation of culture…. Today the UN and its powerful sub-organizations fight for dissolution of men’s and women’s sexual identity [and] elimination of marriage and family.”
Regardless of how enticing or beguiling the label—such as “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” or “sexual orientation and gender identity,” or “comprehensive sexuality education”—any policy or program that undermines the family and its supporting values must be exposed and resisted. As nations now scramble to vaccinate against a dangerous and often deadly virus, we call upon all to protect against a potentially more dangerous enemy that seeks to destroy the very foundation of society. Honoring the treaty obligation in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights to provide the family with “the widest possible protection and assistance” may well be the most important thing a nation can do for itself and the rest of humanity. ifamnews.com/en/iofs-joint-statement-to-un-ambassadors-for-the-2021-international-day-of-families
Back in 2007 the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks said this: “The fact that we have deconstructed the family – morally, psychologically, economically, politically – is the single most fateful cultural development of our times.” Absolutely. The deconstruction of marriage and family has been one of the most successful acts of hardcore vandalism by the revolutionaries.
As has often been said, ‘As the family goes, so goes the nation’. If you are wondering why our culture is in such a mess, well, now you know. The militants have been working overtime to destroy the family. And the more they succeed at this, the more they destroy everything else in the process.