We Must Fight for Family Values

Our culture is increasingly pushing against the family as the bedrock institution of civilization. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed that the family is a "bourgeois institution" premised on the inequalities of the capitalist system. This teaching is disgusting and wretched in the deepest sense. It must be persistently and openly repudiated. Bernie Sanders and some stupid lady who just won a primary in New York City openly proclaim socialism, but all their critics can say to their vision of more free programs for the populace is "where will the money come from?" The implications for our families of their socialist-communist vision is never at the forefront of the voiced objections to them, even by the conservative media. Yet the preservation of the family is more important than even the serious matter of whether the country is or is not impoverished. My grandparents were dirt poor from a foreign country, and America did not yet have any safety net, but they had a strong sense of family, a strong commitment to family values. Because of those values, they survived and even thrived, as did their children and grandchildren. It was their family values that allowed their progress.

We are on the brink of a family catastrophe in this country. The threat to the integrity of the family in America is entirely because of the leftward trend of our politics during the past half-century, combined with a tremendous decline in faith in God. Since the era of the 1960s – the anti-Vietnam War movement; the sexual revolution; prayer taken out of the schools; millions dead from abortions; the drug subculture epidemic; the explosion of perversions of all kinds; identity politics instead of trans-ethnic unity (the melting pot); and above all heightened divorce rates, non-marital cohabitation, children born out of the bonds of holy matrimony, and stagnant or declining educational competencies. Our leftward drift has brought us to this point of disunity, chaos, moral relativism, and utter contempt for the foundational values of our country. This writer taught in the New York Public High Schools for over twenty years. In one high school, two weeks after I arrived, when it became known that I had a more conservative outlook and was an evangelical Christian (how shocking!), one of the teachers stood close to me and said, "I just want you to know that communism collapsed in the USSR, but it is alive and well in this high school." Another teacher, regularly and blithely, handed out copies of a communist newspaper to students. Still another teacher spent an entire month in his Advanced Placement European History course teaching the Communist Manifesto. When the students complained to the department chairperson, nothing was done. Although Howard Zinn's bestselling college textbook on American history entitled The People's History of the United States is not on the list of textbooks that can be bought by the New York public schools, many teachers of American history photocopy sections of that book for distribution in their courses as supplementary reading. By so doing, they are advancing Zinn's communist view of American history. But one of the most popular approved textbooks is The Americans, a veritable digest of left-wing activities (Zinn lite) and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Although teachers are not allowed to promote a specific candidate or political point of view in the schools, it is so common, and so uniformly approved in the bluest of blue subcultures known as New York City, that these "forbidden polemics" are routinely promoted. When this writer expressed to his leftist colleagues that the teaching platform was not a bully platform, and that teachers should try not to let their biases totally control their teaching, the leftists declared that it is impossible to offset one's biases and that trying to offset one's bias is itself a bias in favor of a more conservative ideology than theirs. In many high schools in New York City, girls are routinely given slips to go have abortions without parental permission. Condoms are distributed by the schools. The days of going to the drugstore to purchase your own are over. Thus, the schools are literally promoting fornication. For over 30 years, sex ed teachers have been telling students how to put condoms on cucumbers and bananas. This writer was covering a class as a substitute and glanced at a sex education textbook on the teacher's desk. One section told the students they should be tolerant of that remnant of students who still believed they should wait to have sex until they are married. This implied that their view is now a minority view but that this pro-wedlock minority should not be harassed or ridiculed. How generous and commendable! The unity of love, sex, and marriage was not advanced in any way. The relation of sex to reproduction – i.e., the ultimate purpose of human sexuality – was not included in the book. One high school where I worked had a yearly event called Senior Cross-Dressing Day, where senior male students, if they so desired (and many did), would come to the school dressed as females with wigs, dresses, make-up, polished nails, bras, and other accoutrements such as necklaces or bracelets. In a way, it was a mockery of drag queens, homosexuals, and cross-dressers. In another sense, it was a purely prurient activity that not only went against the school dress code (yes, the school on "normal days" had a dress code), but was guaranteed to have shocked most of the freshmen boys and girls and to have offended students of every religion in the school (in NYC, that includes Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews). No parental permission is required in any of these cases. The premise of this article is that these activities are anti-family because they put sex on a pedestal outside the context of family. For most of the twentieth century, the rule of in loco parentis (in place of the parents) prevailed. Schools were to acknowledge that it was the parents who imparted values to their children, not the schools. Those values were, by definition, family values. Now the schools have become places were values are imparted, and the parents sometimes, and sometimes not, are asked to sign a permission slip for their children to participate in modern society. The values projected are anti-family. The engine of the anti-family agenda in our society and in our schools is the Marxist agenda that has gained traction and momentum since the 1960s. The central tenet of that agenda is that government ("the people"), not private individuals, should own the means of production. That agenda has seen various add-ons such as identity politics; the sexual revolution that repudiates the sex-love-marriage unity; the increasing legitimization of drugs and various dissipations; and attacks on the philosophical ideas and ideals of individual rights and an eternal, God-given moral law. These add-ons to classical Marxism may be called cultural Marxism. Those of us who are professed deplorables and people of faith must pray, speak, vote, and organize against these destructive trends. E. Jeffrey Ludwig is a prolific online writer of conservative articles and has authored the volume The Catastrophic Decline of America's Public High Schools: New York City, A Case Study, available at www.amazon.com. He has been listed multiple times in Who's Who Among America's High School Teachers. At present, he teaches philosophy in New York City.