Leftism Threatens American Family Life

From many on the left we hear the words "collective" "intersectionality," or “hegemony” as central vocabulary in socio-political-economic discourse. Words like “liberty,” “individuality,” “freedom,” “free markets,” “responsibility,” and “personal autonomy” are rarely used. Words like “faith, family, and freedom” which is the motto of the Family Research Council are depicted as not only passé but as dangerously “right-wing.” Persons like myself who appeal to that motto and wish to defend traditional marriage, the unborn, natural rights, liberty, freedom of religion (especially of Judeo-Christian values) and the family of man are depicted by the left as “right-wing” or “deplorable.” Although this writer is a rational centrist, I bear the title deplorable proudly. A recently retired former high school classmate of mine and so-called liberal who ended his career as Director of Pediatrics at a major New York City hospital wrote to a nationally known communist on our high school website that his son had married a young woman whose father was an evangelical Protestant. When he greeted his son’s father-in-law, he gave him a copy of Noel Ignatiev’s book Race Traitor and a copy of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto. A great way to build bridges with your daughter’s new family, right? How would you have reacted to this gift? I would not have accepted the books.

It might have seemed that after Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president, lost four times at the beginning of the 20th century, that socialism was finally buried as non-viable in the U.S. context. But socialism became retooled, American-style, and emerged in a more acceptable form as the graduated income tax, the Federal Reserve, and the “alphabet agencies” of the New Deal. Now, this drivel from the past has re-emerged with Bernie Sanders and some stupid lady who just won a congressional seat in New York City and openly proclaims socialism. But the shallow pundits who critique them and interview them keep asking only about how they are going to pay for their vast Green New Deal, socialist program. “Where will the money come from?” they ask, and of course, since the money will come out of the pockets of all the people, the left becomes evasive. The interviewers and critics fail to address other more serious consequences of their outdated and self-serving vision. The main problem with their socialism (communism relabeled) is that it will weaken or even give the coup de grace to the family. Government will pretend it can take care of people and give sufficient womb to tomb nurturance, and can do what no family can do in terms of assuring security, purpose, and even love. Undoubtedly under any new federal takeover of day-to-day life there will be new “love laws.” Virtue signaling will become passé, and persons will be open to public contempt and fines if they do not participate in state-defined love signaling. These assumptions and promotions are gaining momentum among our obsessed, depressed, and possessed fellow citizens as they experience lovelessness to an extreme. What could be more important than being wanted, loved, taken care of, and sharing a close relationship with others in one’s family, others who love and care about what happens to you, others who will share in your sufferings and rejoice with you in the good times? Wake up, my beloved countrymen! Family life is disintegrating before our very eyes. Less than 5% of children were born out of wedlock in 1960 and now, cutting across all ethnicities, it is near 40%. Daycare centers will never replace the intact family. Babysitters will never be a substitute for mom. We need someone there to establish the rules of social intercourse and encourage us and involve themselves with us and be there when we have a fever and are throwing up. We need special someones who will come to the school play to support us and our classmates even though we only have two lines or no lines. I was a gingerbread boy in 3rd grade with no lines in a performance of Hansel and Gretel, but my parents were there and were thrilled to be there. Let's stop pretending that the left’s agenda is only about or mainly about money, and start realizing that many in our culture are pushing against the family as the bedrock institution of all civilization. Marx believed that families are a "bourgeois institution" that is 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. In the name of "helping people," the consequences of more and more government intrusion is more and more destruction of families as well as poverty. My grandparents were dirt poor in their home country and came to the USA at a time when there was no safety net, but they had a strong sense of family, strong commitment to family values -- yes, have your children in marriage, stay married, and do your best to take care of your families! We are on the brink of a family catastrophe in this country. Do you know how much I miss Phyllis Schlafly? Phyllis was not afraid to attack the Equal Rights Amendment and defeat it. This was not because she did not want women to get ahead, not because she wanted to keep women in the kitchen (she had a law degree and was a tremendously active careerist as well as a devoted mom). But she understood that the anti-male component of the feminist agenda was wrong. She knew that the pro-lesbian agenda of the women's movement was wrong and anti-family. She knew that liberation as in "women's lib" could not be built on denigrating men and ways of life that have existed for millennia. Freeing women from men, and freeing children from parental authority such as we see increasingly in schools, is a dangerous trend. Common Core asks 400 personal questions of students. This is encroaching on the privacy of children which privacy is part and parcel of family life. Schools were established in loco parentis (in place of the parents) but now increasingly operate as though they rule the children and that the parents are simply there to rubber stamp the school's practices. In NY State, minor females can be referred for an abortion without parental notification. My God, a 13-year-old girl can get an abortion without her mother or father knowing about it? Yet the same girl cannot get a learner’s permit to drive until she is 16. The message is that the state loves and cares for you more than your own parents. That idea is noxious to me. Health education teachers are teaching the birds and bees with demonstrations about how to put a condom on a cucumber. Non-marital fornication is thus being encouraged by our public educational systems. The greatest problem with Bernie, Alexandria, and the Green New Deal is not mainly that their programs cost too much, which they do, but that the radical growth of government further undermines and erodes the family.