“The family is a conservative project that limits human flourishing."
The Left has never worked so hard to undermine and dissolve the nuclear family.Last week I inexplicably received, amid other political flyers in the mail, a pamphlet from something called the Texas Transgender Student Union. It was an LGBTQ+ resource guide addressed to the “student” of the household, encouraging him or her (or maybe “they”) to speak with a “safe adult” such as a trusted teacher if their parents don’t support their socially engineered gender confusion (my terminology, not theirs). The mailer even included a section for young people curious about legal “emancipation” from one’s parents. It could not have been more clearly designed to drive a wedge between children and their mothers and fathers.
Also last week a controversy erupted on social media over an episode of the wildly popular Call Her Daddy podcast in which two liberal white women, one of them a twice-divorced actress now married to a woman, assured viewers (a reported ten million per episode, approximately 70% female and 76% under the age of 35) that it’s never too late to divorce your husband. Because if you’re wondering if you can do better, “the answer is always yes,” and any argument to the contrary is just “the patriarchy” talking. The media today teems with examples of such messaging designed to foster in women a dissatisfaction with their husbands and a yearning for sexual libertinism.
More anti-family news: set to go into effect on November 1 is a bill passed by New York’s Democrat-controlled legislature that amends family court, domestic relations, and related statutes to replace terms such as “mother” and “father” with “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” While such erasures of everyday biological sex distinctions seem comical and ridiculous, they are actually a very serious ideological strategy to eradicate the very definitions of male and female in order to render family relationships meaningless.
As my friend, author Michael Walsh, is fond of saying, the Left never stops, they never sleep, and they never quit; and they work at nothing so hard as undermining and dissolving the nuclear family, because the family is the first and last line of defense against the transformation of society into a totalitarian, socialist dystopia.
All of this reminded me this week of a four-year-old essay by Lily Sánchez called “Why We Should Abolish the Family.” It is an explicit demand that the nuclear household be dismantled so that unhappy women might be liberated from the “slavery” of motherhood and homemaking, and children absorbed into the “loving” collective, just as the satanic Karl Marx envisioned.
Sánchez’s article, published under the “Socialism” category at Current Affairs online, opens with a thesis that leaves no room for misinterpretation or ambiguity: “The family is a conservative project that limits human flourishing. The family must be abolished.” The author then proceeds to lay out the socialist case for a revolution that “will break down the family structure as we know it now.” Marriage, for example, is “a kind of slave contract,” which in the future “will not exist.” This harks straight back to Marx and his benefactor Engels, who fantasized in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeois family would vanish along with private property.
Abolition promises “a breaking open of the family to free and unleash what’s good in it and to generalize that into the social body as a whole,” she writes. “To make the necessary forms of care available to everyone unconditionally.”
The particular loves that bind a mother to her child, a husband to his wife, a grandmother to her grandchildren are reframed as selfish hoarding. The socialist remedy, then, is to socialize care so that no one is “trapped” by kinship. Radical feminist Sophie Lewis, repeatedly invoked in the article, has explained, “When you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them; privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwelling-place, class, and very identity in law.” The implied alternative is a society in which children, the elderly, and the infirm become the common property of “everyone,” administered by a bureaucratic apparatus that replaces the family. That is not an expansion of love but a dilution of it.
Families are not idyllic. Many are dysfunctional; some even hopelessly broken. Divorce, abuse, and neglect certainly exist, but Sánchez catalogs them at length as a condemnation of the institution itself. The reality is that decades of social-science data—ignored or dismissed by Sánchez as conservative propaganda—show that children raised by their married biological parents fare better on average in educational attainment, mental health, and economic mobility than children raised in other arrangements. The article prefers to emphasize anecdotes of maternal exhaustion and pandemic domestic violence to those inconvenient truths. It then attributes the exhaustion not to flawed human nature, but to “capitalism” and “neoliberalism.”
Every attempt to treat the family as a disposable “social technology” has either failed or required coercion. The early Bolsheviks liberalized divorce, encouraged communal kitchens, and preached the withering away of the bourgeois household. Within a decade the experiment produced abandoned children, collapsing birth rates, and a panicked retreat to Stalinist natalism. Sánchez’s vision is no less unattainable for being phrased in the language of “unconditional love” rather than “dictatorship of the proletariat.” --->READ MORE HERE
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