The Long War Against the Family

Crises Magazine ^ | January 28, 2013 | Ryan N. S. Topping

[LucianOfSamasota]

The progressive cultural elite has long perpetuated prejudices against the family that, unchallenged, lead to its ruin. Among several I cite three: (1) the assertion that marriage makes men and women less free; (2) the assumption that children are a burden; and (3) the insistence that sexual differentiation is a fiction. These three ideas represent, as it were, three waves of the anti-family movement of the past 150 years. The first is the Marxist contribution; the second is the eugenicist; the third is the fruit of recent gender theorists.

Social conservatives too often play a battle of catch-up with the progressive left. We marvel at abortion; we worry over divorce; we wonder at the rise of the homosexual lobby. It is right that alarm is sounded. But even before lobbying, if the family is ever to regain its natural position of prominence, conservatives need to recover the memory of how the “traditional family” lost its way. In this and the next two articles I would like uncover the three stages of the long war against the family, and then note briefly some helpful lines of response to them. We’ll begin first with the Marxist contribution.

[LucianOfSamasota]

The long, slow decline of the west.

[Ransomed]

“Writing a generation after Marx and Engels, Pope Leo XIII understood well what was at stake in the fight against socialism.”

He recognized the risks of the state defining the institution of marriage.

“Now, since the family and human society at large spring from marriage, these men will on no account allow matrimony to be the subject of the jurisdiction of the Church. Nay, they endeavor to deprive it of all holiness, and so bring it within the contracted sphere of those rights which, having been instituted by man, are ruled and administered by the civil jurisprudence of the community. Wherefore it necessarily follows that they attribute all power over marriage to civil rulers, and allow none whatever to the Church; and, when the Church exercises any such power, they think that she acts either by favor of the civil authority or to its injury. Now is the time, they say, for the heads of the State to vindicate their rights unflinchingly, and to do their best to settle all that relates to marriage according as to them seems good.”

Pope Leo XIII, 1880

To the state in the modern era, marriage is simply whatever judges, pols, or 51% of the voting public think it is at any one time. That’s it, that’s all it can be. It can coincide with the actual version, or depart from it.

Freegards