Radicals Liberals, Illiberal Families

...Measured against these four principles, the 1980 Republican platform was a decidedly pro-family document...

...Since the mid-1960s, sociologists have systematically stripped the word, "family," of intelligible meaning, preferring instead the dual concepts of "changing families" and "a pluralism of family forms...

...Harper urged parents to "encourage, help, and foster" sexual play among their preadolescent children...

...Even a more restrictive label seems applicable, in some respects, to politicians as different as Jesse Helms and Daniel P. Moynihan...

...Just as "pro choice" means more than "pro abortion," so does the "pro life" label encompass sentiments beyond opposition to that particular "medical procedure...

...However bankrupt and discredited these developments now stand, the difficulty of their task cannot be underestimated...

...One does suspect, however, that at least some of the outrage spawned by the Family Protection Act arises from the consternation liberals feel at seeing their favorite social engineering tool-the coercive threat of withholding federal funds- turned against their most cherished schemes...

...Polite society has greeted the "pro family" movement, a political development unique to the past half decade, with a mixture of ambivalence, panic, and discomfort...

...Other sections of this novel proposal would prohibit federal funding of values-clarification and behavior-modification courses, exempt private schools from National Labor Relations Board jurisdiction, allow parents to establish tax-exempt savings plans for their children's education, grant tax deductions to corporations that help fund cooperative employee day-care facilities, and declare a legal presumption in favor of parental supervision of their children's religious and moral formation...

...In the words of Jo Ann Gasper, editor of the Right Woman, "There is a war going on for the preservation of society and the pagans are already within the walls...

...In their November 20 report to the President-elect, this panel recommended, among other actions, the appointment of a Special Assistant to the President for family matters...

...The essentially defensive nature of the American pro-family movement becomes apparent when one turns to the legislative measure most fully embodying its agenda...

...While currently making conciliatory noises, they will not voluntarily surrender their hold on these institutions...

...The preservation of identifiable social norms and a common moral code may, in fact, be necessary for the very survival of our free society...

...One section of the original bill would confirm the legal point that discrimination against homosexuals would never constitute an "unlawful employment practice," while others would prohibit the expenditure of federal funds to advance homosexuality as an acceptable way of life or to support divorce litigation...

...Yet the pro-family label has also been attached at various times to individuals or groups drawn from widely disparate and historically hostile religious traditions, including Roman Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism, Mormonism, and Orthodox Judaism...

...Pro-family activists, on the other hand, support a less sweeping, more historic definition, limiting the "family" designation to two or more persons related by blood, heterosexual marriage, or adoption...

...Borrowing a page from Joe McCarthy, commentators have delighted in ferreting out the supposed interlocking directorates of pro-family and other "New Right" groups...

...and the appointment of pro-family sympathizers to critical slots in the Departments of Justice, State, and Health and Human Services...

...And human life is effectively reduced to a deplorable accident...

...the emergence of homosexuality as a legally protected lifestyle...

...New Leftists, feminists, cultural relativists, populationists, and sexual libertarians lashed away at family life as the cause of poverty, violence, imperialism, inequality, the oppression of women, overpopulation, and mental disorders of all sorts...

...For it is clear that the modern liberal temperament, wedded to a host of anti-natalist sentiments, is likely to produce few babies among its own adherents...

...Progressive doctrine on family and sexual matters has spread widely, and early and extensive sexual experimentation, the conscious rejection of parenthood, a reliance on abortion to correct sexual mistakes, a dogmatic adherence to the view that there are no differences between the sexes, and the elevation of selfishness to a virtue have reached pandemic proportions, particularly among American youth...

...Indeed, the sterile orgasm may be among the most appropriate symbols of the contemporary liberal temperament...

...Not unexpectedly, the pro-family ranks are peopled disproportionately by the parents of young children...

...the dismantling of the Department of Education...

...For it is clear that the modern liberal ethos still dominates most centers of national power...

...One need only look to the humanistic paradise of Sweden, where the modern collectivist state is somewhat ahead in its task of severing children from their parents...

...Traditional business-oriented Republicans, in the flush of victory, have found the pro-family elements of the Reagan coalition to be an embarrassment-something like the visit of distant cousins without proper education or the social graces-and have advised placing the "social issues" on the back burner, lest the new administration squander its opportunity for necessary economic initiatives...

...priority legislative attention to the Human Life Amendment...

...It is here that people who otherwise span the political spectrum commit the single, unforgivable act that finally separates them from the modern liberal temperament...

...Reagan will abide by his pledge to the Republican platform and remain consistent with his frequent endorsement of pro-family goals...

...and the distortion of the White House Conference on Families into an assault on traditional families, can all be traced, in part, to this decay of intellectual standards displayed in contemporary discussions of family life...

...Similar confusion reigns among the national media, as journalists strain to define the composition and agenda of the pro-family coalition...

...Unfortunately, in this instance, Marx was wrong about the impact of the intellect on events...

...and dozens of grassroots organizations spanning most ethnic and religious distinctions...

...During the past two decades, the normative American family structure served as a favorite target for a series of highly politicized intellectual movements bent on transforming or destroying the existing social order...

...Collective paranoia...

...Yet among these diverse elements can be found four recurring attitudes which, I suggest, essentially define what it means today to be pro-family: To be pro-family is to reject most recent effusions from the social sciences concerning the family...

...But they would undoubtedly survive such experiences with their value systems intact...

...To be pro-family is to oppose the union of educational and family professionals with the coercive power of the state...

...presidential support for the so-called "Helms Amendment," which would limit the power of federal courts over voluntary prayer in public schools...

...The movement has been sometimes portrayed as a monolithic effort to force a tired moral code down the collective American throat...

...But you may not, under any circumstance, accuse another of hedonism or sin...

...Consider sociologist Merwyn Cadwallander, who declared in a 1966 Atlantic article that "marriage is a wretched institution," where beautiful romances are translated into dull matrimony and where relationships inevitably become "constrictive, corrosive, grinding, and destructive...

...The pro-family movement stands on the other side of the moral divide, committed to those traditional moral principles most purely embodied in the Ten Commandments...

...A minority of liberal voices, including the venerable New Republic, have counseled a bemused toleration of this latest example of small town Babbitry...

...assorted research organizations, such as the American Family Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Rockford Institute...

...Or meditate on the vision presented in a 1971 article by family-counselor Robert Harper, which included a call for abortion-on-demand to avoid inflating America's "already pathologically swollen population" and suggested a "blockbuster intensive therapeutic" federal program to help children and youth "overcome the contamination and crippling of their sexual beings by our culture...

...This abhorrence of a common moral yardstick had its birth among the social sciences, where a sometimes useful analytical tool was distorted in this century into a philosophical absolute...

...In a spiritual sense, "pro life" means a struggle against the cool allure of Death and his steadfast companions, narcissism and sterility...

...Outside the loss of some influence with the presidency and in the Senate, its partisans are still effectively in control...

...Malefic motives, not just intellectual muddle-headedness, are suspected...

...The large majority of publishing family sociologists, revealing a pitiful lack of objective standards and their own subservience to ideology, seemed to take special pleasure in challenging the prevailing social framework...

...They might have to tolerate a few voluntary prayers by their classmates, or give occasional notice to the theory that women make the best mothers...

...To be pro-family is to war against the cultural death-wish of modern Malthusian-ism...

...Not primarily in the sense of expecting their offspring to be physically torn away (although that is part of their apprehension...

...And without discounting the complex ethical questions that do arise, they give strong preference to life-creating and life-sustaining acts over their life-denying and life-destroying antitheses...

...Such expansive definitions, designed to offend no one, arguably extend the "family" label to everything from group marriages and homosexual couples to a pair of winos sharing a boxcar and a bottle...

...Federally funded family planning clinics provide children contraceptives and referrals for abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent...

...Even if the whole Family Protection Act were approved, liberal progeny could continue virtually undisturbed in their secular-humanistic ways...

...From their offspring's birth, they sense the agents of the liberal state swarming about them...

...Regrettably not...

...Ideologically, the phrase symbolizes aversion to the whole anti-growth, anti-large family, anti-child, and pro-eugenic culture promoted by the modern Malthusians...

...It acknowledged the political, legal, and moral significance of the Judeo-Christian tradition, ignored fashionable sociological theories of family diversity and change, promised efforts to overturn the 1973 abortion decisions, supported a tuition tax-credit plan, opposed federal meddling in the governance of private schools, and pledged a preference for the appointment of pro-family judges...

...In sum: a coalition of hayseeds, housewives, the Pope, and preachers sporting leisure suits and Southern drawls, doing battle with the forces of enlightenment, pluralism, refinement, and liberty...

...When a society views heterosexuality and homosexuality as merely interchangeable forms of sexual release, and considers the birth of a child as but another burden on an already overtaxed environment, then procreation and the nurturing of children have in fact lost all claim to special social consideration...

...Elements of the pro-family coalition, most visibly the Moral Majority, mobilized large numbers of voters behind Ronald Reagan and other friendly-mostly Republican-candidates...

...Children's ombudsmen" work diligently to inform the moppets of their "rights," while the Swedish parliament has seriously considered legislation allowing children to divorce their parents...

...Title I, for example, contains provisions that would withhold federal education dollars from states that prohibit voluntary prayer in public buildings, that attempt to exclude parents from visiting classrooms, that refuse to allow parents to review textbooks prior to their use in public schools, or that employ educational materials which belittle women's traditional roles in society...

...From the towers of learning, this moral void spread into the law, the courts, the media, and the "mainline" churches and synagogues...

...There is an unsettling recognition that America's current time of troubles-economic, diplomatic, military, and spiritual-is worsening, and suspicion that proposed conservative nostrums, such as supply-side economics pr increased defense spending, will not be sufficient to reverse America's decline...

...Even refugee Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans have been known to confess publicly to pro-family sentiments...

...As Midge Decter has recently pointed out, "the one thing that even the most passionate exponent of, or most ardent sympathizer with, homosexual liberation is bound to admit is that homosexual relations are and are meant to be fruitless...

...Left-leaning clerics, civil libertarians, and other politicos of more excitable disposition have nurtured a media image of pro-family advocates as Bible-thumping, jack-booted, moral zealots trampling on human freedoms, modern lifestyles, pluralism, and the Constitution...

...Their agenda demands a reversal of nearly two decades of political, social, and intellectual evolution...

...White House backing for the Family Protection Act...

...For in the culture which liberal laxism has produced, you can perform virtually any voluntary act of decadence, debauchery, or perversion without opprobrium or guilt...

...Unless one assumes darker motives, it is difficult to understand why liberals are driven to such apoplexy by this measure...

...Notwithstanding pretensions to majority status, though, they still remain a distinct and largely unorganized minority...

...Meanwhile, the movement's agenda has normally been characterized as constituting a rigid opposition to a litany of liberating causes-abortion rights, contraceptive rights, women's rights, gay rights, children's rights, and federally funded day-care-girded by simple-minded support for prayer in public schools and an inferred hostility to diversity, change, and all things intellectual and urbane...

...Allan C. Carlson RADICAL LIBERALS, ILLIBERAL FAMILIES The Pro-Family Movement has begun to fight back against the social engineering of the last twenty years, but despite the Republican resurgence it remains on the defensive...

...but rather in the sense of watching the values and mores within which their children have been raised slowly subverted by the perceived moral vacuum at the heart of the "helping professions...

...Family education," "values clarification," and sex education courses represent only the most visible forms which this organized erosion of traditional, parent-taught values have taken...

...For ideas related to those cited above, despite their transparent foolishness, had an influence on political developments in the 1970s...

...The Supreme Court's 1973 abortion decisions...

...Admittedly, the pro-family movement is, difficult to demarcate...

...They have conjured up visions of the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, and have regularly invoked the whispered words, "Moral Majority" or "Phyllis Schlafly," to scare young children or frighten wayward partisans back into the fold...

...She suggests quick initiatives on the Family Protection Act, focusing on those tax and education sections that would make an immediate difference in people's lives...

...At last year's White House Conference on Families, for example, virtually every delegate present- whether "straight" or "gay," "parent" or "family professional," "married" or mili-tantly "single," "traditional" or "life styled"-claimed to be pro-family...

...The pro-family coalition's demand for definitional clarity springs from the same rejection of recent phrenic legerdemain...

...What Onalee McGraw of the Heritage Foundation has called "an undeclared civil war" has been the result, an ideological struggle between "the Judeo-Christian ethic, based on God-given eternal law, and the secular humanist orthodoxy that rejects God and traditional values...

...The Forum 14 Report of the 1970 White House Conference on Children, for example, defined family as "a group of individuals in interaction," while the American Home Economics Association, an occasional fount of obscure sociology, views family "as a unit of two or more persons who share resources, share responsibilities for decisions, share values and have a commitment to one another over time...

...Pro-family activists have won a political battle or two...

...Yet in spite of apparent electoral success, the pro-family forces continue to face a powerful, clever, and implacable foe...

...It takes no great leap of imagination to appreciate that it is only a matter of time before Swedish family professionals, given their characteristic adherence to value-free humanism, will show religious indoctrination to be a particularly brutal form of psychological child abuse...

...the tax-subsidized celebration of International Women's Year...

...The federal bureaucracy, most universities, the relevant professions, the media, the federal courts, and, in some respects, the House of Representatives remain theirs...

...As incredible as it may sound, many American parents now live with the almost primeval fear that public schoolteachers and family professionals are in a league with the state to take away their children...

...In contrast, pro-family activists unashamedly declare that parenthood, birth, and the rearing of children are positive, even superior, social tasks...

...To be pro-family is to accept a common measure of right and wrong...

...To prevent sexual hang-ups in interactional as well as masturbatory sex," he concluded, "we have to start when children are barely toddlers...

...Since passage in 1979 of Sweden's notorious Parenthood and Guardianship Code, it has been a criminal offense for parents to spank, strike, intimidate, threaten, ostracize, ridicule, or otherwise "psychologically abuse" their children...

...The Family Protection Act, first introduced in Congress by Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, has been vilified by critics as a repressive monstrosity...

...Or ponder a 1972 contribution to the Family Coordinator by psychologist Janis Kelly which, after noting that women "cannot develop fully in a heterosexual context," offered the corollary that conditions allowing women "to love fully and without fear are at present met only in a homosexual setting...

...In consequence, family and school professionals can sometimes loom as modern equivalents of the faeries and trolls who, in former times, stole human children away during the night to raise in their own alien ways...

...Yet no political movement, however hostile towards procreation it might be, can long survive without initiating someone's children into its mysteries...

...Public schoolteachers-organized into political cadres by the National Educational Association and directed by the courts and assorted Departments of Education to inculcate secular and historically non-Western dogma in children- mold young minds in a "value free" direction...

...religious figures ranging from Jerry Fal-well to Michael Novak...

...Social workers, trained to scorn the middle-class values of family independence and personal responsibility, descend on parents with insinuations of child abuse on the flimsiest of evidence...

...Opposition by the pro-family coalition to the gay rights movement arises from the same revulsion towards the cult of sterility...

...Yet pro-family sentiment goes beyond blind allegiance to an ancient set of moral principles...

...Phantasms of Twin-kie-besotted imaginations...

...Yet on closer scrutiny, most provisions of the measure prove to be little more than efforts-admittedly, sometimes clumsy- to protect the rights of parents to raise children within their own value system, free from state interference...

...Post-election polls suggested that these voters provided a significant share of Reagan's popular electoral margin and may have tipped the balance in a number of senatorial contests, including those in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Alabama...

...There is apprehension that the great eighteenth-century champions of liberty were correct in their belief that a free society cannot exist without strong, internalized moral values, nor without well-defined and commonly accepted social norms...

...As this century's foremost philosopher of freedom, Friedrich Hayek, wrote in his masterpiece The Constitution of Liberty: "It is indeed a truth . . . that freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs and that coercion can be reduced to a minimum only where individuals can be expected as a rule to conform voluntarily to certain principles...

...A long and bitter struggle awaits those who defend traditional families before they and their children will again sleep in peace.and their children will again sleep in peace...

...the diffusion of ideological feminism through the academy, the media, the federal bureaucracy, and even the armed services...

...Connie Marshner, chairman of this group and the editor of Family Protection Report, expresses faith that Mr...

...A few more memorable examples of this intellectual catharsis should suffice...

...As Reagan's own Family Policy Advisory Board soon made clear, the pro-family coalition expects its reward...