Contributors

...Contributors - David Brudnoy is an associate professor of history at Merrimack College, national aflairs commentator on WGBH-TV in Boston, and an associate of The Alternative...

...The Assault on the Family The assault on the family comes in many forms...

...By viewing marriage as a product of romantic love, the integrity of a stable family .is destroyed...

...Lippincott Company and has written articles for National Review, Modern Age, Rally, The University Bookman, The Intercollegiate Review, and The New Guard...

...Instead, they want to cure the modern family by making it even more modern: more autonomy for both partners (including sexual autonomy), more female careers in business, more day-care centers (financed, preferably, through coercive taxation), fewer binding vows, more impulse...

...Man, Economy and State, p. 441, footnote 35...

...Gary North is on the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education...

...The American family, while visibly shaken by the expansion of secularism and the inroads" of "'the modern state, will survive long after the heralds of new (or very ancient) Utopias without families have ceased from their labors of scribbling tracts...

...like all viable structures, it will not persist completely oblivious to changes, both external and internal...

...How crude a travesty of justice is this...

...Newsweek's scare article (Jan...

...Haven Bradford Gow is a college student whose articles have appeared in Intercollegiate Review, Modern Age, University Bookman, and elsewhere....James Grant is on the staff of the Baltimore Morning Sun...

...One of the most common in western society, from the Romans to the present, is the concept of romantic love...

...Contracts for mutual prostitution, homosexuality, pornography, heroin sales to anyone who has the money, and every other kind of "non-coercive" human depravity: these are all legitimate, since they add to human welfare (as all voluntary contracts must, he says: "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics," in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise...

...Conservatives therefore conclude that there are built-in limits on the extent to which society can be depersonalized...

...Roger Rosenblatt is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University...

...It is almost enough to make the conservative suspicious about Rothbard's claim that his social and economic analyses stem from totally neutral, rational presuppositions...

...Homosexuals, apparently, are hardest hit: up to 40 percent of new cases of syphilis occur among male homosexuals...

...The family, although under heavy attack from all sides, does survive, as the voluminous studies of Carle Zimmerman indicate...

...Pandemic, rather than epidemic, describes what has happened to the rate of VD since 1955...

...The number of cases of the two combined exceed the number of cases of strep throat, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, hepatitis, and tuberculosis combined...

...The radical autonomy of Ellen Peck's The Baby Trap is simply unacceptable to most women...

...A new repression is quite likely under such conditions...

...he is also the Literary Editor of The Alternative...

...they are, as Nisbet calls them, adolescent judges...

...The advent of gay liberation is symptomatic of cultural degeneracy...

...E. T. Veal is a graduate student at Yale University...

...The absurdity of that contemporary intellectual aberation known euphemistically as "womerfs liberation" rests ultimately on a misguided critique of the family...

...The family is even more fundamental than the process of western rationalization...

...Homosexuality is an ancient form of deviant behavior...

...And the marriage contract is just this kind of voluntary slavery...

...It may take several decades for this to happen, but if the challenge to the family posed by open homosexuality is permitted to flourish, then post-"pos-Christian" society will put an end to it...

...24, 1972), while a piece of propaganda for increasing governmental financial support of medical research and control programs (not a word was mentioned about informing youth of the immorality of promiscuity neutrality, you know), nevertheless offers startling data...

...The wages of sin are death, but God offers an advance on people's salary from time to time...

...That would be immoral...

...The arranged marriage, subject to a negative in cases of extreme hostility on the part of either prospective partner, served men, women, and society quite well...

...In contrast to the hip button that reads, "chastity is its own punishment," we find that the breakdown of the marriage bond‚ the only truly successful prophylactic against venereal disase has brought with it a huge personal and social cost...

...The family will survive...

...Deviations from sexual norms bring with them, as the sociologist might put it, "endogenous negative feedback...

...The phenomenon noted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, that there is a relationship between sexual continency ("repression") and social progress, was pursued by J.D...

...If for no other reason, it was useful for blaming your marraige's many failings on your parents' lack of insight rather than your own stupidity...

...The masochistic impulses of the public homosexuals will then be fulfilled...

...I suspect that when the tight-lipped female enthusiast (I am tempted to write "female impersonator") in her goggle glasses announced to the evening T.V...

...It is not surprising, (and a testimony to the family's strength) that the "Movement" finds most of its recruits in upper-middle class, intellectual neighborhoods and on college campuses, and not in the local laundromat and beauty parlors where the vast majority of women are to be found...

...In fact, it is more than enough...

...These Utopians live in mentally fabricated worlds...

...But not permanent, binding marriage contracts...

...He was trying (probably as a publicity stunt) to get a court to consider the following argument: if a partner can prove that at the time of the marriage he or she was actually in love, there are grounds for divorce on the basis of temporary insanity...

...randomly personal and capricious), devoid of love, legalistic (or terrifyingly an-tinomian), unwilling to grant the distinction between childhood and adulthood among its subjects, the state attempts to make perpetual children out of all men and women...

...It certaintly seems more honest than what actually pre--vails.in American law Historically, western culture has prospered when marriage was seen as a function of faith and character primarily, property secondarily, and romantic affection last...

...But when the surfacing of "the velvet underground" is possible, the erosion of moral standards by relativism is marked...

...Rothbard is a fine economist, but his social theories necessarily alienate conservatives...

...The momentary irrational "feelings" of two persons become the foundation of society's primary institution...

...No amount of data could prove this to our modern cultural relativists and ethical hedonists, but the warning is there irrespective of their dislike of Unwin's findings...

...The depersonalization and rationalization of modern western culture have produced major changes in all traditional, personalistic, status-oriented institutions, including the family...

...The concepts of binding law and permanent mutual obligation are undercut...

...Paul H. Weaver is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University and the Associate Editor of The Public Interest...

...The family is a viable institution...

...Yet in one area, defined as the area of "slavery," he would deny the right of men to make permanent, binding contracts...

...Somehow, a priori, by definition, forever and ever, rationally, inescapably, by the God Who probably does not exist and Who always is irrelevant to economic analysis, this kind of contract is forbidden...

...That would be a form of slavery...

...As infectious diseases, only the common cold exceeds them...

...Tamper with the integrity of the family, and your culture will pay a heavy price...

...Unwin in his now-ignored studies, especially Sex and Civilization (Oxford, 1934...

...Not disbelief in the statement, which is outrageously ridiculous, but in the fact that anyone could be so immature and stupid to say it...

...Pointing to the obvious weaknesses of the modern family, the libbers refuse to call for alterations that might solve the family's problems: marriage based on faith and character, property, and parental guidance...

...Like the socialist who sees the only cure for the obvious failure of socialism in the advent of even more socialism, so the libbers would like to repair the family by prescribing heavier doese of the acids of modernity...

...In culture after culture, much to his amazement PERSPECTIVE: David Brudnoy and discomfort (he was an old liberal humanist), he found that any deviation from monogamy brought with it a lessening of creativity...

...The challenge made by any flagrant exhibitionism of gay libbers will, in the long run, produce"" a major backlash, either through the civil government or through Klan-like activities of vigilante groups...

...George Carey is a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Editor of The Political Science Reviewer...

...When "mental cruelty" or "irreconcilable differences (unstated)" have become the escape clauses for marriages built upon the shifting sands of romantic love, Moran's little stunt does not seem too outlandish after all...

...news audience that science must find an alternative to pregnancy, since "pregnancy is barbaric," some 96 percent of the viewers shook their heads in disbelief...

...The epidemic proportions of venereal disease in the United States is one of those magnificent signs of the built-in regularity of social order...

...Kenneth P. Shorey works for J.B...

...C. Bascom Slemp is the chief Washington correspondent of The Alternative...

...Saint Paul catalogues it as one of the sins of Rome that were deserving of death...

...Jim Moran, generally regarded as a master of the practical joke (or mental hotfoot, as he likes to refer to the art), came close to the meaning of romantic love several years ago when he was able to enlist the support of several psychiatrists in a peculiar project...

...Contracts, yes, but not a permanent marriage contract...

...Not his brother's wife, his father's wife, his aunt, daughter, neighbor's wife, neighbor, or his Great Dane, hut to his wife...

...Another attack on the integrity of the family has come from the chief representative of the anarchist Right, Murray Rothbard...

...Rather than a school for responsibility, the "familistic state" creates a bureaucratic socialism that would transform society into a huge Skinner Box of perpetual youth and perpetual servitude...

...Chester Finn is a special assistant to Francis W. Sargent, governor of Massachusetts...

...When and if this ceases to be true, the end of this civilization is very near...

...But its familiar outline will persist: for this will a man leave his parents and cleave unto his wife...

...Cultural leadership would shift to some newer monogamous culture...

...Such changes would, if unlimited, call into question the very function of the family...

...Some 85,000 new cases of syphilis occur annually, and an incredible 624,000 new cases of gonorrhea...

...Rothbard has distinguished himself as a major defender of the right of voluntary contract...

...It would be better for all concerned "hatT the underground either disappeared, or at least stayed circumspectly underground...

...Women's lib, gay lib, sado-masochism, trial marriages, co-ed dorms, situational ethics, and cultural relativism will not survive, except in their underground, culturally impotent forms...

...indeed, he would prefer to see the complete abolishment of the civil government, resting the whole of society on individually contracting men and women...

...men and women are unlikely to permit such a public flaunting of the integrity of sexual union in marriage...

...But I am optimistic here...