Family Matters

...Although, as is the custom in an election year, the quarrel about The Family will be waged in gross and muddy terms, all mixed up with God, flag and sandlot baseball...

...Hearing from the Benighted Luce most reformist movements, the liberal approach to family matters has been piecemeal...

...What is deeply satisfying is to blame other people...

...One need feel no nostalgia for the patriarchal household to recognize that family bonds are being severely strained throughout much of the world -not by radical ideologues but by technological and social change...

...Sometimes, instead of being portrayed as villains, they come across as dimwits or clowns...

...Although the press is generally careful to treat most forms of religion most gingerly, with a hush of reverence for anybody who mouths the name of the Lord, lately a wise-guy tone has crept into reports on the fundamentalist upsurge...

...Not only are their paychecks being stretched thin, but their values are being mocked, their neighborhoods are being disrupted and their families, havens of security, are spinning out of control...

...But its present significance owes a good deal to liberal successes over the past couple of decades in moving the state into areas once held to be The Family's special domain...

...My guess is that a pretty fair consensus exists on the subject, that the great majority of us are neither authoritarian despots nor commune-prone experimentalists...

...they are never heroes...

...No great blame attaches here...

...Although many sitcoms may still rely on old-fashioned sexy adornments, the explicit message is invincibly liberationist...

...So it is an achievement of the Enlightenment to have wrenched control of certain matters from their grips...

...Add to this school busing, racial quotas in the classroom and on the job, high divorce rates, and other symptoms of spiritual distress at a time of economic dolor, and one can begin to appreciate the free flowing indignation that is adding fuel to this year's Republican campaign...

...One wants to blame somebody for such continuing affronts...

...God-fearing notions of the proper life tend to be on the narrow side, and tolerance of differences is not a strong suit of those in possession of the truth...

...And I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born...

...This time round it gains extra force from an alliance of the born-agains and conservative Catholics...

...Every change reverberates and the reverberations may be thunderous...

...Even the booboisie, after all, have feelings...

...What they see is this: X-rated movies occupy the main streets of towns across the country, and in the same vicinity can be found dirty-book stores where lots of kids and other things hang out...

...When the Republican platform and those who stand thereon lament over what has been happening to The Family, it is evident whom they blame: Washington social planners, New York intellectuals, Hollywood fad mongers, overprivileged undergraduates-all those elements, alien to certain sections of middle America, which have substituted synthetic foreign made goods by Darwin, Marx and Freud for American homespun...

...The Cost of Enlightenment Before breaking out in a rash of sympathy for these folks, we had better recall that they have not as a group shown much interest in the values or liberties of anybody but themselves...

...With regard to the freedom of the individual for choice with regard to abortion, there's one individual who is not being considered at all...

...They are portrayed as benighted, the parents who do not understand their children, the narrow-lipped nonreaders who want to censor controversial works, the buttoned-up burghers resisting wholeseome change...

...Has state intervention become unduly intrusive...

...Yesterday Indians, today homosexuals...

...The extent of their loss can be gauged by prime-time television...

...Perhaps that is too much to ask in the commotion of political skirmish...

...As a matter of fact, many of them seem to have been converted...

...That can be very irritating...

...Yet divisions there are, and the celebrated reassessment reportedly under way of the dimmed vision of a liberal society will not get far without reflection on the place of The Family in our society...

...if you prick them they don't say thanks...

...If they had any inkling of what Tom Paine preached, they would be appalled that the Reverend Reagan should go about quoting him...

...If our fundamentalists had it in their power, we would go back to Sunday closings...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Family Matters Let us try to see what they see when they look out at America-those people who take the trouble to attend rallies for Ronald Reagan and participate in other evangelical occasions, who don't live next door or come to dinner, who (given heaven's protection) will never marry any of our sisters...

...This was true of civil rights, and it is true of women's rights...

...The child-labor laws, after all, were attacked on the grounds that it is not the business of the government to tell a parent how he may exploit or abuse his child...

...There is a constituency under pressure...

...sometimes some of us need help with the kids, but few of us are altogether helpless...

...And just as anyone observing the Republican convention could spot the enemies of Enlightenment, so anyone watching the Democratic convention could spot the enemies of The Family...

...it is not very satisfying to blame the pill or the automobile or the TV set or abstract social forces...

...But the piecemeal approach, particularly when accompanied by nasty polemics, helps to explain why every surge of reformism invites a countersurge of reaction as the implications are felt by those in the middle...

...Sex-education classes in the public schools are teaching youngsters how to get away with doing what their parents would prefer they not do at all, and introducing them to ways of doing it that their parents have never comfortably enjoyed...

...Listen to the Reverend Ronald Reagan: "I think ail of us should have a respect for innocent life...

...Because the people who make the shows are disposed toward bicoastal permissiveness, and because the nature of the market requires pandering to youngish sensibilities, television can be counted on to be no more than a beat behind whatever cause appears to be on the move, in the direction of liberation...

...Yet each time the most passionate right-to-lifers, anti-evolutionists, anti-sexual liberationists tune into their favorite shows, they may very well find that they recognize the heavies of the evening as their friends and neighbors...

...Their educational horizons tend to be limited, and although they may lately have come to fancy IQ tests that can be interpreted as demonstrating racial inferiority, as a group their own IQ averages set no records...

...Oughtn't we by now be more sceptical of the experts...

...The hand of the bureaucrat or specialist often turns out to be much gentler than the hand of a flesh and blood relation...

...Abortion has joined freedom of speech, press, pornography and contraception as one of the rights extended by the founders to Americans in their quest for a more perfect union...

...Often, the way the message is conveyed is silly, but that is television, and given the possible alternatives, it has done some service to the nation...

...The exalting of The Family is the latest expression of a nativist spirit that is never far from the surface in this land and that keeps popping up in response to pressure or opportunity...

...Not many people like to be told, either, that they are ignorant and backward because they don't see abortion as a tribute to the human spirit...

...What prerogatives are left to The Family when the argument is advanced that teen-aged girls need not be required to mention to their mothers that they are planning to have an abortion...

...The airing is welcome...

...But the bureaucrat-specialist forces have grown drunk on their own righteousness and expertise...

...Women's Liberation is setting wife against husband, daughters against parents, strewing confusion in accustomed and valued relationships, shaking up what little stability remains to a family in these disordered times...

...Where are the tariffs on imported ideas...

...It may impel more of us to ponder what sort of family life in fact suits best this country at this time...

...For persons of a liberal bent, such an alliance-truculent, rigid, unedifying -has precious little to commend it...

...Very few parents enjoy hearing that they are less competent to deal with their offspring than a Master of Social Work, a civil servant, a politican from Brooklyn, or a Federal commission...

...There have been exposes of the large sums of money drawn down by television preachers, cautions about the political power of these fellows, and intimations of ridicule for persons who express doubts about theories of evolution...

...Drug use is so widespread that law enforcement officials have for all practical purposes given up efforts to snuff it out...

...Nor are the folks who are making millionaires out of TV Bible-thumpers the brightest sparks in the land...

...One presses for sex education, for legal abortion, for easier divorce, for special treatment of juvenile offenders, for laws to protect young children, without pausing to put together the implications of these severally worthy endeavors...

...This can be seen in the consumer and environmental movements as well as in matters concerning The Family...

...Reaction is also heated up by the tendency of the virtuous to flaunt their successes and revile their adversaries, not to mention phrasing issues in the starkest terms: Federal payments for abortion become a matter of "right" rather than social policy, and the Equal Rights Amendment becomes the burning cause of the century...

...Whatever one's reservations about the esthetic component of commercial television, it is an exemplary indicator of the liberal agenda at any given moment...

...That's the one who's being aborted...

...Their historic differences are put aside, temporarily we may be sure, as they join in defense of the way things ought to be...