All in the Family

...But in order to see the battles to shore up the institution of the American family as a public fight worth fighting, we need—as Jennifer Roback Morse demonstrates in Love and Eco-nomics—to think our way through the social and economic costs of abandoning the traditional family...

...It was the universal orientation of married couples towards the education, upbringing, and civilizing of their children that constituted the key to the relative stability of marriage and family in past eras of dramatic socioeconomic change...

...It is on this point that William Bennett is at his best, keenly aware that such behaviors are mortal enemies of family stability...

...The Broken Hearth is a wake-up call to all who imagine that "family issues" are only something to be exploited for the votes of social conservatives on Election Day...

...Most of our social pathologies (crime, imprisonment rates, welfare, educational underachievement, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, depression, sexually transmitted diseases) are manifestations, direct and indirect, of the crack-up of the modern American family...

...the latter because it denies the procreative and sexually complimentary nature of marriage...

...His bestselling The Book of Virtues, following his term as the secretary of education, and The Death of Outrage established him as one of the nation's most popular defenders of the traditional moral order...

...Nor, she argues, is the mother's investment of time, effort, and love into the task of caring for her child...

...While that may seem obvious, it is not, as Morse points out, accounted for in the free market worldview...

...A self-identified libertarian, Morse contends that such a relentlessly materialistic way of looking at human behavior is wholly insufficient to explain the dynamics of families...

...Although he grants that refuting the "liberationists"—those who see the traditional family as an antiquated, repressive institution that should be deconstructed out of existence—is a priority, Bennett contends that this challenge is, in some ways, easier than dealing with "the apathy and surrender" of those who know better but are unwilling to give battle...

...In fact, the contractual mentality, which looks solely for one's optimum personal benefit, has been one of the primary forces undermining marriage as an institution in this society...

...A more pragmatic reason for conservatives to focus on family stability as a public policy issue cannot be imagined...

...That can only accelerate the family decline at the root of our most pressing—and expensive—social problems...

...William J. Bennett has always been something of an exception to this rule...

...Morse points out that, in truth, there is "literally no such thing as a 'single parent,' " since "some third party is always in the background, helping the mother who is unconnected to the father of her child...

...In all the debates about child care and family structure, it's essential never to lose track of this vital insight...

...Morse's efforts to reconsider the ways in which we typically think about families is most striking in her chapter entitled "The Mother of All Myths," about the myth of the "single parent...

...Morse starts with the fact that babies are not freely choosing, rationally calculating beings who make considered judgments of their best interests...

...babies and their needs are not truly factors in the ideological universe of laissez-faire...

...When you set aside single moms, divorced wives, and unmarried women, the gender gap tends to vanish: Married women vote Republican...

...But there is no such thing as neutrality in the matter of family policy...

...As family breakdown progresses, the expectation increases that government should step into the breech to provide the social and economic stability naturally found in families...

...There are few matters of more profound public consequences than the condition of marriage and families," Bennett writes...

...While he acknowledges that reversing these trends is, first and foremost, a matter of convincing individuals of the old wisdom that true happiness, contentment, and security are only to be found within the haven of the traditional family, Bennett does not shy away from the fact that reversing the collapse of that institution necessarily entails making the political case against both the no-fault divorce regime and the gay-rights agenda...

...Many on the libertarian right, wary of seeming to endorse one particular freelychosen "family structure" over another, blanch at tax policies that support the traditional family or acknowledge the essential social and economic role of parents...

...Along the way, Bennett points to the copious evidence that the divorce culture and the legitimization of homosexual behavior have had devastating effects on children and adults alike, despite their promises of liberation...

...Government policies that acknowledge parents' contribution to society and to the economy are the only political alternative to costly proposals to further subsidization of dual-income families and commercial day care as a way of addressing the growing difficulties working parents have in fulfilling their obligations to both employer and children...

...BY BRIAN ROBERTSON The phrase "family values" has always seemed an empty one on the lips of American politicians...

...In the absence of determined and thoughtful policy proposals to help parents, the day-care establishment—made up of media, academia, and lobbyists—will carry the day and co-opt the child-friendly banner in the public debate...

...ly pulpit of his public positions to instruct his fellow citizens about the moral principles that underlie the institutions of a free society...

...nal investment...

...As Jennifer Roback Morse points out in her recent book Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work, the strong strain of individualism in modern conservatism makes it difficult to examine the family with anything other than a purely utilitarian analysis...

...A mother, or father for that matter, is not continually calculating all the ways in which care for a child is a ratioTo see the battle for the American family as worth fighting, we need to understand the social and economic costs of abandoning it...

...Bennett neatly demolishes this facile relativism with a section on "The Family in History" in which he conclusively shows that the solid core of mother-and-father-with-children has, despite all the incidental changes, remained constant...

...The conservative editors at the highly respected Economist, for example, have argued that the "unprecedented burst of agonizing in Western society about the collapse of the family" merely betrays an unseemly historical and cultural parochialism: "Maybe today's Western family, in all of its many jumbled forms—one-parent-headed, second-time-around-headed, grandparent-headed, peopled with half siblings of stepsiblings, or combinations thereof— is simply returning to the complex, diverse state in which in fact [the family] spent most of the last millennium...

...Those dynamics, Morse contends, go beyond the realm of materialistic and rational consideration of self-interest, which is one of the reasons that domestic life has traditionally been conceived of as something separated from the commercial forces of the market...

...Throughout his time in public life, he has not been timid about using the bulBrian Robertson, an editor at Regnery Publishing in Washington, D.C., is the author of There's No Place Like Work...

...it is the collapse of that orientation that accounts for the unprecedented levels of divorce, illegitimacy, cohabitation, and fatherlessness that we witness today...

...The effort to downplay the importance of this decline, Bennett observes, is not restricted to the fever swamps of the academic left...

...Morse, a free market economist at the Hoover Institution, argues that those family relationships ought not to be subjected to the sort of cost-benefit analysis that characterizes the usual laissez-faire understanding of human activity...

...The "new conventional wisdom," says Bennett, is that there is no such thing as the family, and it has become so commonplace a view that even a publication like the Economist can assert it as a simple—and morally neutral—reality of modern life...

...Measures of "family decline" are, according to this way of thinking, only indications that families are taking on new and different forms...

...These phenomena don't indicate the "evolution" of the institution of the family, according to Bennett, but its collapse...

...The person who appears to be raising a child all by herself has substituted for the other parent some combination of market-provided child care, employment income, and government assistance...

...One of the more interesting insights into current voting patterns is that the much discussed "gender gap" is largely a function of marital status...

...If we view that investment of the mother solely in terms of her direct or indirect benefit, our analytical tools fall short of accounting for the reality of mother-love...

...Like the parent-child bond, the relation of spouses in a marriage is not analogous to other human contracts...

...All surveys show that parents wish to invest more time in caring for their own children...

...Laissez-faire analysis, while useful in explaining economic dynamics of the market, does not suffice to explain the dynamics within the family...

...And now, with The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, Bennett looks at family breakdown in the United States...

...the fact that the nuclear family of late-twentieth-century Western society is in eclipse should cause no more concern than did the demise of other seemingly "permanent" family forms throughout history...

...He persuasively argues in The Broken Hearth that the already-complete revolution in divorce law and the imminent normalization of samesex marriage are both directly destructive of the institution of the family: the former because it has annihilated the legal, economic, and even psychological security that the marriage bond provides to spouses...

...In particular, it makes it impossible to argue against same-sex marriage, cohabitation, and illegitimacy, all of which were once easily seen as inherently destructive of family welfare...

...Bad as is the situation of the American family," he writes, "we still have within us the power to change our ways and reclaim our legacy...

...But the truth is, there is also a considerable ideological element to the reluctance of those on the right in addressing the family issues that Bennett raises...

...That's because those who use it are very reluctant to say what it means...

...Unless the breakdown of the American family is addressed directly, any attempt to ameliorate our social problems is doomed...

...For a politician— whose constituency is bound to include a vast assortment of divorced couples, single moms, cohabiting young professionals, and baby boomers with family histories that are models of instability— it's just too risky to explain in any detail the origins and consequences of the family breakdown that afflicts American society...

...Our difficulty is finally that the rel-ativistic view of family as merely one more matter of individual preference in a consumerist democratic culture undermines any attempt to make a moral, legal, or policy distinction between traditional marriage oriented towards the welfare of children and other possible domestic arrangements...

...One major barrier to grappling with this truth, Bennett notes, is the increasingly influential school of thought which holds that "the family" is, in fact, a constantly evolving, highly artificial social construct with no necessary and set form...