Barack Obama’s Statist Quest to Reshape the Family

by Francisco Gonzalez ~ September 5, 2008

As I noted in my previous post, the family is where most Americans believe we ought to start because the family is where we all, in fact, do start. As noted in the recently republished book Family and Civilization, human experience points us in the direction of the family.

Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman notes that:

“No problem is more interesting and vital to us than that of the family. The child is born into a family and sees the world through its eyes. His introduction to civilization is through the family. At first he is only a child in a system of social relations consisting of a unity of husband and wife, parent and child. Later he learns that there are relatives (grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) who are closer to him than other people. In time he acquires the idea of friends, and then of strangers. Then he learns that he secures his status through his family. He is an American, an Englishman, a Chinese because he is born into a parental unit that belongs to those nationalities. His parents belong to a certain community and so does he, and they are subject to its rules and privileges. He can and must go to the schools of his community. As the child grows up, he founds a family of his own where the roles are reversed; instead of remaining a child, he becomes a husband (wife), parent, leader, breadwinner, responsible person, disciplinarian, and status conferrer. In the course of a lifetime, most people play changing roles within the organization known as the family.”

It seems self-evident that the center and progenitor of our lives and civilization is the family, and marriage is the cement of every healthy and well-ordered family. Marriage, in the words of pro-family advocate Jennifer Roback Morse, “is society’s normative institution for both sexual activity and child rearing.” Marriage is an organic pre-political institution that emerges spontaneously from society, says Morse. “Government does not create families any more than the government creates jobs. Just as people have a natural propensity to ‘truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,’ in Adam Smith’s famous words from the second chapter of The Wealth of Nations, we likewise have a natural tendency to couple, procreate, and rear children. People instinctively create families, both as couples and as a culture, without any support from the government whatsoever.”

The alternative to the view of marriage asserted here, as a naturally occurring, pre-political institution is the progressive view, like Barack Obama’s, which defines marriage as a strict creation of the state, as if marriage could be created out of whole cloth and reinvented at will. So-called “no-fault divorce,” “same-sex marriage,” “polygamous marriage,” “polyandrous marriage,” are necessarily not only ad hoc and whimsical institutions, they are in actual fact, meaningless combinations of words; unintelligible statements. Such phrases do not even rise to the dignity of error and if accepted, by definition, mean the abolition of marriage. Marriage as a formal institution will have been defined out of existence.

Obama argues that civil unions for same-sex couples shouldn’t be a “lesser thing” than marriage. If this view is true, however, then as has been noted, the principle upon which it stands also says that the state can recreate marriage in any form it chooses. Implicit in this view is not only the abolition of marriage but the illusion that the state is the ultimate source of social order.