Family Values
As time goes on, I get angrier and angrier with the right’s focus on preserving what they call ‘family values’. They will not only openly decry any changes to the status quo that could be a detriment to the ‘American Family’ (whatever that is supposed to mean), but if you press them hard enough, their underlying motivation for most of their beliefs is the same thing: ‘family values’.
Why not legalize gay marriage?
Because it would destroy the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
And what is wrong with that?
Well, it destroys the American Family.
So what?
The family is the glue that holds society together, and if it goes, our civilization will crumble to dust.
This is just an example of one of the things they base off of the values argument, but I have heard it used on the attack against things like gay adoption, sex education, and to justify censorship.
I am going to ask you to humor me for an out-there hypothetical. What would really happen if the family unit as we know it were completely done away with? What if marriage as a government recognized institution were totally abolished, or extended to animals and inanimate objects? What if a kid walking down the street were exposed to billboards and ads showing full on penetration on a daily basis?
Would people stop pairing off and reproducing? I highly doubt it. Would they stop caring for their children and wanting the best for them? Surely not. The government is not what is keeping fathers from abandoning their children, and single men from raping women on sight. Familial instincts are just that; instincts. They existed before government, and even when societies collapse they continue to exist.
And there it is; morals are something that’s internal, and need not be handed down from the state.
The real responsibility of the government is to ensure that the American way of life remains possible, not to preserve it. The moment they start legislating anything based on how a family ought to be is the moment when family values are really being threatened; nobody knows what is right for anybody else’s family.
And so we come to Sarah Palin. She claims to know what is good for everyone’s family, and she makes this very apparent.
-Good families do not start with sex out of wedlock (even though her first was conceived before marriage).
-Good families start when a baby is conceived, not necessarily when the parents are mature enough and financially capable to take care of it (even if the parents are seventeen).
-Good families don’t learn about sex and reproduction until it happens (even though her daughter was sneaking out for some independent study).
I won’t bring up the point of how socially/economically/environmentally irresponsible it is to have 5 children, because that is my personal family value.
The point is, she is hypocritical. That’s obvious. But what I am trying to get at here is that those values were not good for her family, and they aren’t good for every family in America, either. I am sure that they work for some people, but prescribing them as a moral goal for every family is silly.
I do not by any means think Sarah Palin is a bad mother. But by her own standards she is. I do not think her teenage daughter did any wrong either, but as much as Governor Palin tries to call it a ‘blessing’, it is in fact exactly the thing she is fighting so hard against.
Do away with your unrealistic ideals of what a family should be, and no family is a failure. And face it, you are not the only thing ensuring the existence of the family unit.