Freedom and the Family: The Family Crisis and the Future of Western Civilization

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/06/freedom-and-the-family-the-family-crisis-and-the-future-of-western-civilization.html

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Zimmerman pointed out that the state views the family as a threat, eviscerates the family, co-opts its critics and sponsors family-hostile intellectuals, and demands supremacy over society in general and the family in particular. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, “the state helps to break it up.” The state constantly aspires to reduce the family to its instrument. “The state wishes to have only enough family power left as is needed to achieve the functions of government.” In the United States during the nineteenth century, “law piled on law, and government agency upon government agency” until by 1900“the state had become master of the family.” The result (in 1947!) is that “the family is now truly the agent, the slave, the handmaiden of the state.”

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The Divorce Revolution

Some four decades ago, at the height of the sexual revolution, the Western world embarked on one of the boldest social experiments in its history. With little public discussion, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that ended marriage as an enforceable contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family. Government can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other. Maggie Gallagher aptly titled her 1996 book The Abolition of Marriage.

The full implications of the “no-fault” revolution have never really been publicly debated. “The divorce laws…were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion,” writes Melanie Phillips. “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”[8]