The family is the fundamental unit of society

In discussing the family we must keep foremost in our minds that America is a nation of destiny. America is different. It is unique. Although we live over 200 years into its existence, we must not forget how America came to be and how revolutionary it was and it remains.

Responsible citizens and especially elected officials must also remember that for America, or any nation, to remain strong, the family must be maintained and strengthened as its most fundamental unit.

National survival requires its citizens to value a variety of principles and virtues. The list may be infinite but includes work, honesty, thrift, empathy, compassion, faith, service, sacrifice, education, integrity, responsibility, patriotism, civility, respect, knowledge, honor and gratitude. These, along with many others, when truly valued lead to survival, even the prosperity of a nation.

These can and should be taught and upheld in all parts of society, from the classroom to the corporate boardroom; from the religious assembly to the legislative assembly. Every unit of society should consciously and overtly promote the assimilation of the principles and virtues that secure national survival.

Nevertheless, the most effective and long lasting forum for teaching these in a manner that enable us to actually come to deeply value them is the family. Mother and father in the very act of providing for, protecting and nurturing their children, teach these almost unconsciously yet so profoundly that where the traditional family strives to maintain itself we most often arrive at adulthood valuing these vital elements of national survival.

America’s Destiny depends on the Family

Sometimes we refer to these as “family values” because we see them so readily in the traditional family. What they are in reality are principles and virtues best and most effectively taught in the traditional family so that children grow naturally to value them. When the majority of society value these principles and virtues then the nation will survive and flourish. America’s destiny is not yet fulfilled. America continues to be the most consequential nation on earth. Its survival is of vital importance to all the world. We, therefore, must rise to our responsibility to promote that which will maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society because it is the fundamental unit of society. The family instills that which will secure our national survival.

While all areas of society play important and even vital roles in our national success, none surpass the family in its importance or ability to secure national survival.

Social scientists and historians consistently link the collapse of prominent civilizations to the breakdown of the family. It is revealing that the conquest of family generally takes the form less of a frontal assault and more of an infiltration. Nor should we assume that enemies of the family are simply misguided. What clever tactics to erode family defenses by elevating lesser societal institutions to equal or superior status to the family. What an amazing strategy to redefine the family as simply an aggregate of individuals committed to the communal welfare of the group.

The greatest challenge to protecting the status of the family stems from its very acceptance as a societal icon. With the passage of time, those charged with its defense begin to gravitate toward complacency, while those who would damage the family grow bold. Without the sustained effort of a committed defense force, gradually, the once spotless citadel on the hill devolves from society’s defining paradigm to the rubble of cliché - ripe for plunder.

How Marriage Benefits Women

Notwithstanding the mountain of propaganda directed at the family by social scientists in recent decades, men and women are very different within the framework of the family. Each brings a different set of skills, mindsets, talents, outlooks on life, as well as prejudices, biases, forms of discipline and reward. Each are critical to family stability. Each provide aspects of nurturing, love and training children to become productive members of society.

Despite a generation of rhetoric designed to mislead women into believing that marriage is not in the best interest of themselves or their children, the evidence argues otherwise. Intimate-partner violence among never married women is 32.9 per 1000 women, according to the National Crime Victimization Resource Guide. It is 14.7 per 1000 women among those who were “ever married,” which includes married, divorced and separated. Senator Rick Santorum notes that domestic violence rates for married women is just 2.6 per thousand. These are stunning statistics in favor of marriage as a safer haven for women.

Additionally, mothers who have never married are 300% more likely to become victims of all forms of violent crime than women who have been married, even those who are divorced or separated. Wives are 30% more likely to rate their health as excellent. They are less likely to suffer long term health problems and their mortality rates are less than one-third of unmarried women. Married women also enjoy a 50% increase in income over single women.

How Marriage Benefits Children

Evidence that living in a two-parent home - over a single-parent home - provides children with both safety and a better chance for success, once they leave the home, are overwhelming:
· They are 44% less likely to be physically abused,
· 47% less likely to suffer physical neglect,
· 43% less likely to suffer emotional neglect.

While the United States does not measure child abuse by family structure, British data on child abuse by family structure indicates that serious child abuse is dramatically less likely in the intact married family:
· It is 6 times higher in the step family,
· 14 times higher in the always-single-mother family,
· 20 times higher in cohabiting-biological parents family, and
· 33 times higher when the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend who is not the father of her children.

Fatherless children are three times more likely to fail at school and two times as likely to experience emotional or behavioral problems requiring psychiatric treatment. They are three times more likely to commit suicide. Boys raised with two parents are also half as likely to commit a crime leading to incarceration by their early thirties.

The Role of Father

“The greatest social tragedy of the last 30 years has been the collapse of fatherhood,” wrote Wade F. Horn in 1997. “The retreat from fatherhood began in the 1960s, gained momentum in the 1970s, and hit full stride in the 1980s.” Now, as Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Horn relates a confrontation he experienced while conducting a workshop on restoring fatherhood in the mid-1990s, “I was lectured by a social worker that it is not just incorrect, but dangerous, to use the word ‘father’. The correct term is ‘parent’."

Those of us who lived through the decades cited by Dr. Horn remember well when social scientists began to lecture American society - in popular magazines as well as scientific journals - about the necessity for gender neutral parenting, but focusing their attacks almost exclusively at men. They argued:
· Mothers and fathers should both parent the same way.
· Fathers are doing it wrong.
· To be a good father, a man must be more like mother.

This escalated to the point that psychologists and sociologists grew confident in dismissing fathers entirely from the family structure. In 1982, University of Virginia psychologist Charlotte Patter stated flatly that “children don’t need a father to develop normally.” Some even cited the benefits of fatherless homes, like Barbara Cashion in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, who asserted that girls growing up without fathers were more independent, have higher IQs, and enjoy higher self--esteem than girls growing up with fathers.

The last few decades have proven that any idea, even society shattering philosophies can gain substance if we are told them often enough. In a poll conducted in 1994, asking young adults if "One parent can bring up a child as well as two parents," 35% of men between 18 and 29 years old, and 62% of women agreed. It is little wonder that fathers and mothers wishing to exit difficult marriages grabbed these ideas like a lifeline. Men could flee the family and still claim they were doing the children a favor, while mothers could work to exclude the influence of ex-husbands and alienated fathers from their children, with confidence that they were doing the correct thing.

Thankfully, as we enter the 21st century, these ideas increasingly are being repudiated. After years of irreparable damage, now, study after study are debunking the idea of the obsolete father. And, they are not utilizing junk science or personal animosity but quantifiable data.

In Defense of Family – The Need for Political Representatives as Champions of Family

Each individual, notwithstanding their place or standing within a specific family unit, owes an allegiance to the family as an institution. In a society governed by laws - taking into account the historic tendency of the state to supplant the family - all citizens owe a responsibility to champion the family by choosing their political representatives wisely.

Government itself must function as the stalwart defender of the family. To do less endangers the framework of our freedom. At every level of the political process, our political representatives must ask themselves - and require the same of other political leaders - how do our laws and regulations affect the family? Do our public policies strengthen marriage and the family, or weaken them?

We must not settle for mere rhetorical defense of the family. We must require an actual accounting, from taxes to spending; from crime to regulation. We must require that those who govern consider how the laws they pass will affect the family. It is time that we require our laws to first, “do no harm,” and then that they maintain and strengthen the family as society’s most fundamental unit.