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It’s All About The Children – Part 2

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Children have the best chance for success in a stable, traditional family, including both a mother and father.  This fact has been supported by numerous studies http://www.townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/le20041223.shtml, and it makes sense.  It takes both a mother and a father to create a child, and children need the skills and talents of both parents as well as the economic security provided by the traditional family unit, in which the parents are committed to supporting each other and their children.  Indeed, thanks to Judaism’s demand that sex be confined to marriage, the traditional family has become the cradle of our strong civilization.  So why has our government done so much to try to undermine the traditional family?

First, government established a welfare system that rewards women for having children out of wedlock.  Who needs a husband when you can marry the state?  It should come as no surprise that, with such a reward system in place, the number of illegitimate births has skyrocketed, putting a much larger percentage of children at risk than before the welfare system began.

Next, government established no-fault divorce.  The state continues to enforce other types of contracts, but the marriage contract is easily voided at the whim of either party.  Women who sacrifice careers in order to raise children, with the expectation that their marriage contract offers them some protection, may later find themselves abandoned and unsupported when their marriage contract is not honored by their husbands and is not enforced by the state.  This failure of the state to enforce the marriage contract undermines the traditional role of women, pushing them out of the home and into the workplace, away from their traditional role of raising children.

High taxes also push women out of the home and into the workplace.  Women who would prefer to stay home and raise their children are forced to go to work in order to support government programs, which supposedly solve problems that were created when children did not have sufficient support at home.

And now we have the homosexual “marriage” issue.  Instead of elevating the traditional family as the ideal, as the cradle of civilization, and as the living arrangement that provides children the greatest chance for success in life, there is a powerful movement to treat the traditional family arrangement as just one of a number of equally valid options.  http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34587 

Since we know that the traditional family provides the best opportunity for the success of children, why does government continue to undermine the traditional family? 

First, it’s about money and power.  If government pretends to care about the children, it can impose taxes to support all kinds of government programs “for the children”.  This gives the bureaucrats lots of money and power, even as it harms families and children. 

Second, many people have a socialist, collectivist notion that parents cannot be trusted to raise their children, because they will instill their own values in their children; instead, in order to remake society into an ideal imagined by the elites and to instill the “correct” values in children, the children must be separated as much as possible from their parents and raised by the collective, the state, or the “village”.  Taxing families to provide services such as a “free education” forces mothers to go to work and leaves their children in the hands of the state, thereby furthering the collectivist agenda. 

Third, many people want no standards for their behavior; they want to be as promiscuous as they choose without any accountability or social stigma attached.  Undermining the institution of marriage and the ideal of the traditional family through no-fault divorce and homosexual “marriage” helps erase those standards and makes those promiscuous folks feel better about themselves. 

While there are numerous reasons for state policies that undermine the traditional family, the reasons don’t really matter to the children.  What matters is that those policies cause many children to be deprived of a traditional two-parent family, leaving them without the support and direction they need in order to grow and thrive. 

As we consider proposals for new government policies in the coming year, let’s consider what policies will support and what policies will undermine the traditional family unit.  If we want to support families, for a start, we should consider reducing government spending and taxation, allowing parents to spend their education dollars as they choose, and establishing a marriage contract that will actually be enforced. 

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