The Devalued Family

The American family and those who govern us are locked in a mighty struggle over resources. The more the federal government’s domestic agenda grows, the weaker the family becomes, as family resources and even basic functions are preempted by the monolith within the Beltway.

Despite the pro-family rhetoric, we all acknowledge that our resources are finite. The commandeering of these resources is done through the use of power, and another name for power is money. Money gives you the power to make another person scrub your floors, write a will for you, cut your hair. In fact, all of society works on the exchange of power for goods and services through the brokerage of money.

There are three social institutions in Western society that supply humans with the needs of everyday life: food, clean clothes, a roof and custodial care. These are the family, private charities and the government. Charities, formerly funded mostly by families, are reaching into Uncle Sam’s pockets more and more these days.

We’ve got a little phrase in our Declaration of Independence whose misinterpretation has gotten us into most of our trouble. That phrase is, “All men are created equal.” What this phrase does not say is that all men are guaranteed equal outcomes in life. Yet the federal government, by misrepresenting the concept of equality, has raised its vision of control of the resources of daily life to the status of dogma. And it is grabbing resources earned by families through increased taxes and Social Security payments while then using these resources to implement its version of what should be provided to individuals, like condoms for teenagers and fat-filled noonday meals for school children whose families don’t like to get up early to pack lunches.

I want to tell you about two real mothers from equivalent social and educational backgrounds. They both have little ones in primary school; the working mom’s kid is a boy and the welfare mom’s child is a girl. The working mom told me, with tears in her eyes, that teachers consider her a poor mother because her job prevents her from being at daytime school events. Yet they consider the woman on welfare to be a terrific mom. Of course, the welfare mom’s food and housing are being funded by the federal government, which does so by taking part of the working mom’s salary, in the form of taxes. Whose family is being weakened by the federal money grab to take over the function of the family?

I’ve seen families who could quite easily pay for a cane for Grandma but instead demanded a prescription for it because the feds were supposed to provide for their family member in her old age. Welfare fathers abandon their progeny because the government will provide, usually much better than they can. And now we have the absurd circumstance earlier this year in Louisiana, where a court has upheld the right to Social Security payments of a child conceived artificially from the sperm of a man dead a year before her birth. Talk about the fatherless family!

And parents who would love to provide the ideal of stay-at-home mothering for their children can’t do so because the federal government demands a transfer of money from them that forces mom to return to the workplace. But never fear, because such organizations as the Children’s Defense Fund and its umbrella lobbying organization, Generations United, hope to have uniform day care centers--potentially government funded and controlled, of course--available to families whose two-parent incomes feed the federal beast.

Our families, like the seven fatted calves of Joseph’s biblical dream, are being devoured by the federal government in the resource famine brought on by federal control.