Why “Value” Families?
by Bruce Frohnen
In responding to a recent post of mine
criticizing our liberal culture for its hostility toward the
traditional family, a commenter wrote: “I don’t know a single liberal
who … doesn’t value (and participate in) both traditional and
non-traditional families.” I think it is important to examine this
liberal response to conservative criticism, not because the issue can be
“settled,” but because it can tell us why liberals and conservatives so
often seem to be talking past one another when it comes to social
issues.
Conservatives (like me) often are accused of being unfairly
censorious in accusing liberals of undermining primary institutions like
the family. After all, the argument goes, we talk about “attacks” on
relationships liberals genuinely value. And there is a way in which
this is true—a way that shows why the “culture wars” are not likely to
end any time soon.
When someone tells you that he and his liberals friends “value (and
participate in) both traditional and non-traditional families” that
person expects a fight about just what a “non-traditional family” might
be. Most liberals, in my experience, are loaded for bear on this
question. “What, you mean just because both parents aren’t present, or
both happen to be male, or female, or the family is a mixed one, having
been through one or more divorces, or there is no marriage certificate,
that it somehow isn’t ‘real’? Well how intolerant and narrow-minded is
that?”
If true, this charge would be a serious one. But it is not. Tragedies
occur, as they always have. Children are left to be raised by a single
parent—neither death nor abandonment is new. Children are raised by
maiden aunts, struggling uncles, and other relatives or adoptive
parents. Broken families seek to reform in the wake of one or more
tragedies. And common law marriage grew up to recognize the rights of
children and spouses in situations where marriages are difficult to
obtain or one spouse (or both) persists in refusing to solemnize the
relationship.
Bruce Frohnen is Professor of Law at the Ohio Northern University
College of Law. He is also a senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center
and author of many books including The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism, and the editor of Rethinking Rights (with Ken Grasso), and The American Republic: Primary Source.
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