Parshall Partners

Abolish The Family?

         Dwight L. Moody once famously said, “I believe the family was established long before the church, and my duty is to my family first. I am not to neglect my family.”  He would be stunned to learn just how much the family is being neglected today.

         Sophie Lewis, a feminist theorist, has released a book entitled, Abolish the Family, A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. In the book, Lewis argues that the traditional family needs to be replaced with something she calls “full surrogacy” where all of us “mother” each other.  She refers to pregnancy as “an extreme sport” and decries what she says is “the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other (that) is endless and exhausting”.  She believes the idea of women carrying children is an unnatural thing.   “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she says at the start of her book “This situation is social, not simply ‘natural.’ Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.”

         In her book, Lewis heralds the work of nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and an early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist. She praises the work of anti-family feminists and gay liberationists, where she credits queer Marxists for bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century.

         Make no mistake – Lewis’ goal is to reenergize feminism and to repoliticize its goals.  But she is not alone is the battle cry against the family.  David Brooks, wrote a piece in The Atlantic declaring the “nuclear family was a mistake.” Marxists, feminists and gay activists have long decried the traditional family because it’s seen as an encumbrance to their goal of total personal liberation. 

         Justice Alito noted what would happen once we legalized “gay marriage.”  He wrote:  Suppose we rule in your favor in this case, and then after that a group consisting of two men and two women apply for a marriage license. Would there be any ground for denying them a license?”

         He was prophetic.  A judge in New York has ruled in favor of a polyamorous couple on an issue of rent control.  California, Washington, Louisiana and Rhode Island have already recognized multiple parent homes, even though it is currently considered to be illegal in this country.

         In Nebraska, a father has married his 21-year-old daughter, because the other siblings were competing to have sex with the dad.  There is also a movement afoot to no longer ID’s pedophiles as such but relabel them as “minor-attracted” individuals. 

         The issue of family abolition may have political, philosophical and ideological components but at its root, it’s a spiritual battle.  God created the family before any other institution and set it in a place of perfection.

         He defined marriage as one man and one woman and directed Adam and Eve to have children.  His book starts with a wedding and ends with a wedding – and marriage is affirmed repeatedly in the pages in between.

         The nuclear family will never cease to be but it will be constantly under attack by the one whose days are numbered yet presently struts this earthly plane. 

         Those are my thoughts.  I’m Janet Parshall.