WHY THE LEFT WANTS TO DESTROY THE FAMILY

In Reliapundit's well-documented post, below, you can read the sad consequences that befall children who grow up without fathers and without the structures of traditional family life that have been the bedrock of human culture since time immemorial.

In two recent articles posted at National Review Online, "The Confession" and "The Confession II," Stanley Kurtz shows how many advocates of same-sex marriage are actually committed to a radical program of undermining and ultimately destroying the traditional family. Writes Kurtz:

The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement is nothing if not radical. It calls for extending government recognition beyond traditional married couples to groups of senior citizens living together, extended immigrant households, single parent households, “queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple in two households,” unmarried domestic partners, polygamous/polyamorous households, and many other diverse family forms.

Advocacy of same-sex marriage is being used to create the conditions in which marriage itself will be superseded. This is not a new goal for the statist left. Plato, in his Republic, describes a society in which males and females of the appropriate social stratum reproduce like breeding animals, their children being raised communally, and without any family structure at all. Parents and children would not be permitted to know each other as such. Similar projects were conceived during the "War Communism" phase of the Soviet State, and the SS "Lebensborn" breeding program is also well known.

Remember the sad truth that Mark Alexander documented, (hat tip Reliapundit):

To wit, the truth -- and it is a hard truth for men who have abandoned their families, but a harder truth for their children: According to the CDC, DoJ, DHHS and the Bureau of the Census, the 30 percent of children who live apart from their fathers will account for

63 percent of teen suicides,
70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions,
71 percent of high-school dropouts,
75 percent of children in chemical-abuse centers,
80 percent of rapists,
85 percent of youths in prison,
and 85 percent of children who exhibit behavioral disorders.

In addition, 90 percent of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. In fact, children born to unwed mothers are 10 times more likely to live in poverty as children with fathers in the home.

So why do the socialists advocate creating such dysfunctional social conditions? I think that the answer is because they feel that it will be possible for them to seize and maintain power only in such a dysfunctional society.

Remember, as I suggested last week in a discussion of why the theme of "global warming" is so important to the statist left, that Antonio Gramsci asserted that the survival of a free market society was based on "cultural hegemony," and that the communist vanguard had first of all to subvert that cultural hegemony in order to seize power. As the Wikipedia article puts it:

Gramsci therefore argued for a strategic distinction between a "war of position" and a "war of movement". The war of position is a culture war in which anti-capitalist elements seek to gain a dominant voice in mass media, mass organizations, and educational institutions to heighten class consciousness, teach revolutionary analysis and theory, and inspire revolutionary organization. Following the success of the war of position, communist leaders would be empowered to begin the war of movement, the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support.

The hard left understands that it must undermine, subvert, and liquidate traditional culture in order to replace all of the multitudinous relationships which form the dense network of family and community life with a univocal culture in which every nexus of human contact is mediated by the state. As the Gramsci biography puts it:

Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to Christianity, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values [umph added - Relipaundit]. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognise it as an expression of their own experience.

The destruction of the family will condemn millions of children to dysfunctional outcomes. The left would sacrifice those children - future drop-outs, wards of the State, prisoners, runaways, and suicides - in order to create a society in which everyone is essentially institutionalized from birth to the grave, and in which every decision affecting everyone's daily life is made by a bureaucratic elite and enforced by violence.

For further details, see The Road to Serfdom, the must-read and re-read book by the economist F. A. Hayek.