Commentary
While he married his high-school sweetheart and fathered seven (or perhaps eight) children,
Karl Marx was not what you might call a “family” man.
In “The Communist Manifesto” Marx called for traditional family structures to be abolished because he regarded them as enabling capital and private wealth creation. And since the family is the primary mechanism for passing society’s values from generation to generation, strong families also reinforced the middle-class worldview Marx so abhorred. With revolution in mind, he argued the state must take over education and disrupt the familial nexus.
Other Marxist thinkers carried this idea forward, arguing that the family is a tool of oppression and must be dismantled. Even democratic and ostensibly free countries are not immune to such thinking today. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example,
has as one of its guiding principles to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Progressives understand that strong families hinder revolutionary movements.
In Canada today, a steady march of federal and provincial policy furthers these ends by diluting the definition of family nearly to the point of meaninglessness. Ontario is Canada’s most aggressive jurisdiction in this regard. In 2016, the province radically redefined family in law with its All Families Are Equal Act. Prior to this act, Ontario law stated: “For all purposes of the law of Ontario a person is the child of his or her natural parents.” The only exception was legal adoption.
The 2016 legislation erased this basic recognition of the natural family from Ontario law. It also established multiple ways to become a legal parent. Up to four adults could sign a “pre-conception parentage agreement” whereby they agreed to co-parent a child yet to be conceived, even if none of these adults had a biological relationship to the child, or any legal or familial relationship with any of the other co-parents.
Other provinces are moving in the same direction, diminishing the importance of a child’s blood relationships. Courts in British Columbia and Newfoundland have given benediction to “throuples”—essentially, threesomes of any combination of sexes—and definitions of families across jurisdictions are being changed to remove terms such as “mother” and “father.” Whether intentionally or not, such policies undermine the family’s independence and stability.
The problems with such an approach are most obvious in surveying the outcomes for children. Strong and voluminous academic evidence shows that a child has the best chance for success when he or she lives with both biological parents. Father and mother play important but differing roles in their child’s life, and children who live with their married, biological parents do better statistically than those who do not. According to a study by the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, children separated from one or both biological parents are more likely to suffer poverty, witness violence, and live with someone who has a drug or alcohol addiction or is likely to be incarcerated. Biological ties are a vital factor in a child’s upbringing.
At the same time, ample historical evidence points to the importance of the family as a bulwark against totalitarianism and government overreach. And for all the reasons that Marx fretted about: Families convey and protect their own values, often in opposition to prevailing political demands. In his book “The Burden of Hitler’s Legacy,” former Nazi Youth member
Alfons Heck explains that “We who were born into Nazism never had a chance unless our parents were brave enough to resist the tide and transmit their opposition to their children.”
Former Czech dissident Vaclav Benda, who was imprisoned during the Cold War-era for “subversion of the Republic,” wrote a series of essays including “
The Problems of Family in a Totalitarian State“ describing the communist state’s many techniques for undermining family bonds. Other writers have called families “resistance cells” in the fight against totalitarianism. Even greater state animosity towards family can be seen in communist China’s abhorrent former “one child policy”—a policy that restricted parents from growing their own family.
According to the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the family is “the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” With this in mind, we cannot allow the concept of family to become an empty vessel to be filled or redefined however the state wishes. It must be defended as a natural and pre-political institution independent of the state with its own distinct domain of authority.
Families are vital to the stability of society and critical to resistance against government overreach.
A longer version of this story originally appeared in C2CJournal.ca. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
