Monday, May 21, 2012

Real Family Values

What is killing America's families?  Is it the gay menace?  Certainly children need male and female role models.  Two men just don't cut it.  Neither do two women.  Or one man and one woman.  These aren't families.

Two people are little more than a baby-making unit.  That's a nuclear family: two things that make babies and a collection of babies of various ages.  Hardly a real family.

That's what is killing America's families: the false ideology of the nuclear family.  With only two people, someone must lose.  The man works and the woman raises children and cleans the house and takes opiates to survive.  Or the man stays home and we call him a sissy.  Or both parents work and the kids are sent off to be raised by strangers.  What a great family.  Someone loses.  At the least.

Once upon a time less than two or three generations ago people lived with or near their parents, and grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and so on.  Children weren't raised by parents to then grow up and leave them behind and be parents and raise their own kids to grow up and leave them behind in an endless cycle of abandonment.  Instead, children were raised by family.

My own family believes in traditional concepts of family.  I was watched and raised by a grandmother, aunts, uncles, and had a cousin I treated as a brother.  Everyone helped everyone.  It made more sense that way.  Someone with two children can watch a third with no great extra burden, but to relieve one person of children entirely is a wonderful blessing.  This was how one tradition started which has run to this day, of my uncle taking my brothers and me to dinner on Christmas Eve so my mother doesn't have to deal with us.  At other times my brothers would be watched by my godmother (whose son would go to great lengths to frighten them, but maybe that is their own faults for watching Ghostbusters).

If you're going to artificially define families as a pair of baby factories, then I can almost understand the argument against gay marriage.  But that's a ridiculous starting point.  It's starting with a limitation which already is not to the benefit of the children or the parents and then rather than fixing the problem, tacking on another limitation as the weakest of bandaids.  Once you see that a family is more than just two people making sex cells and putting them together, that a family is a network of mutual support, then a couple gay people here and there aren't any problem at all.  So what if a couple people aren't baby factories?  There are plenty of those and they're perfectly capable of raising children, especially as part of a family rather than two people isolated from any social or family support.

I say it's time we brought back traditional marriage and real family values.  No more of this nonsense of blocking marriages to people who have the same genitals.  I say we block marriages to people who live too far away from their families.

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