The Children of The Age Rise Up to Kill Themselves

The Dwarves Have Delved Too Greedily

Barbara Ehrenreich has been an advocate for the proposition that the "family is dangerous".   The idea was that the family represents a primitive social arrangement which needs radical rework by the State.

In an article in Time (July 18, 1994) she wrote:

A disturbing subtext runs through our recent media fixations. Parents abuse sons -- allegedly at least, in the Menendez case -- who in turn rise up and kill them. A husband torments a wife, who retaliates with a kitchen knife. Love turns into obsession, between the Simpsons anyway, and then perhaps into murderous rage: the family, in other words, becomes personal hell. . . . We live in a culture that fetishizes the family as the ideal unit of human community. . .

In the same article she asserted:

. . . even the ostensibly 'functional' non-violent family can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence.

She should know, for Ehrenreich publicly confesses to killing two of her children by aborting them.

What concerns us here was the continuing effort by Unbelief from the seventies onwards to persuade people that the family needed to be replaced.
 It needed to be replaced by something far more powerful--namely, the intelligent design of new social arrangements conceived and proven in the social laboratories of the State.  The feminists of the early seventies openly and enthusiastically advocated that the State should improve upon the family, a flawed relic of former evolutionary times.

As nearly as 1970, Gloria Steinem laid out the basis of a feminism that became a goal for many influential Americans, the overcoming of specifically male and female functions through the power of government.  She looked forward to the day when courts would assign to wives (not divorcees) a percentage of their husbands' income, and when government would  mandate that housing complexes be designed to force people out of traditional patterns.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 157.]

 Would the attempt succeed?  It would fail miserably.  The seventies dream of the New Model Man and the New Model Woman has failed, fizzled out.  But the directions and options now being pushed have become even more destructive and radical.  Gender would now be regarded not as a fixed category determined by DNA, but an intensely personal and constructed identity.  Sexuality would have morphed ["developed"] into homosexuality, then bi-sexuality, then trans-sexuality.  The demand would now become that the State follow,  sanctioning and protecting each iteration of greater and greater perversity.  The State would now be the follower; rights-demanding people would begin to insist vociferously that the State catch up.  Each iteration would become an implicit destroyer of all previous iterations.  The genie would now be well and truly out; it would not be coming back.

When God gives a society up to "a debased mind", who knows what will end up crawling out of the sewer?  But whatever form it takes, it will be a Balrog, a demon from the ancient world.  May God have mercy upon us all.