Protecting the Traditional Family

Floor Speech

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Mrs. HARSHBARGER. Mr. Speaker, I start by saying I am honored to be the co-chair of the Congressional Family Caucus.

We have seen the decline of the traditional family for many years, and it is not by chance this has occurred. We have come to a point in society that the restoration of the family is of the utmost importance.

Russell Kirk wrote about the problem this way: ``We cannot feel any affection for our country unless we first love those near to us. The conservative feels that the family is the natural source and core of any good society; that when the family decays, a dreary collectivism is sure to supplant it; and that the principal instrument of moral instruction, ordinary education, and satisfactory economic life always must remain the family.''

Kirk goes on to say: ``Now very powerful forces are at work to diminish the influence of the family among us, and even to destroy the family for all purposes except mere generation. Some of these forces are material and unintentional: . . . cheap amusements and transportation, which encourage members of the family to spend nearly all their time outside the family circle; the assumption of the old educational functions of the family by public schools . . . .''

He continues: ``But other forces hostile to the family are not merely impersonal and unconscious; they are more or less deliberate, and they may be countered by intelligent action in the social and educational and political spheres. The chief of these ominous forces is the deliberate desire of certain people to have the political state assume nearly all the responsibilities which the family once possessed. This movement is the most thorough and disastrous form of collectivism.

`` `The shrewd totalitarian mentality knows well the powers of intimate kinship and religious devotion for keeping alive in a population values and incentives which might well, in the future, serve as the basis of resistance. Thus to emancipate each member, and especially the younger members, from the family was an absolute necessity. And this planned spiritual alienation from kinship was accomplished, not only through the negative processes of spying and informing, but through the sapping of the functional foundations of family membership and through the substitution of new and attractive political roles for each of the social roles embodied in the family structure. . . . What the totalitarian must have for the realization of his design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum.'''

He goes on to list some of the deliberate techniques of the mass state for undermining the family.

Number one is: ``Taking the instruction of children entirely away from their parents by the official adoption of theories that prescribe `educating the whole child' in the state schools, with a corresponding depreciation of parental intelligence and rights.''

Number two is: ``Creating `youth organizations' to take young people quite out of the sphere of the family in their leisure hours and to indoctrinate them in the ideology of the mass state.''

The third is: ``Abolishing the inheritance of family property, through confiscatory inheritance taxes or through income tax policies that leave small margin for family saving.''

The fourth one is: ``Planned encouragement of divorce, `sexual freedom,' and `deprivatization of women,' through positive legislation or official propaganda, with the aim of weakening the bonds of affection within the family that offer a strong barrier to the wishes of the total state.''

``The traditional family--which, like many old-fashioned things, is an indispensable thing--gives us those roots without which we all would be just so many lonely little atoms of humanity, unprincipled and at the mercy of some iron political domination.''

Do you know when this little book was written, Mr. Speaker? That was written in 1957.

Kirk's insights about family, the importance of private property, education, religion, and a dozen other subjects not only remain completely sound but now seem downright prophetic.

We were being warned about the attacks on the family unit more than 60 years ago. That is why, as chosen leaders, we have the responsibility to protect the sanctity of the traditional family because marriage and family are institutions unique to human beings among all of God's creation.

In modern-day wording by the author Tim Clinton in a book from 2021, he says this: ``Suffice it to say that the deterioration of the American family is the source of nearly every symptom of cultural decline, from criminal activity to plunging academic performances, from damaged mental health to poor physical health, from rising poverty to shredded social networks.''

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