"Traditional" or not, real families are under attack from right and left

Attempts to define "family" more widely than the nuclear family are greeted by conservatives with ridicule and alarm. But do conservatives really want to be saying that only modern, fortunate, two-parent families should be protected by -- and from -- the government?
After all, the same narrow view of families' rights which now lets courts break up lesbians' families may next be used against parents who home-school their kids, take them to church, or teach them to shoot.

Conservatives need to be responsible and distinguish between those who want protection for the remaining family ties within unusual, broken, or extended families, and the small, irrelevant minority who think all families are obsolete and oppressive.

The latter view is merely a potential threat to families. It would destroy the transmission of civilization's values if it were widely acted upon by teachers, social workers and judges. But right now the numbers of diehard socialists, ultra-rad-feminists, and commune-dwellers who would willingly denounce families are shrinking fast as reality intrudes on them.

A more immediate danger is the reigning upper-middle-class belief that only nuclear families are functional or worth saving. This is embodied in legal doctrines that promote "intact family units" by encouraging stepparent adoption even at the cost of cutting ties with natural parents, disfavoring and often outlawing open adoption, and discouraging parents' visitation as "disruptive".

I don't know what exactly is conservative about such views, except that conservatives seem to favor them. Indeed, they embody the classic error of utopian socialism -- they destroy imperfect, existing families in the faith that they can be fully replaced by artificial, ideal families.

Right away, conservatives should know something is wrong when they hear themselves using such a ridiculously pseudo-scientific social-engineering term as "family unit" in place of "family." The term is used precisely because it means something different from "family." It is the mere nucleus of a family, shorn like Samson of the strength-giving strands linking it to a continuing, extended family and to important members who live under separate roofs. It is small and simple enough for the modern state to comprehend and utilize.

A genuinely conservative view of families would accept that imperfect households and frayed relationships exist, and, like other existing social ties and complex institutions, are still valuable and should be conserved and respected as long as they cause no actual physical harm.

The simple fact is that nowadays, as always, people end up in households with unrelated people, and in families that cannot afford, or can't stand, to form a single household. In addition, traditional extended families remain common, especially among immigrants and rural or ex-rural people. Whether these families deserve approval is irrelevant, compared to the basic question of whether they will get to raise children without legal interference.

Throughout history, people have often found themselves in non-nuclear households and have taken responsibility for each other's welfare. There have always been single parents, and they have made do, with help from relatives and neighbors. Though it is far from ideal, there is nothing unprecedented about, for example, a child being raised by two women, and there is no reason a lesbian's child would know more about his parents' love life than any other child.

Likewise, there have always been people who have had to raise other people's children. Until this century, it has not been thought necessary to make them hostile to ties between the child and the natural parents. In the often-cited example of Jesus' family, and for millions of exchanged and apprenticed children, guardians who acted in the place of unavailable natural parents had no need to bolster their authority by pretending to be natural parents. Jesus' open adoption may have been disruptive, but not to his family.

The preference for cutting all non-nuclear ties is both pseudo-scientific and over-sentimental. It assumes children will be confused by knowing their natural parents and their guardians, as if children were born with the exclusively nuclear family pre-programmed into them. It also assumes that parents who are initially too young or irresponsible to raise their children are so psychologically fragile that they are better off forgetting they ever had them.

Extended families provide children with strengths, not confusion. They are confusing only to bureaucrats and social workers. I know this because I was brought up in such a family, in a neighborhood where that was common.

Like most big families, mine had its weak links: irresponsible people who died young or lived unhappily. They were poor parents, but that did not make the whole family grind to a halt. They still made many positive contributions to their children's lives, and provided a much-needed, up-close example of the consequences of irresponsibility. And there were always plenty of people within the family to provide the children with homes, discipline, and a good example.

If my extended family had ever ended up in court with a judge who believed in "intact family units," it would have been chopped up into little disconnected pieces. My aunt and uncle's grandchildren would be cut off from them. My mother's parents would not have known their parents, grandparents or aunts. The hard-working, responsible cousins, uncles and half-sisters who raised my grandparents and helped raise other family members would have been strangers to us.
All of us would have little idea of who we were or where we had come from. Instead of fiercely independent Czecho-Choctaw-Dutch-American lapsed-Methodist Recovering Texans, we would just be ill-tempered funny-looking people from the middle of nowhere with nothing to live up to and no source of values except for popular culture and the government. And that, I fear, is an accurate description of too many modern Americans.

Many courts and legislatures -- and a good many conservatives -- treat non-nuclear families and open adoptions as experimental, so exceptional that the law should disregard them. What is forgotten is that adoption itself is an extraordinary response to the problems of family breakup, and what is normal in court may be exceptional in everyday life, and vice-versa. People who end up in court, as they cannot get along, are not necessarily representative of those who work things out without litigating. Open adoption is no flaky experiment; it is far older than modern, hermetically-sealed adoption.

To accept families as they are is not to do them some kind of favor, to endorse or even tolerate them. Rather, it is simply the minimum duty of anyone who asserts judicial or legislative control over them.

- John Crouch