A great way to demolish the institutions of marriage and family is to redefine them out of existence. So far down this path have we gone in recent times that we can no longer even use words like “mother.” We are now being forced to use moonbat concepts such as “birthing persons.”

For decades now the radicals on the left have told us of their hatred of the traditional family, and they have done all they can to see it destroyed. Things like easy no-fault divorce, the rise of the porn culture, androgyny, radical feminism, the homosexual and trans agendas, and the sexual revolution have all been part of this.

But of course one especially effective way to destroy something is to completely redefine it. The old saying about verbal engineering preceding social engineering certainly applies here. Thus a great way to demolish the institutions of marriage and family is to redefine them out of existence. So far down this path have we gone in recent times that we can no longer even use words like “mother”. We are now being forced to use moonbat concepts such as “birthing persons”.

As mentioned, the radicals have been working on this for quite some time now. While Marxists declared their hatred of the family over a century ago, things really came to a head during the 60s counterculture. The feminist and homosexual militants made the family one of their main targets.

And seeking to redefine it was a key part of their strategy. Consider the year 1994: by then several decades of this assault on the family was paying off handsomely. The year was declared to be the International Year of the Family. Working with the Australian Family Association at the time, I was heavily involved in all this.

We held our own international conference on the family that year, and I also did countless media interviews on the question of ‘what is a family?’ Already there was plenty of pushback on the normal understanding of the word. Family had long meant ‘any group of people related by blood, [heterosexual] marriage or adoption.’

So two sisters living together is a family. A man and a woman who married – with or without children – is a family. An orphan adopted by a loving heterosexual couple is a family. That was all basic common sense. But the activists wanted to push the boundaries to include any and all other kinds of relationships – especially homosexual relationships.

Two guys having a sexual relationship had to be considered to be ‘family. So I was constantly defending the usual concept of family against those seeking to obliterate it. I even went to a conference that year put on by the tax-payer funded Australian Institute of Family Studies.

The AIFS also happily pushed the revisionist line that family can be whatever you want it to be. I presented a paper at the conference arguing the opposite, that historically almost all cultures have had the traditional understanding of what family means. In it I offered a number of quotes from experts, including these:

“A family is not an association of independent people; it is a human commitment designed to make possible the rearing of moral and responsible children. Governments care – or ought to care – about families for this reason, and scarcely for any other.” James Q. Wilson

“There never was a society throughout all of history . . . without a family as the central unit for launching the education of children, for character formation, and as the moral agent of society.” Amitai Etzioni

“When we survey all known societies, we find everywhere some form of the family, some set of permanent arrangements by which males assist females in caring for children while they are young.” Margaret Mead

“A substantial body of research suggests that family structure is an independent factor influencing the well-being of children. Even after correcting for variables such as family income, parental education, and prior family history, children from single-parent families tend on average to fare less well economically, educationally, and emotionally, and encounter more difficulties on the road to becoming self-sustaining adults.” William Galston

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