Familia Est...
by Ryan Dallava
As the November elections draw closer and special interest groups
mobilize in an effort to garner the support of policy makers and the
citizenry at large, a war of terminology and definition is being waged
on the American political stage. Terms like conservative, liberal,
feminist, and libertarian are spouted by all who choose to participate
in this ritualistic show of intellectualism and feigned public
awareness. Politicians and lobbyists alike scramble frantically in a
vain attempt to claim the most appealing buzzwords possible to
attract the widest political base. Who can dispute the fact that more
supporters will rally behind a candidate identified as conservative,
pro-life, anti-gay, or Republican, rather than simply an economic and
social conservative? No term, however, has been more coveted and
more misused than "family."
The concept of "family" is one of the most basic components
of
society. Throughout history, the notion of family has undergone
countless metamorphoses that vary across cultural boundaries.
Today, no one can refute the vital importance of the institution of the
family in modern society. Sociologist Emile Durkheim calls the family
a primary source for social order and control within a civilization.
When constituent members of society are integrated into the family
structure, they are provided with access to support resources that go
beyond those they could provide for themselves. Thus, incidences of
suicide decrease as fewer individuals are estranged from the comfort
of the family's unique structure. However, the supposition by certain
right-wing special interest groups that the family does not evolve in
a socio-historical context, that it is impervious to the stresses placed
upon it by the social institutions and trends which surround it, is
pure fallacy.
The incarnation of the family that many right-wing and Christian
conservatives tenaciously cling to is, in fact, almost an anomaly in
American history. The post World War II generation is the wealthiest
generation of Americans ever to emerge in the nation's history. The
generation raised during the Depression held in its mind a vivid
memory of true poverty and vowed to excise the word "want" from
their children's burgeoning vocabularies. An expansive job market
and such programs as the GI Bill and Veterans Assistance produced
men and women more than capable of providing their offspring with
the life they never had. Low property tax and interest rates gave
birth to the American suburbs and the homes that the next
generation, the baby boomers, would occupy.
Unfortunately, the good fortune did not last for long. The
enormous size of the baby boom generation glutted a constricting job
market. By the 1960s a revolution in thought took flight, changing
gender roles within the institution of marriage itself. By and large,
men and women waited longer to enter into marriage and start a
family. As Neil Howe and Bill Strauss report in their sociological
study, 13th Gen, the mean age for the first marriage of men and
women in 1960 was twenty-three and twenty respectively, as
opposed to statistics from 1991 which report the mean age for the
first marriage at twenty-six for men and twenty-four for women. As
more career opportunities for women became available and conflict
over sex roles became problematic, divorce became a more common
occurrence. The economic stresses of the 1973 oil crisis and the
subsequent recession during the Reagan and Bush administrations
not only exacerbated the instances of divorce amongst married
couples, but also prevented many prospective newlyweds from
entering into marriage and made the notion of having children too
costly.
Therefore, in a search for integration into some form of a familial
social network, many individuals have extended their definition of
family to include close and intimate friends. Additionally, the nascent
gay right movement of the 1960s has prompted a heretofore ignored
demographic contingency to assert their right to form families of
their own. Though these trends appear to be recent and, in many
cases, radically frightening, they are by far more characteristic of
patterns of marriage and family formation prior to the emergence of
the post-war generation.
The family is, in itself, a dynamic entity subject to innumerable
social pressures. It has never been static, nor has there ever been a
single archetype for the family structure. The contention of right-
wing fundamentalists that divorce is a phenomenon which only
occurs among the depraved and that a family must consist of two
parents of the opposite sex and include one or more children is
preposterous. Furthermore, such individuals seek to lay claim to the
word "family," only to draw the historically ignorant and dangerously
nostalgic into a false sense of security. In fact, their conception of the
family and the proselytizing with which they present it to the public
at large is little more than moral masturbation.
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