The Far Right's Secret Weapon - Concept of the Nuclear Family

[ck4829]

If you want to control people, you begin at their home, with the family.

The RW's Stooges AKA the 'christian' Right is constantly screaming about the Nuclear Family, and how Liberals supposedly want to destroy it.

Republicans constantly push the propaganda and say they are defending the so-called Traditional Family (Nuclear Family).

Rick Santorum also made fun of the Extended Family, just look at the title of his book "It takes a Family", which lampooned Hillary Clinton's book "It takes a Village".

It's interesting, if we look at the High Up RW'ers, you can see that they are anything but 'Nuclear'.

For starters, the Bush Family is clearly not Nuclear.

The Coors Family, also not Nuclear.

The Dynasties in the Far Right look like one... Dare I say it... one big Extended Family.

The Non-Nuclear Bush Family always shares the White House with the Cheney Family and they are tied with the Coors Family. The Coors Family basically owns the Heritage Foundation which is tied to the Bush Family and Richard Mellon Scaife.

And then there is PNAC, which is basically a Multi-Family Venture, that includes guys from the Bush Family, the Cheney Family, the Kristol Family, the Kagan Family, and so on.

Reverend Moon and his clan, chummy with the Podhoretz Family and the Bush Family.

While the 'christian' Right calls anyone who opposes the Nuclear Family evil and going against the will of God, the RW'ers they support have a very large Extended Family.

I've long supported the idea of bringing back the Extended Family in an Advanced Society, maybe it's time to fight to bring that idea back.

[Skidmore]

1. Lots of the Christian Right have been married more than once

and committed adultry in the process. I wonder if a study has ever been done on this.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. If not there should be one. Of course, we all know what their response

would be: "We're not perfect, just forgiven"

[Skidmore]

12. Actually I found some stats on the site linked below:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_diov.htm

Scroll down the page to get to that data--it's been sourced too. Very interesting.

[jean]

3. Ya, for the Bush family, it takes a cabal.

[teriyaki jones]

4. Love that!

And BTW, would that be a nookular family?

[undergroundpanther]

5. If you want to know about family

Read the book the Way We Never Were

http://www.allreaders.com/Topics/info_4733.asp?BSID=22046473

This fabulous, eye-opening book challenges popular notions of what American families were like in the past. Almost every page has a shock -- whether it's that thousands of children as young as 11 worked in Pennsylvania mines and silk mills in 1900; or there may have been as many as 1 abortion for every 5 live births in the 1850s; that per capita consumption of alcohol was much higher in the 1820s than it is today; that Mother's Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women OUTSIDE the home; that most studies suggest welfare does not break up families; or that even as late as 1940, 10 percent of American children did not live with either parent. Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen College, writes: "Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model." This excellent, well-researched book shows why.

[PATRICK]

14. One shock among many

America never was perfect, but in fact never was what many us assume we mean when we say it is now "gone" or lost or stolen or dead. Many of things never were but it takes crises and plunges to show the dark side no one likes seeing. Civil rights has been uphill for two centuries and downhill a lot of times too. Business influence over civil government has been monstrous before, it's treachery in wartime unpunished, unheeded. When everyone idolizes a religion a value a myth you can bet a big lie is being born because one goes from assumption to worship to angry hate-filled defense in big easy steps simply because leaving actual practice out of the picture, with all its dogged down to earth imperfection lets the lie have more raw energy, energy never having to be used for the common good or the sacrifice of self and the burdens of real life.

The separation of the talk from the walk does not accidentally cause the EXACT OPPOSITE to reign with atrocities and repression- it is a hellish guarantee. And you don't need a scrap of paper explained truthfully to interfere with this vision tunnel to glory.

I think even MLK lived quite long enough to see his movement sentimentalized so America could feel good about itself as if saying- there America the free has done it again. Problem solved. MLK is an American hero. And he got co-opted in the deals, in the legislative progress and the actual results slid away or rested fragily on glossed over resentment. His last ideas again uncovered the huge beast was not slain but wearing new sheep's clothing to feel good about itself with an undercurrent of reasserting old wrongs(and just wait until the RW rules again).

The blind Faustus mistakes the demons digging his grave for free workers toiling together. Then he gives his soul by saying "Stay this moment, you are so wonderful". God luckily lets him off the hook on another sentimental technicality- in some romantic versions for redemptive love. His exultation in isocial ideals? Frauds.

But the trouble is overcoming not the world but our misty eyes with premature sentiment and making idols, forever making little idols of clay or gold. Everything else phsically important to us is uncertain and connected to hard toil. Yet we expect the government that controls our well being on a grand scale with immense power to be easy as pie and mythically heroic. In the great scale of the cosmos that double perpsective is stupid and leads to the devaluing and infection of both with more lies.

[happyslug]

6. The Extended family has never fully gone away

Over 20 years ago I was told the the Department of Labor did a Study on how people found jobs, and 92% of people found jobs through friends and Relatives.

On the other hand Big Business likes the Nuclear Family, it means such people can move wherever the business wants them to move to, abandoning their extended family in the move. In short an extended family is always stronger than numerous nuclear families and if you are a member of that Extended family you can dominate all the nuclear families that comes in contact with your extended family. The only thing an extended family fears is another extended family, or worse a splitter branch of the extended family. For this reason extended families have a tendency to marry their cousins, to keep all the money in the extended family AND to further unite the xxtended family.

[Vogon_Glory]

11. The Right Wing HAS Been Waging War on Extended Families

I think that progressives ought to make the point that the right wing has been making war on the extended family in this country and has been doing it for years. You see the right wing's dirty little fingerprints all over the place if you know where to look.

Look at the so-called immigration reforms implemented during the last fifteen years or so where it is more difficult, if not impossible, to sponsor aunts, uncles, grandparents.

Look how little the right wing supports the rights of grandparents to have dealings with their grandchildren.

One of the reasons the welfare state we support exists is because of the intolerable stresses placed on extended families by the rise of industrial capitalism and the fact that the fractured nuclear families just don't have the strength of support that extended families do.

The latest effort by anti-abortion fanatics to criminalize sisters, cousins, grandparents, aunts, etc. from assisting pregnant teens seeking abortions across state lines shows how much contempt the far right has towards extended families.

[undergroundpanther]

7. more

First, are children of divorce or one-parent homes markedly worse off than those who live with both parents? Second, if such children are so disadvantaged, is the source of their problems the family structure itself, or some factor that may have existed earlier or have been associated with it? Third, can public policies intended to stigmatize and reduce or prevent divorce or single parenthood do so without unintended negative consequences for children's well-being? Additionally, would positive measures such as support for one-parent families or reducing the stress that accompanies marital disruption be of more benefit to children?

Finally, there is the issue that has helped to fuel the backlash against single parents: the supposed direct link between family structure and what a Newsweek writer called a nauseating buffet of social pathologies, especially crime, violence, and drugs. Dan Quayle tried to link the family values issue with the equally explosive issues of crime and violence in his Murphy Brown speech. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, Quayle argued that it was not poverty per se, but a poverty of values that had led to the breakdown of families in the inner city, and which in turn was responsible for the violence. The one sentence about Murphy Brown in his speech caused the national outrage which overshadowed the rest of the message.

Charles Murray was more successful at linking family values with fear of crime. He has warned that because of rising white family illegitimacy rates, a coming white underclass was going to engulf the rest of society in the kind of anarchy found in the inner cities. What is the evidence for this incendiary claim? Why is it that countries with similar trends in family structure do not suffer from the social deterioration that plagues us?

The family restorationists do not provide clear answers to these questions. The answers found in the research literature do not lend much support to their extreme statements about the importance of family structure or to some of the drastic policies they propose to change it. It is true that the research does not show that one-parent families are the same as two-parent families. Without a father's contributions to parenting and family support, single mothers face added burdens, responsibilities, and stresses.





http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/other/lawreview/familystructure.html

[undergroundpanther]

8. more on nostalgia.

The right is exploiting NOSTALGIA when it screeches family values.


THE TRAP OF NOSTALGIA

On close examination, it appears that many of our images of the traditional family are derived from 1950s television serials. These shows presented an idealized mixture of values that never coexisted in any real family and that were in many cases quite contradictory. For example, the family of the 19th century revolved around the parent-child axis while the family of the 20th century revolved around the couple relationship. The hybrid modern expectation that a woman can have an intense, close relationship with her children while simultaneously maintaining youthful sexual excitement with her husband is highly unrealistic, and this has introduced enormous stresses into many women's lives.

Fantasies about the working husband of the past who came home to his secluded refuge from the real world each night are similarly misconceived. The ideal that there should be a strong sexual division of labor was never historically associated (as it is in the modern myth) with the ideal that the family should be a private, self-sufficient institution.




http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC21/Coontz.htm

[zbdent]

9. Didn't Rush have, like, three nuclear "families"?

(With no issue . . .)

Bob Dole, two "nuclears"

Reagan

Gingrich

Giuliani

[DanCa]

10. Yet the RW Catholics are supposed to be against the war and guns.

I guess they think that the President is above church law too. Hell Chimpy's own bishops denounced the war. Btw just to be fair, Left Wing Christians rock.

[OneBlueSky]

13. maybe we need a Constitutional amendment to ban divorce . . .

to protect the "nucular family," don'tcha know . . .