The gifted Michael Novak takes a similar tack in his eloquent commentary on the family:
Clearly, the family is the seedbed of economic skills, money habits, attitudes toward work, and the arts of financial independence. The family is a stronger agency of educational success than the school. The family is a stronger teacher of the religious imagination than the church. Political and social planning in a wise social order begin with the axiom What strengthens the family strengthens society. Highly paid, mobile, and restless professionals may disdain the family (having been nurtured by its strengths), but those whom other agencies desert have only one institution in which to find essential nourishment.
The role of a father, a mother, and of children with respect to them, is the absolutely critical center of social force. Even when poverty and disorientation strike, as over the generations they so often do, it is family strength that most defends individuals against alienation, lassitude, or despair. The world around the family is fundamentally unjust. The state and its agents, and the economic system and its agencies, are never fully to be trusted. One could not trust them in Eastern Europe, in Sicily, or in Ireland—and one cannot trust them here. One unforgettable law has been learned painfully through all the oppressions, disasters, and injustices of the last thousand years:
if things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family falters, life falls apart.
With current statistics telling us that “worldwide, there are . . . 40 million abortions per year” and
that “41 percent of all births in the United States [are] to women who [are] not married,”
we should be declaring boldly that inherent in the very act of creation is, for both parents, a lifelong commitment to and responsibility for the child they created. No one can with impunity terminate that life, neglect that care, nor shirk that responsibility. Paul wrote to Timothy, “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” If Paul could see our day, surely he would repeat that counsel and would mean more than providing physical nourishment, essential as that is. If we want democracy to work and society to be stable, parents must nourish a child’s mind and heart and spirit.
Generally speaking, no community of whatever size or definition has enough resources in time, money, or will to make up for what does not happen at home.
So rather than redefining marriage and family as we see increasing numbers around us trying to do, our age ought to be reinforcing and exalting that which has been the backbone of civilization since the dawn of it. I leave with you this final quote on that subject from David Brooks, with a phrase or two of my own added: At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. [Another label for our time.] They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options. The transformation has been liberating, and it’s leading to some pretty astounding changes. For example, for centuries, most human societies forcefully guided people into two-parent families [with a father and a mother who
were devoted to each other]. Today that sort of family is increasingly seen as just one option among many. . . .My view is that the age of possibility is based on a misconception. People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. [People are] better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice—commitments [to traditional marriage and time-honored family life].
J. Reuben Clark Law Society, Conference Washington, D.C., February 15, 2013, Jeffrey R. Holland
