If Harris Wins, It’s Nuclear Winter for the Family
The Harris program has many worrisome points of a material nature, but these pale in comparison with the war against the family, the glue holding our society together.
By: Tom McDonough, originally published August 23, 2024, Crisis Magazine/Opinion
During the Trump-Biden debate the question of a child-care tax credit was raised. Biden mumbled the materialist priority of getting Mom back into the economy as quickly as possible. Trump missed the opportunity to reply that an ideal economy would be one where, should the spouses so decide, one parent can be at home until the children leave for school and home when they return.
What the country needs is a programmatic legislative agenda recognizing the family, the union of husband and wife for their mutual benefit and the procreation and education of children, as the single greatest contributor to the cohesiveness of our social order and the nation; more important than GDP growth or power projection overseas.
Trump offers no such program but the dedicated effort of Progressives for more than a century to destroy the family, the basic cell of society, through social and cultural transformation will achieve its final victory during a Kamala Harris presidency.
The Harris program has many worrisome points of a material nature—inflation, immigration, limits on free speech—but these pale in comparison with the war against the family, the glue holding our society together.
The war against the family in the United States has been ongoing since the early Nineteenth Century and has been chronicled many times elsewhere. A key feature of this war is to separate the children from the family with the claim that children are so complicated that their transition to good citizens cannot be left to the parents but must be curated by government experts.
The most effective Progressive weapon in this war against the family has been sex education in the public schools: anti-parent, anti-birth, and anti-family. With a pernicious and monstrous aggressiveness, they have all along aimed at leading us human creatures away from our dignity as image of God to a paganism of autonomous freedom, reducing us to a miserable existence as belly, sex and money; the outcome being muddled thinking, a cancer for any republic.
The Biden-Harris Administration has accelerated this war against the family by relentlessly weaponizing the entire apparatus of the executive branch against the family and family values. They have designated abortion opponents as domestic terrorists, exalted men in women’s sports, and promoted homosexuality in grammar schools.
In a complete rout of parental rights, in July Harris’ native state of California passed the “first ever” bill explicitly prohibiting teachers and staff from notifying parents of their child’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. This state law apparently overrides any individual school board’s commitment to parental notification and will ultimately be an absolute prohibition of parental notification. The justification is that the child has the “right” to determine his or her sexual orientation at the instigation of the state but without the toxic moral opinion of the parents.
On the other coast, in the same week, the Massachusetts legislature passed H4750 prohibiting the terms “mother” and “father” on birth certificates, once again “with the child’s rights in mind.”
As absurd as the California and Massachusetts laws are, the Harris Administration will surely hold them up as heroic examples for the rest of the country. Those states adopting similar laws will be rewarded and the holdouts will be punished. Harris often speaks of the “rule of law.” Her rule of law will be used to prevent any parent from objecting to this rights grab. Complain at a school board? Call the Child Services Gestapo! What if the child WANTS a father and mother? What if that child, now in pre-school, speaks of Mommy or Daddy? Call the Child Services Gestapo!
The basic issue dividing Liberals and Conservatives is an understanding of human freedom. Does God and God’s law, natural and supernatural, restrict or perfect human freedom? Conservatives understand, often quite dimly, that God’s law directs men and women to their ultimate purpose for being created.
Liberals see God’s law as only negative, an obstacle to the ultimate liberation of the individual. They see their cause as so important that morality demands that power be seized from corrupt persons and institutions and coercively redistributed to the less privileged using any means possible and without apology.
A Harris Administration will surely be a time of praise for sexual deviancy of all types, longer and longer lists of “hate crimes,” and demands for massive extensions of state power. A true nuclear winter for the family.
Nuclear winter is a long period of devastation following a nuclear explosion. Thank God, I haven’t been through one, but I have been through a forest devastated by fire. Little by little, amidst the charcoal air and the black tree trunks arise seedlings and ferns, chirping birds and crawling things. There is a new beginning.
Whatever a Harris Administration will do to destroy the family – and they will do everything they can–the family will arise as fresh growth in the burned forest. It will inevitably survive because it comes from God and will remain until the end of time. Let’s hope by that time we have the anthropology and legislation to recognize the family – nuclear, united, and large – as the most important driver of a robust nation; an agenda that will alter the trajectory of world history.
Tom McDonough is the Executive Director of American Family Project and author of An Eye for Others: Dorothy Day, Journalist 1916-1917.