The Enemy At Home (24 page)

HOW DID THE
new liberal morality succeed in undermining the traditional family? Why did the traditional family prove so vulnerable? For all its benefits, the nuclear family did not satisfy everyone. Polygamous males were constrained under the monogamous code of the “nuclear” family. Singles who did not want to marry at all felt marginalized, as did homosexuals. These groups became nonconformists, and they assembled into communities that went by the name of bohemia. Excluded by traditional society, the bohemians fought back by sneering at the mores and morals of traditional society. Theirs was the morality of the “inner self,” the morality of authenticity. Even the most untalented bohemians proclaimed themselves to be “artists” whose paintings, journals, and doggerel reflected the unique expressions of their inner voice. When bohemians did things that have traditionally made people ashamed, such as abandoning those who loved and relied on them, they justified their actions as manifesting an elevated and lofty freedom above petty notions of propriety and responsibility.

According to historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, the sex lives of these social rebels were so bizarre and convoluted that diagrams are needed to trace their heterosexual and homosexual associations. Many of the bohemian women, passed from one self-styled “artist” to another, felt used and degraded by their men. These women had little ground for complaint, however, because they accepted the liberal moral code. In their liaisons as in their work, the men claimed to be following the call of their inner selves.
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The only liberation conceivable within this framework was for women to demand the same right to self-fulfillment as the bohemian men. Feminism in this sense meant “the right to do things that men have always done.” Sexual freedom, and the freedom to work, became the defining hallmarks of the women’s movement.

The bohemians were the founders of the cultural liberalism of today’s left. Starting in the early twentieth century, these bohemians began a campaign against the nuclear family. Three champions of the bohemian lifestyle were social activist Margaret Sanger, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, left her husband and children to devote herself to the cause of birth control. She promoted contraception and abortion as part of her campaign to liberate the sexuality of women from the consequences of childbearing. She was the one who invented the idea that a woman is not free if she does not “control her own body.” Mead went to Samoa and claimed that the South Sea cultures had a culture of free love that did not suffer from the repression and hangups of American society. “They laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity…adultery does not necessarily mean a broken marriage…divorce is a simple, informal matter…. Samoans welcome casual homosexual practices…. In such a setting, there is no room for guilt.”
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Kinsey authored famous studies—a strange mixture of lewdness and pedantry—showing that various forms of “deviant” sex, such as adultery, homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, and bestiality, were much more common than anyone suspected. Quite the sexual pervert himself, Kinsey’s objective was to use the prevalence of sexual deviancy to establish its legitimacy.

Sanger, Mead, and Kinsey were sexual revolutionaries with a clear agenda. Sanger was a social Darwinist who was determined to reduce the breeding rate of blacks and other minorities. Mead and Kinsey were scientists, which gave their work public credibility. Subsequent research found that Mead was completely wrong about Samoan free love. Anthropologist Derek Freeman showed that virtually all her claims about Samoa were contradicted by the facts. In a classic lapse of ethnocentrism, Mead seems to have written more about what she wanted to believe than about what was really there. Kinsey was a sadomasochist who collected much of his evidence by interviewing prisoners, child molesters, prostitutes, and regulars in gay bars. Kinsey passed off their experiences as representative of the national population. Even so, Sanger, Mead, and Kinsey are celebrated on the cultural left as pioneers of sexual “openness.” The latest paean is Bill Condon’s film
Kinsey,
a canonization of Kinsey that sends movie critic A. O. Scott in the
New York Times
into raptures: “Where Many Were in Darkness, He Shone a Light.”
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Starting in the early 1960s, a group of women calling themselves feminists intensified the attack on the traditional institution of marriage. In 1963 Betty Friedan published
The Feminist Mystique,
which portrayed the housewife as the inhabitant of a “comfortable concentration camp.” The only way for women to escape, Friedan said, was to seek fulfillment through full-time careers. Germaine Greer wrote
The Female Eunuch,
which scorned the contented housewife as a sexless “eunuch.” Greer called on women to realize their authentic nature by pursuing the same sexual freedom that men have always enjoyed. “The chief means of liberating women is…by the pleasure principle. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. Spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to. Liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts.”
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Scholars like Jessie Bernard and Carolyn Heilbrun, and columnists like Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown, echoed these sentiments. Through academic writings and popular journalism, feminists championed a revolution to overthrow the regnant patriarchy.

Reading these feminist “classics” today, one is struck by their crudeness, their intellectual weightlessness, their virtual unreadability. Even so, the social transformation they sought did occur. The first change involved the laws governing divorce. Pressed by feminist groups such as the National Association of Women Lawyers, most states passed no-fault divorce laws allowing spouses to divorce without showing cause or even without the other spouse’s consent. Suddenly marriage became the only contract that one party could breach without suffering any penalty for doing so. Ironically, the partner initiating the divorce often received custody of the children. Equally strange, divorce allowed one parent to relinquish both parents’ decision-making authority to the courts or the state. Important as these legal changes were, the bigger transformation was in social mores. Divorce became increasingly acceptable, and couples contemplating it were often urged by friends and family to go their separate ways. Most Americans came to believe that parents should leave unhappy marriages, not preserve the marriage simply for the welfare of the children. Mothers were expected to work and leave their children in day-care centers.

How did feminist groups and their allies on the cultural left achieve these changes so easily? The conventional answer is technology, but this is only a partial answer. Yes, the technology of time-saving appliances and the contraceptive pill made it possible for women to have careers, whereas in the past this was impractical for most women. Even so, technology is no more a full explanation of the success of the women’s movement than the invention of printing is a full explanation of the Reformation. In both cases, technology made the revolution possible, but the root cause of these momentous events must be found in the ideas and activism of the people who championed them.

I believe the reason feminism prevailed so easily is that from the beginning, the feminists had the tacit support of many men. Contrary to the predictions of the feminists, the patriarchy offered no serious resistance to women’s liberation. Many men realized that feminists were championing something men have always sought, something that the ethic of the nuclear family denied them. Men discovered in women’s liberation a means to have sex with many women without having to marry or support any of them. This was even better than polygamy, which allowed men to have multiple wives but required the husband to look after all of them. Consequently many men—especially rich, powerful men looking to expand their options—enthusiastically backed the feminist goal of liberation.

As a few feminists like Germaine Greer have now recognized, this liberation has proved a mixed blessing for women.
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Relationships between men and women have been unhooked from the old social restraints, and are now largely subject to market forces. What this means is that as the man grows older, more sophisticated, and earns more, he no longer feels obligated to stay with the spouse who has devoted her “best years” to him. Many men now feel free to leave their wives and find younger women who are attracted to their status and power. Call it “men’s liberation.” The women who are left behind rarely have the same options that the men have. The plight of the abandoned forty-five-year-old housewife with three children is easy to contemplate. But even older women, who are successful and sophisticated, find that their “market value” is much lower. The law of nature, which neither liberalism nor feminism can repeal, has decreed that men of all ages generally prefer a sexy woman in her twenties or early thirties to the charms of an aging career woman.

As people in traditional societies have always recognized, the real victims of women’s liberation and men’s liberation are the children. Every child considers its particular family irreplaceable. Children lose their childhood on the day that parents divorce. They become vulnerable to a host of social pathologies that are well known. Judith Wallerstein’s landmark twenty-five-year study shows that the problems of divorce persist even into adulthood. Children of divorce are typically reluctant to form enduring relationships and are more likely themselves to divorce and to bear children outside of wedlock. Years and even decades later, they harbor feelings of self-doubt, loneliness, and hostility toward their parents, especially toward the one who initiated the divorce.
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No child would choose divorce, and the sons and daughters of divorce never wish this for their children. If children had the vote, there would be no such thing as divorce. Children are to the right of even the Muslims on this issue.

AMERICA IS NOW
witnessing a new wave of opposition to the traditional family, with effects that are being felt throughout the world. This is the campaign for homosexual marriage, presented by the left as the civil rights issue of our day. The first wave of gay activism focused on getting rid of statutes criminalizing homosexuality, and on winning the battle for social tolerance. These are causes that I support. But now, in a second wave of activism, the cultural left is pushing for complete social approval of homosexuality. This campaign goes beyond tolerance. It seeks to stigmatize all moral criticism of homosexuality as “discrimination” and “homophobia.” Gay marriage is the centerpiece of this campaign, and its implications are well known to its advocates. Andrew Sullivan writes, “Granting homosexuals entrance into this institution is tantamount to complete acceptance of homosexuality by American society.”
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Sullivan’s point is dramatized by a recent controversy at Joseph Estabrook elementary school in Massachusetts. The parents of several second-graders were outraged to discover that the teacher was reading to the children stories that promote homosexual marriage. One such book, titled
King and King,
featured a prince who rejected the proposals of several beautiful maidens in order to finally select, for his mate, another prince. This twenty-first-century fairy tale ends with the two men kissing. “My son is only 7 years old,” complained parent Robin Wirthlin. “They’re intentionally presenting this as a norm, and it’s not a value that our family supports. By presenting this kind of issue at such a young age, they’re trying to indoctrinate our children.” School superintendent Paul Ash agreed, but argued that such indoctrination is a good thing. “Same sex marriage is legal,” he said, and the school district is committed to promoting acceptance of diverse sexual lifestyles “by teaching children about the world they live in.”
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With a straight face, liberal scholars like Michael Walzer present gay marriage as a profamily concept. “True defenders of family values,” he writes, “are those who promote…gay marriage.” Columnist Jonathan Rauch goes even further, writing in
The New Republic
that “gay marriage is good for kids.” Senator Ted Kennedy accuses people who oppose gay marriage of “bigotry” for their willingness to “deny gays and lesbians the right to marry.”
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I wonder if these men have any idea how radical their schemes sound to people beyond their social circle. Certainly outside the West, their arguments would be considered to be bordering on madness.

While there have been a variety of family forms throughout history—the nuclear family, the polygamous family, the extended family, even the incestuous family—no society has ever permitted homosexual marriage. Only in recent years have a number of European countries—accompanied, of course, by our own state of Massachusetts—legalized the institution. The entire swath of cultures stretching from South America to Africa to the Middle East to South Asia to the Far East regards homosexuality as wrong or disordered. The general view is, we know that homosexuals exist and there may be good reasons to leave them alone. At the same time, this view holds, why would a sane people jeopardize an indispensable and already fragile institution such as marriage by redefining it away from its central purpose? Is the point of marriage to ensure that children have a father and mother, or is it to make Edgar and Austin feel more accepted by society?

In America, sad to say, we are inured to the debris of the broken family. We accept that the traditional family is no longer the norm, it is now something like an “alternative lifestyle.” We invite Edgar and Austin to our dinner parties. But in the Middle East, Abdul and Ali do not go out on dates. The traditional family remains the norm, both in the statistical sense and in the moral sense, in the non-Western world. Many Muslims believe that we should stop parading our perversions as an example to the world, and we should stop all efforts to export our way of life to other cultures. As they see it, if we in America want to wreck our families and ruin the lives of our children, that is our choice. But we don’t have the right to wreck their families and ruin the lives of their children.