Bringing Up Baby

For John, BLUF:  The idea of family is under assault in some quarters.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

From an analyst at the Brookings Institution we have this item, "Twenty Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown and Unmarried Moms"

This is a year old, but it is timely.  The author is Dr Isabel V. Sawhill (the Brookings Institution analyst), a budget expert, focusing on domestic poverty and federal fiscal policy.  She was also co-director of the Center on Children and Families and the Budgeting for National Priorities Project at Brookings.

Ms Sawhill's bottom line:

But in the end, Dan Quayle was right.  Unless the media, parents and other influential leaders celebrate marriage as the best environment for raising children, the new trend—bringing up baby alone—may be irreversible.

This is in contrast to the idea put forward by MSNBC Host Ms Melissa Harris-Perry, who said in an Advertisement for MSNBC:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children.  Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.  We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children,” she says in a spot for the network’s “Lean Forward” campaign.  “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Of course context is everything.   Most of us recognize the responsibility of the community to provide common services for the raising of children, from playgrounds to schools, from vaccination programs to public libraries.  In this case the "context" seems to be that children are more public property than the are members of a private family.

The Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, dated 15 May 1891, RERUM NOVARUM, "On Capital and Labor", gives us some guidance.

From Paragraph 12 we have:

Hence we have the family, the "society" of a man's house - a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State.  Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.

And then, in Paragraphs 13 and 14 we have these sage words:

A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father.  Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty.  We say, "at least equal rights"; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature.  If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.

The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.  True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.  In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them.  But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself.  "The child belongs to the father," and is, as it were, the continuation of the father's personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born.  And for the very reason that "the child belongs to the father" it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, "before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents."  The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.

Sure, 1891 was a long time ago, over a century, and, we use different language to describe the family, but this idea of the place of the family remains sound.  To reiterate, "...that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error."

Regards  —  Cliff