Death of the American Family?

It's been a while since we've seen any of the work of Allan Carlson, whose Rockford Institute published The Family in America, a monthly (?) review of family policies and problems in the US.  So when we read this essay at The American Conservative, we were treated again to the thoughts of Carlson.

It's not a lengthy treatise, and you should read it.  We'll excerpt a couple of highlights.

...Roosevelt was deeply concerned about American families. The nation’s birth rate had fallen by over 30 percent between 1880 and 1920; the number of divorced Americans had risen threefold between 1890 and 1910. Because of this, the topic of birth control became for Roosevelt “the most serious of all problems, for it lies at the root of, and indeed itself is, national life.” He condemned the practice of “willful sterility" in marriage and called birth control “the capital sin” against civilization. He labeled abortion “pre-natal infanticide.” None of this, unsurprisingly, appears on T.R.’s Wikipedia page....

That's Teddy, not Franklin.

 ...“If you do not believe in your own stock enough to wish to see the stock kept up, then you are not good Americans, you are not patriots,” he warned an audience of liberal Christian theologians in 1911. “The nineteenth century saw a prodigious growth of the English-speaking, relative to the Spanish speaking, population… The end of the twentieth century will see this completely reversed,” he predicted....

He wasn't far off; and if  you count the Arabic- and Far Eastern- speakers in the US today, he's dead-on.

Moving ahead a couple of decades, we see serious immigration from Germany, and while the author doesn't mention Poland, there are commonalities.  (Living in SE Wisconsin, that German-Polish political heritage is very clear, albeit the principles are now largely in dis-use. )

...Many of these German-Americans were Catholic, and were deeply influenced by Catholic teaching (e.g. Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum) at the turn of the century that argued for labor rights, such as a family wage that would enable a working father to support his family. German-Americans were also strong supporters of the early-twentieth-century maternalism movement, which called for a living wage and aimed to improve conditions at home for mothers and their children....

By the early '60's, the model was working very well indeed.

Then came LBJ and Nixon.

 ... the federal government began to discourage that old, very effective model in favor of Malthusianism. Lyndon Johnson in 1965 convened a White House Conference that included a panel on concerns regarding overpopulation. In 1968, an LBJ-appointed presidential committee pressed for increased government efforts in population control. Richard Nixon the following year called on Americans to confront “the population crisis.” Large families and population growth, championed only a decade earlier, “had become virtual social pathologies and the targets of state activism,” Carlson observed. The American fertility rate plummeted, while divorces skyrocketed. The most vocal family theorists of the late ’60s and then ’70s rejected the idea that there should be a unifying set of social standards governing society....

Remember that attacking the Church and the family is the M.O. of both Satan and the Communists; not surprising, then, that the teachers' unions--along with the mini-deep-states of "social services" at the State, County, and Municipal levels are following that playbook.  Finally, you will not be surprised to learn that the large-money interests, led by David Rockefeller, were shoving dollars into the anti-family/anti-church efforts.  They still are:  see the activity of Bill Gates, Ms. Jobs, Mr. Doerr, (et. al.) and--locally--Ms. Uihlein's massive support of Planned Parenthood.

Then it got worse.

....The 1964 Civil Rights Act decreed discrimination in employment on the basis of “sex” to be a federal crime, and LBJ’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commission resulted in rising female wages, while male breadwinners working full time suffered a 28 percent decline in real wages between 1970 and 1990. In 1975, the Supreme Court struck down the restriction of survivors’ benefits under Social Security to only widowed mothers, communicating that delineations between male and female wages would no longer be legally tolerated. And as the economic character of men and women became more alike, the financial advantage of the joint marriage household evaporated, provoking a decline in the overall marriage rate....

We are now importing labor, both legally and not, at a record rate to make up for a very serious deficiency of children.  And with Ted Kennedy's immigration law, we are importing people from cultures which are not consonant with that of the America of the 1950's.  Ozzie and Harriet are dead.

When Legislatures are considering a "flat tax"--which actually penalizes families in favor of a materialist nirvana--it's time for people to buttonhole their representatives and demand, instead, a "fair tax," structured with large per-child exemptions.

Read the whole thing!