Taking down the family. . .

The recent outrage over the address by Harrison Butker is revealing on many levels.  The critics are revolted by the very idea that the family is the center of our lives and the foundation of our culture and society.  They were offended by the idea that husband and wife would sacrifice for the sake of marriage and children.  This ought to be alarming to Christians and to those concerned for the well-being of our nation.  This family has been the most basic social unit and the very foundation of all human civilization.  It is written into our DNA.  But now it is the family that is under attack and the cultural and political left in America are working very hard to destroy the identity of the family and replace it with a confused ideal of self-authentification which references everything in feelings and mostly sexual feelings at that.  

When we found ourselves filling out marriage certificates without reference to husband or wife and birth certificates without reference to mother and father, we began the formal and governmental sanctioned program of eliminating the family as we know it. There have always been liberals and progressives who believed that government knew better than any mom or dad and who have raised up education and child care as the better substitute for the family of old.  They were on the fringes.  Now the work of sexual liberation and the triumph of sexual desire and the eruption of brand new genders has moved this work into the mainstream.  It is not in the saltwater regions of our nation or in the liberal enclaves of the urban dwellings but has become normative for every educational institution, library board, book list, and law governing our social order and affecting it.  This is not about the release of desire or the triumph of the feeling over the body but about the destruction of the family.  While you might expect such a judgment from the folks at "The View," “Today with Hoda & Jenna” co-hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager also ripped Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker for his faith-based commencement speech at Benedictine College.  Even the NFL had to distance themselves from Butker -- as if this group has any moral authority left for its choice of the dollar over the abusive and indulgent lives of its star players.

Whether you are J. K. Rowling or Harrison Butker, you dare not offend against the prevailing mores of a culture designed almost exclusively to destroy the family.  Target is but one major business and industry which is seeking to capitalize on this modern notion as businesses become also instruments of the new values and new shapes of society.  The only diversity that matters to these groups is the one that is about sexual attraction and gender identity.  If you get in their way, they will work to take you down and this works only because the overwhelming number of Christians are either silent on this matter or complicit in it.  Where is the compassion and love that would chemically abort the child in the womb and then laud this as the noble thing to do?  Where is the respect for life that would insist more than a dollar sign defines the value of life -- from its natural beginning to its natural end?  Children are essential to God's order but optional and probably not even all that welcome in the evolving order of society today.

Christians need to realize that there is no desire to enter what we have known and defined as marriage and the family by those with disordered attractions and confused identities.  They do not want what we have but want to destroy it and they use not only our silence but our shopping dollars to support their cause.  How odd it is that we live in a world in which you can make a football star a hero and all he has to do is to repeat what everyone knew and believed only a couple of generations ago!  But the enemies of marriage and the family have been effective and productive.  They have changed the minds of the youngest generations and it is routine now to find youth who reject marriage and have no desire for children.  You can call them selfish but the reality is that the subliminal message of the past and its now painfully obvious cause have been skewing the hearts and minds of the next generation to reject what they themselves knew growing up.  It is not the loss of an institution but the destruction of the very foundation of our life together.