March 6, 2012
From the Desk of Carol Soelberg:
Our weekly alerts are provided to educate about issues relating to the family, inform of current threats, and inspire with proven principles. Tom Christensen is our expert in defining unchanging principles that inspire us to continue to fight the sources that relentlessly try to disguise the truths about what really insures a healthy civilization! I trust his article this week will inspire you as it has me with increased commitment to contribute to the fight to preserve the family.
Tom’s article is particularly ironic because at this very moment UFI has our UN team in New York fighting – and it really is a battle – to include in UN documents such phrases as “wives and mothers” and “the family plays a vital role.” Hard to imagine such simple and time-honored phrases could be controversial, but there are those who oppose any vision of the family playing a central role in society.
I trust Tom’s article this week will inspire you as it has me with increased commitment to contribute to the fight to preserve the family.
The Unheralded Heroes of Society
The unheralded heroes (and heroines) of society are those to whom Abraham Lincoln referred as “the plain people” who walk through the “valley of the shadow of death” to bring human life to the world. They are mothers who choose family over career and other interests, and fathers who honor marital covenants. Such families, according to the US Supreme Court in 1888 are the “sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization.”
For a man or a woman, the greatest personal satisfaction in life and the greatest benefit to society is expressed in the home. No triumphs in the corporate world, classroom, playing field, battlefield, or political arena surpass those experienced in the home. Theodore Roosevelt, who excelled in all of the above, wrote: “no other success in life, not being President, or being wealthy, or going to college, or anything else, comes up to the success of the man and woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed.”
Enduring marriage and effective parenting cultivates in parents qualities of tenderness, modesty, spirituality, and refinement–qualities essential to the rule of law, a civil society, and a joyful life.
Raising children, although challenging, is a blessing precisely because it demands moral certitude, role modeling, marital commitment, quantity and quality parental time, patience, tenderness, love and listening skills. The benefits of such a lifestyle are immediate. Statistically, married adults with children are less accident-prone and susceptible to divorce and are healthier, wealthier, and longer living. Marital fidelity is the best insurance against AIDS. It is virtually a 100% guarantee.
On the other hand, those who live a life alone or with multiple or serial partners, whose family relationships are falling apart, diminish their influence and their prospects. As George Will writes, family and moral decline produces a “growing, gnawing sense of savagery and second-ratedness.” Family disorder also destroys a nation, driving up the cost of and need for welfare entitlements, increasing crime rates, and creating an environment hostile to and unfit for children. Family decline decimates the work force. No amount of government intervention or regulation can compensate for it.
The simple truth is that children learn and develop best alongside siblings, parents and extended family.
In the home, children learn thrift, industry, perseverance, and faith. Under the firm and loving hand of parents, they learn to read, play, obey, conserve, cook, mend, shop, garden, clean, speak, perform, interact, express gratitude, etc. On a broader scale, the condition of a nation’s families impacts consumer confidence, markets and job skills. Nations with broken or unproductive families struggle to care for their own or compete in the world.
Obviously, not everyone will choose to marry and have children, nor should they be compelled to do so. However, government policy and the mainstream media must not reward the unmarried or childless. US tax policy has long showered incentives on small businesses, farms, schools, religious institutions and charities. It must not overlook or undermine the natural family, the fundamental institution of society. Discouraging divorce, enshrining traditional marriage, inspiring adoption and responsible childbearing are sound public policies.
Radical feminists, statists, environmentalists, homosexuals, humanists, and media moguls are combining to conduct an effective campaign to break the hold of the traditional family on the hearts and minds of entire cultures.
Even though they too are born of a mother and father and are personally benefitted by parents who love and respect each other, stay together, and build a stable home together; their political agenda is somehow threatened by the persistence of such loving relationships among others. They fail to realize that their future, and that of their posterity, rests in the gentle arms of righteous, unselfish men and women who marry, bear children, lead, mentor, provide, and protect.
Rather than watching in silence as homebound mothers are portrayed as mindless, pathetic creatures without a life, husbands as chauvinists or predators, and children as career altering annoyances all of whom must be rescued by the government; take the time to rediscover and stand up for the soul-expanding joy of the traditional family. If real solutions to world problems are to be developed, if the powers of government are to be appropriately redirected and restrained, if natural order and freedom are to prevail, if the traditional family is to survive–the time to fight for such critical values and institutions is now.
Tom Christensen, former CEO of United Families, is a successful father, attorney, and politician. He has written extensively on the natural family and has addressed UN delegations in behalf of UFI in Istanbul, New York, Nairobi, the Hague, Lisbon and Geneva.