By Erin Weist
I first heard about United Families International several years ago and the message they were promoting immediately resonated with me in my role as a wife and mother. I feel privileged to write for UFI, offering my own perspective on social and political issues that affect families.
The mission statement for United Families International is stated clearly on the website. Our mission is to strengthen and defend family, marriage, life, parents, and religious liberty. These are principles worth defending and ideals worth fighting for and strengthening in any society. The idea of family is not cultural – rather, it translates across EVERY culture. Families may not function exactly the same in all places (patriarchal vs. matriarchal, multi-generational or not) but however they function the goal of all people should be to provide support to wives and husbands, parents and children, and offer tools to help them succeed.
UFI supports the family as the basic unit of society. We defend marriage as between a man and a woman, with those relationships based on chastity before marriage and fidelity after marriage. We defend all life as sacred including lives of unborn children and the infirm. We support parents in their right and their obligation to love, protect, provide for, and teach their children. And finally, we defend religious liberty as the right to live our lives according to our religious convictions, acknowledging the importance of religion to individuals as well as society.
I also have other passions in life: the arts, which make life beautiful; education, which makes our view of the world richer and more full; physical fitness, which teaches me about pushing boundaries and encourages me to erase my own limitations; and the physical world, which has provided mankind with discoveries for millennia and continues to teach and help us. But without those principles of family, which UFI works to strengthen and defend, these other things that make life beautiful and enriching would be lost. The beauty of life is truly experienced through the lens of family and religion, amplified and made whole. I will continue to support United Families International and any group which seeks to promote these ideals. I encourage all others to join me in making life beautiful by making families stronger.