Focusing on the Family
                            By Chuck Colson

In the late 1970s President Jimmy Carter announced a White House
"Conference on the Family."  Yet instead of praise for his efforts to
bolster a crumbling institution, Carter received howls of outrage from
militant groups. Their objection?

The word FAMILY, it seems, was too restrictive, connoting a traditional
household of husband, wife, and children and excluding single parents,
couples living together, homosexual partners, and other combinations.
Bending to the pressure, White House officials renamed their meeting the
"conference on Families."

I wasn't overly troubled at the time: The protesters seemed a fringe
element at best, and surely such semantic games couldn't do much harm.

Well, I was wrong. This wasn't merely another case of politicians
placating special interests but the opening salvo of a concerted assualt
upon the traditional American family.

By the end of eighties, the campaing was in full stride. Last June, for
example, over the protests of Christans and civic leaders, San Francisco
officials passed a "domestic partnership" law, entitling two people
living together who attest that they have "an intimate and committed
relationship of mutual caring" to the same rights as those legally bound
in marriage.

In Washington, DC, a 25 member commission is examining " new forms of
the American family." (I've become increasingly leery when Washington
convenes a commission to study anything - let alone the constitutional
unit of Western civilization.) Last year New York City officials granted
a gay man full familial status and the right to his dead lover's
rentcontrolled apartment. Then mayor Koch, a bachelor, explained that
marriage is no longer necessary for a "strong family unit."

Still, many observers dismissed these actions as merely special interest
pressures of trendy, elite politics. After all, in San Francisco
ordinary voters overturned the domestic partnership ordinance - in the
city with the lartes, loudest homosecual population in American. Surely
this demonstrated that the American people have better sense that to
seriouly consider redefinig the family.

But now I wonder.

When the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company recently surveyed
its policy holders for a definition of the American family, 75 percent
chose the description, " a group of people who love and care for one
another." Only 25 percent picked the historic difinition of " a group of
people trlated by blood, marriage, or adoption."

So, by three to one, not only is a gay couple with adopted children a
family; so is a heterosexual couple living together for a few months.
For that matter, so is a fraternity house.

What the Massachusetts Mutual poll tells us is that we are no longer
dealing with fanatical fring factors seeking to fool with the family.
Now the man or woman on the street is saying, in effects, that a family
is anything you want it to be.

What is dangerous about all this is the way changes in language precede
changes in ideas. In George Orwell's 1984, a totalitarian government
controls the people's thoughts by controlling their language. With no
word for the idea of revolution, for example, the people never thought
to revolt.

Today this process is imposed not by some sinister, totalitarian force,
but rather by a society that has neutered any language that connotes a
moral judgement. So "living in sin" becomes " living together"; "broden
bomes" are just "single parent families"; homosexuals, or the "gay
community," simply pursue an "alternative lifestyle."

To speak plainly, all this has frightening implications for society. To
redefine the family was instituted by God for the propagation of the
human race. it is the first school of human instruction. It is the
promary means by which a society transmits values and standards of right
and wrong from one generation to the next.

(it is not coincidental that Harvard scholars James Q. Wilson and
Richard Herrnstein's celebrated study documents the connection between
crime and the lack of proper moral training in the home. When families
fail to provide love, security, and models of reponsible behavior, they
fail to provide the influence needed to produce chivalrous citizens.
Our prisons are full of those whose one-parent, inner-city families
failed to provide such training; and the rash of white-collar crime by
youg New York investors, for example, shows  that this is not relegated
to one socio-economic bachground. When families fail to provide moral
education, the result is immoral behavior in those they produce - from
Watts to Wall Street.)

Perhaps all this sounds rather hysterical; a secular observer might well
label my concerns the ravings of an intolerant fundamentalist. But when
three-quarters of the country has been duped to think of the family as
any free folowing sort of associantion, I think it's time to be
hysterical.

In a pluralistic society, acceptance of differing points of view is a
noble and necessary virtue. But when it runs amuck, it can create havoc
in our most precious institutions. The destruction of the family and the
resulting destruction of values is too high a price to pay to indulge
the whims of trendy tolerance.

          Charles W. Colson is chairman of Prison Fellowship.

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This article was taken from  Jubilee, October 1990 issue, page 7.



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