The Heritage Foundations latest policy blueprint, Saving America by Saving the Family, has provoked a sharp response from New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose, who appears more offended by its traditionalism than engaged with its substance.
According to the Daily Caller, the paper asserts that the family is the foundation of civilization, and marriagethe committed union of one man and one womanis its cornerstone, and advances policies aimed at encouraging marriage and childbearing. Grose, writing from the progressive left, seizes on minor points to discredit the broader argument, rather than grappling with the underlying concern that a nation cannot endure if it abandons family formation.
Heritage notes that the Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them an average of six each. Grose fires back with a pointed question: Are they counting the six children Thomas Jefferson had with Sally Hemings whom he enslaved and who could not legally refuse unwanted sex or not? What kind of example is that supposed to set?
Even if one accepts that Jefferson fathered six children with Hemings a claim still debated he also had six children with his wife, Martha, underscoring that large families were the norm among the Founders. The broader point, which Grose sidesteps, is that most signers did not have children with slaves, and no serious reader believes The Heritage Foundation is urging men to procure children via extramarital means or to own slaves.
Groses central complaint is that Heritages report is retrograde and unable to face the past 60 years of change, as she derides its reliance on older sources. She mocks the authors for citing a 2008 Daily Mail article, calling it a questionable, nearly 20-year-old article, and notes with disdain that two National Institutes of Health studies referenced are from 1998 and 1999, under the headline, The Heritage Foundation Wants to Send American Women Back Half a Century[.]
The accompanying artwork, featuring a wholesome blonde, blue-eyed family peeled back to reveal a terrified brown family beneath a grasping white-ish hand, makes the ideological framing unmistakable. Groses message is that because these ideas are old, they must be immoral, stupid, or wrongan article of faith for those who worship Progress with a capital P.
Heritage, by contrast, poses a question that transcends partisan fashion: The question that will determine the course of Americas future is: What happens to a nation when its citizens largely stop having children and eschew marriage?
For conservatives who believe strong families, not expansive bureaucracies, are the bedrock of a free and prosperous republic, that is not a relic of the past but the defining issue of the future.
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