I will be interviewed on two radio shows today:

At 10:20 Eastern Time: The Bill & Joel Morning Show on WDUN Radio, Georgia
http://www.wdun.com/billjoel-06.asp
Call-in information: (770) 535-2911, 1-800-552-WDUN, or *star 550 on AT&T Wireless

At 3:10 Eastern Time: Ken Pittman on WBSM Radio, Massachusetts
http://www.wbsm.com/
http://www.wbsm.com/showdj.asp?DJID=25654
I cannot find a call-in number, but the general number is 508.998.1188.

It appears that you can listen to both these shows from their internet site.

My article, “Married to the State,” has just been published in The American Conservative, online edition.

A longer, scholarly version of this argument will be published in the January 2010 issue of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy.

TAC has published 3 previous articles of mine in their print edition:
“Fathers Into Felons”
“The Fathers’ War”
“Violence Against Families”

******************************

Married to the State
How government colonizes the family

By Stephen Baskerville

In 1947, with the baby boom in its infancy and few disposed to hearing of family crisis, Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman saw the long-term reality: the family had been deteriorating since the Renaissance and was nearing the point of no return. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, Zimmerman observed, “the state helps to break it up.” During the 19th century, “law piled on law, and government agency upon government agency” until by 1900 “the state had become master of the family.” The result, he wrote in Family and Civilization, was that “the family is now truly the agent, the slave, the handmaiden of the state.”

To read the rest, go to: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/married-to-the-state/.

Pat Fagan’s paper delivered at the World Congress of Families in Amsterdam last month, mentioned in the last post, is available here. Note this important passage toward the end:

…in the protection of the family, men have the special role of being the primary protector. Thus, in this political competition for peaceful coexistence, the male needs to especially engage the increasingly hostile state and the polygamy culture whenever it “raids” the territory of his family’s domain. … We can wait no longer; we need men of courage and energy. We are looking for the first few.

My review of Carle Zimmerman’s classic Family and Civilization, recently reissued by ISI Books, has just been published in Society, a very prestigious scholarly journal. Society is not esoteric or highly specialized, and so it is very influential. Unfortunately, it is not online, and Society is very scrupulous about guarding its copyright. Information on how to obtain a copy and the first page are on the links below.

Unlike today’s advocates for the family, Zimmerman (writing in 1947) has a lot to say about divorce and its role in family deterioration. He also emphasized the direct role of government in destroying families, arguing in effect that the state and the family have been on a collision course throughout modern history. Occasionally, he even takes a dig at family court, which even in his day was engaging in abuses that have since become much more widespread. I highlight these aspects in the review.

Stephen Baskerville
**************************

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g3232524710725l2/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g3232524710725l2/fulltext.pdf?page=1

Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization
Edited by James Kurth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008. xiii + 337 pp. $18.00. ISBN-10: 1933859377; ISBN-13: 978–1933859378

Stephen Baskerville

A society grappling with a declining birthrate, proliferation
of single-parent homes, and government policies that
undermine parents and families will find it sobering to learn
that some were sounding the alarm decades ago, even in the
apparently family-friendly post-war years, and that the trends
were developing long before that. Even more disturbing is
that the same ills plagued ancient civilizations—shortly
before they collapsed.

A publishing event of major importance is the re-issue of
Family and Civilization by Harvard sociologist Carle Clark
Zimmerman (1897–1983). Originally published in 1947,
the book is a classic of family scholarship, though as Allan
Carlson explains in the introduction, it has largely been
ignored by the academic elite.

Zimmerman demonstrates how the fragmentation of the
family in Greece and Rome preceded the disintegration of
those civilizations and how similar trends now threaten our
own. Writing as the post-war baby boom (a temporary
aberration, it turns out) was just beginning and the family
appeared to be on a major upsurge, Zimmerman identified
long-term trends that are only now reaching general
awareness.

Polybius noticed “a low birth-rate and a general decrease
of the population” in Greece during the second century BC.
In modern Europe birth rates have been falling since the late
nineteenth century and were below replacement level by
1930. This falloff reflected a larger renunciation of the
family as a social and personal institution, what Zimmerman
calls “familism.” “The extinction of faith in the familistic
system in Europe in the last two generations is identical with
the movements in Greece during the century following the
Peloponnesian Wars and in Rome from about 150 AD to 250
AD,” he wrote: “In each case the change in the faith and
belief in family systems was associated with rapid adoption
of negative reproductive rates, increased acceptance of
perverted forms of sex behavior, and with enormous crises
in the very civilizations themselves.”

One can come away from Zimmerman’s book very
pessimistic—from the realization that today’s trends have
been developing not for decades but for centuries, from
knowing that our Greek and Roman predecessors were
unable to prevent similar crises, and because the demographic
and cultural trends seem beyond the reach of public
policy. Readers witnessing continuing family deterioration
six decades later may conclude that the prognosis for
Western civilization is bleak indeed.

And yet while demography and culture are major
themes, they are not wholly determining. While he does
not state it explicitly, a striking feature of Zimmerman’s
analysis, and one that offers some hope, is that the decline
of the family—really, the attack on the family—is not a
matter simply of impersonal forces but the direct and
conscious work of the state. Over and over, Zimmerman
points out how the state views the family as a threat, how
the state eviscerates the family, the state sponsors antifamily
intellectuals, the state seeks supremacy over the
family and society in general.

Zimmerman writes of the “relation between the type of
family and strong central governments,” arguing that
historically it was in their absence that the family developed
most extensively. Later, “Strongly developed central governments
made the internal cohesion of family groups less
and less necessary.” Whenever the family shows signs of
dysfunction, “the state helps to break it up.” The state…

[More...]

The criminalization of fathers and parents generally is closely followed by the criminalization of children, especially boys. One manifestation is new laws against “bullying”, another new quasi-crime with no precise definition.

According to the Associated Press this week, “Anti-bullying laws lack any regular enforcement” (The Washington Times, 15 September 2009, p. B3.). This is not surprising.

Georgia is said to have an anti-bullying law that is “among the toughest in the nation”, according to the AP. But against what and whom precisely does it protect? Apparently “the state doesn’t collect data specifically on bullying occurrences,” so we do not know precisely how much bullying there is. And how can we, since no one knows precisely what constitutes “bullying”?

As with other new nebulous crimes proceeding from the sexual revolution — like “domestic violence,” “child abuse,” and “sexual harassment” — we are relying here for our evidence of this problem on “reports” that may or may not be “confirmed” (by whom? government officials?) but are not likely to be adjudicated as we usually understand that term – i.e., by a jury trial or other due process protections. “Bullying experts point out that the rising numbers may reflect more reports of bullying, not necessarily more incidents,” says the AP. Here too the definition becomes highly subjective. “Many children reported teasing, spreading rumors, and threats.” So teasing and spreading rumors are now against the law? “How do you quantify bullying?” a school official asks, sensibly enough. “It could even be as simple as a rolling of the eyes.” For this students will be prosecuted? Or simply punished? How, for “a rolling of the eyes”?

The AP writes that “Most states require school districts to adopt open-ended policies to prohibit bullying and harassment.” Open-ended indeed, since nothing else is possible. “It needs to be written into the law that bullying has the same consequences as assault,” says Brenda High, who operates a web site revealingly called Bully Police. Then why not simply use the existing assault laws, if it really is violent assault. Or is it more “open-ended”? Like “a rolling of the eyes”?

What is striking is that the AP does not really even ask these questions or probe any deeper into this alleged problem of criminal justice and neither apparently do many of the officials who would have us believe that we need yet more criminal statutes and law enforcement machinery.

It may well be that bullying is a growing and even rampant problem. The important point here is that traditionally it was fathers that protected their children against bullies or taught them how to handle themselves against bullies and prevented them from themselves bullying others. But having eliminated fathers, the single mothers can only protect their own children by ever more police power and by lobbying the state to criminalize more of other people’s children.

Once again, eliminate the fathers and increase the power and reach of the state.

Thanks for Ad Verdiesen of the Netherlands, part of my talk at the World Congress of Families in Amsterdam is now on YouTube. So far, it seems to be the only presentation at the Congress so honored. Other speakers did mention the plight of divorced parents however. During the same panel, Babette Francis of Australia described the injustices at some length, and others mentioned them too. No one objected to this message, and on the contrary, it was well received. This was a major event, extensively covered in the Dutch media and often the subject of commentaries in English. The word is getting out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFRBegsm3n4

Stephen