By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
R.J.K., a reader from Naples, Fla., writes to ask why Church authorities do not make a more concerted effort to defend the traditional family from the attacks being leveled against it by today’s “neo-pagan culture, led by the media.” He is convinced that the media are making a “mockery” of the image of the father as the “breadwinner” and the wife as “a stay-at-home mother.”
He argues it will be difficult for the “Second Vatican Council’s teaching (and the headline banner each week for First Teachers) that ‘parents are the first to pass on the faith to their children and to educate them in it’ to be realized if those traditional roles are undermined.”
R.J.K. points out that we seldom see any longer in films and on television a favorable portrayal of the roles of mother and father in the traditional family structure, roles which were depicted as the norm by Hollywood in the not so distant past. R.J.K. is correct about that.
There are few television programs these days in the same vein as popular shows of the past, such as Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and The Donna Reed Show — which portrayed the stable nuclear family as something young Americans should aspire to.
Modern children get a far different picture of what it means to be a family than children of the middle years of the 20th century got. First Teachers welcomes letters from those who feel I am being overly gloomy in this matter. I would like to discover that I am wrong.
R.J.K. continues: “The mockery by the media of the traditional family is only a small part of the problem. The most damaging impact on the family in the United States in recent decades has been the exporting of blue-collar jobs to low-wage Third World countries. The resulting unemployment and underemployment at low-paying jobs of young males has prevented them from earning what is necessary to support a family. This has forced married women to work, rather than stay home with their children. What makes this situation worse is that single mothers and non-traditional families have been exalted by the media.”
R.J.K. is not optimistic about finding an answer to this problem: “Unfortunately, the solution — turning back the clock some 50 years regarding the family and jobs — is not politically correct. It is simply not in the cards.”
No question, it is not easy to come up with proposals to change the state of affairs that troubles R.J.K. The secular leftists in control of the media have deliberately sought to change society’s understanding of the role of men and women in marriage, promoting the countercultural values they favor.
Which means that Christians with traditional values would have a fighting chance of reversing the tide if they were able to secure positions of influence in the film and television industry. It may be unlikely that a modern version of the old movie director John Ford will come about anytime soon to promote a vision of society that we favor, but not impossible.
The loss of the blue-collar jobs that were the economic foundation of the traditional family is a more difficult nut to crack. I have never sat in on a discussion by corporate leaders contemplating closing factories in the United States, but I am confident that undermining traditional families was not part of their agenda; that their decision was motivated by the profit motive, not left-wing countercultural aims. Indeed, I would wager that most of those corporate executives thought of themselves as on the right politically.
This leads me to believe that they would gladly move their operations back to the United States, and once again offer the kind of jobs that would permit their workers to maintain a traditional family, if they could be convinced it would be profitable for them to do so.
It makes one wonder why authorities in the Church do not exert their moral influence on government leaders to institute policies that would bring back those jobs, rather than scolding business leaders for moving them overseas in the first place.
We hear many in the clergy, especially those who write for liberal Catholic publications, arguing that “greed” led the businesses to close operations in the United States. It is hard to see how they can be confident that that was the case, rather than that the businesses gave up after losing money on their American operations. Wishing will not make it so: A company that is not making a profit cannot stay in business and provide jobs with salaries that will provide lives of dignity for their employees.
I can’t think of a principled argument that would require a company to stay in business to provide work for its employees, if it is losing money. It is arithmetic that makes that impossible, not a lack of sound morals.
On another topic: A reader has called our attention to the website of Americans for Truth: americansfortruth.org. This is an organization that is dedicated to counteracting the influence of the homosexual lobby in the United States. The website provides facts and figures and calm reasoning for those who find themselves attacked as being “judgmental” and “backward thinking” when they defend Bible-based teachings about sex and marriage.
Just a few examples from the website: Homosexual activists tell us that society has no business speaking out against an individual’s decision about “who they love.” Perhaps. But it is not as if society does not have a stake in this matter. The Americans for Truth website points out that “since 1980, 350,000 men having sex with men have died of HIV/AIDS.” The cost to society? “Each HIV/AIDs victim needs $24,000+ of anti-viral medication per year; treating an HIV/AIDS victim from the disease’s onset through hospice runs $400,000 to $600,000 per year.”
The homosexual lobby also tells us that same-sex marriages should be celebrated for the “stability” they bring to society. The Americans for Truth website points to a Kinsey Institute report that “only one percent of men having sex with men had achieved monogamous relationships; only 9 percent had less than 25 partners; 32 percent had between 100 and 500; 15 percent between 500 and 1,000.” Whatever those numbers tell us, they do not describe a “stable” force in society worthy of commendation.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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