Progressive Family Values

There are certain words and phrases that trigger in me a Pavlovian fury, and “family values” is one of those phrases. I suspect I’m not alone in reading this phrase as right-wing code for the hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people; opposition to reproductive choice; discomfort with sexuality in general; preference for male-dominated households; stigmatization of single people; and even uneasiness with women in the workplace. What’s more, families are hardly the sacred refuges the right would make them out to be; far too often, the mores associated with the “sanctity” of the American nuclear family serve to conceal an array of physical, emotional, and sexual abuses, as well as myriad less egregious ways that family members damage each other.

            Still, the family is one institution in our culture in which the highest acknowledged goal is not the pursuit of money and power but the sharing of love, kindness, and nurturing. In other words, families are among the only entities currently trying to operate, even imperfectly, according to the new bottom line of loving and caring that we in the Network of Spiritual Progressives are advocating for the whole culture. For this reason, I’m wondering whether the concept can be saved. What would our communities look like if they truly supported the nurturing capacity of families? The following are some preliminary answers to that question.

            First and most obviously, no family would be discriminated against on the basis of the gender and sexual orientation of the parents. Legislating against stable, loving families because they are headed by adults of the same sex is simply counterproductive.

            Second, our culture would need to acknowledge that in order to thrive, families require the support of a larger community. Visiting my hometown in Ohio this weekend, I was reminded of how important people outside the bounds of my immediate family were to me as I was growing up. The time I spent with the family of my seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Berring, acted as a tension-release valve for our small family by giving me somewhere else to be during the worst of my middle-school chaos. I lived for the weekends I spent with my grandmother and her partner Margaret near the shores of Lake Erie. No family can sustain itself without support from people around it. This truth is openly acknowledged at Unitarian Universalist commitment ceremonies in which the officiating minister leads gathered friends and family in vowing to support the couple as they vow to support each other.

            A natural outgrowth of this community acknowledgment would be increased funding for family support services, including outreach, parenting education classes, family support groups, eldercare, and crisis nurseries. We must begin to acknowledge publicly that family life is challenging, that no parent is perfect, and that families need not be ashamed to seek help when they are having difficulty. Only by breaking down the walls of secrecy around family life—by making family stress an acceptable topic of conversation—can we begin to address the epidemic of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in American families.

            Teaching students family coping skills as part of public school curriculum would also help ease family stress. In schools and family support centers, family members could experiment with empathizing with each other’s point of view.

            The most significant change we could make to enhance family life, however, would probably be to change the bottom line in the rest of the culture. Much of the stress affecting families is created when family members bring home from work and school an unconscious attitude that other people are means to an end rather than sacred unto themselves. One effect of this attitude is that partners view themselves as consumers looking to get their needs met in relationships, and when one partner isn’t sufficiently meeting those needs, the logical decision (according to the old bottom line, the old way of deciding what is rational) seems to be to search for another partner who will. This view of a “marketplace of relationships” creates tremendous insecurity even in committed partnerships and in the families that those partnerships ostensibly support. The religious right might be correct in decrying the instability of marriage, but by scapegoating same-sex couples, feminists, and women who work outside the home, they avoid confronting the fact that the very economic systems their political representatives support are largely responsible for that instability.

            A new bottom line at work would naturally involve childcare and eldercare support, ample maternity and paternity leave, active cultivation of work-life balance, family days, and other programs designed to enhance workers’ family lives.  

            These ideas are just a starting place for thinking about what a progressive, family-friendly culture would look like. I welcome discussion and disagreement; you can email me. If you are interesting in discussing these sorts of ideas, please consider joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives. For more information, visit www.spiritualprogressives.com.