Family

Philosophos: What about the relation of the government to the family structure?

Nomodiphas: Like the individual and the other fields we have been discussing, the family appears to me to be a distinct field. The government should respect the liberty and autonomy of the structure of the family. For example, people should be free to have children when they wish and they should be free to raise their children as they wish. These are freedoms that we largely enjoy and take for granted. We’ve talked a little about the state overstepping some of the boundaries of family autonomy in areas like health and education—instances where the state either tells the family how it should operate, or takes children away from their parents and directly performs a role of the family. I understand the injustice of these infringements, but it seems to me that there is no absolute right, no despotic power that parents have over their children or husbands have over their wives and there are therefore times when the state should interfere in the family, like if the parents are violently beating their children.

Philosophos: It is tragedy but it is true that many parents do a poor job in raising their children, but this is the system that God ordained and it would be imprudent of us to think we know better. The state is not permitted to interfere and take on the role of the parents in raising children. We have seen this occur to a large part in our schools. Our schools teach our children religion and morals (evolution and humanism), teach them about sex (be safe), and how to interact with one another (tolerate all sorts of evil and celebrate sin as diversity). Though I may be wrong, these appear to me to be core responsibilities of parents.

The state has also taken on determining decisions regarding children’s health—mandating HPV vaccines for young girls for example and controlling the foods that kids have access to at school—shouldn’t it be the parent’s decision to inoculate their kids from STDs and to determine their children’s diet? The state has also begun to prevent parents from spanking their children as a means of punishment—a form of punishment clearly permitted in the Bible.

That being said there are times when the government must interfere in the family. Because the family is a God ordained institution, the state should be slow to interfere. However, whenever the right of an individual is threatened or violated the government has a duty to interfere. When kids or a spouse are being beat or molested and having their right to bodily sanctity violated, the government should become involved and protect the rights of the victim. We’ll talk more about this later, but I believe that the single greatest injustice that our government is currently promulgating is not intervening enough in the family and protecting the rights of our most fragile citizens: the right to life of the unborn.

I want to bring up one more issue. The individual has natural liberty and rights and the government is instituted to protect his liberty and rights. The family too has natural autonomy and rights. The government has a duty to protect these things—to protect the institution of the family. This is an area where our government could use some improvement. Our divorce laws allow men to leave their wives with ease and saddle them with the responsibilities of rearing and providing for children. Permitting fornication produces the same result. By failing to enforce sexual morality the government has allowed the disintegration, to some degree, of the family. More children are raised in single or unmarried parent families, then in married families. We will talk of this later, but for now I want you to realize undermining the system that God instituted has consequences. Further, programs like social security weaken natural communal and familial cooperation, which in turn leads to a further breaking apart of the family structure. The government has a duty to protect the liberty and the rights of the family. It does this by leaving the responsibilities that God gave families to families (that of provision and care—both by parents and of parents, discipline, and child rearing) as well as promulgating sexual morality (limiting sex to within marriage, making divorce more difficult to attain, and holding those responsible for the consequences that their sex outside of marriage produces).