The Family Values Crowd Should Stop Lion

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: The Family Values crowd hates marriage.

Oh, they do. They really do. The above three pictures were featured on the blog of a woman named Jennifer Roback Morse, entitled "The Three Stages of A Man's Life". The first picture is "single", the second is "married", and the third is "divorced". Taken together, they say a lot about the real agenda of the FV brigade.

Ms. Morse is a part-time Research Fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. The Acton Institutes's mission is "to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles." In other words, Family Values-ville, USA.

Again, it is my contention that Morse, along with her FV buddies, really hate marriage, contrary to their positioning as a pro-marriage, pro-family front. The FV folks are actually anti-woman, but they can't come out and say it. Yes, even though Jennifer Roback Morse purports to be a woman herself, her anti-woman agenda is clear.

Let's go back to the enchanting little lion pictures for a moment. Now they, in themselves, are nothing extraordinary. They are just a variation on the old "ball and chain" jokes that have circulated endlessly since time immemorial. You know; men, left to their own devices live a fancy-free existence, until a woman "ensnares" them, and makes their lives miserable. The new twist, courtesy of the liberalization of divorce laws in the last century, is the notion of the woman leaving the man "flat broke" and used up after divorcing him. Not a real glowing portrait of marriage, is it? Yet, this is a picture replicated with startling regularity by the FV crowd. If marriage is so "bad" for men, why do the FVers beat the drum about the importance of marriage all of the time?

Two reasons. First, they know the Lion scenario is false. Second, and most importantly, they support marriage as a means to an end, not an end to itself. Men don't suffer from marriage. They prosper as a result of it. According to the Heritage Foundation, A FV stronghold if ever their was one, married adults are happier and less likely to commit suicide. Other studies have shown that men in particular reap health benefits from marriage, and the economic benefits of marriage have been documented as well. The real agenda of the FV camp is social control. They want to keep a certain group- affluent white males- at the top of the the pecking order.

Marriage, as it currently exists, is but a shadow if its former self. In the not too distant past, it served dual-duty in the service of the patriarchy. It kept women in their place, by defining a very narrow "acceptable"role, and by putting them under the direct control of a man at all times. It also excluded the "unwashed masses" from full participation in society, because it was often difficult for people at the lowest economic rungs to enter into marriage, the maintenance of family was an all-consuming activity for the middle rungs, and the advantages of political alliance through marriage and inheritance were kept safe for the top rungs of society. In effect, marriage kept people at the bottom chasing their own tails, freeing up the top of the heap to do what they wanted. While today's "egalitarian" marriage does not exert the same kind of control, it is the best thing the FV crowd has at the moment, and that's why they are sticking to it. Make no mistake, though. Today's "egalitarian" model of marriage is NOT what the FV folks have in mind when they think about the "ideal" form of the institution.

Need more convincing? Look to the opposition the FV camp throws up to same-sex marriage. Remember my statistics from the Heritage Foundation earlier? The statistics that show people are better off when they are married? Well, this is the recommendation from the folks at Heritage in regard to same-sex marriage: " Adopt an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect the traditional definition of marriage." Yep. They don't care AT ALL about the well-being of the people in the relationships. Allowing for same-sex marriage would run counter to the REAL goal of the FV crowd, so of course, they aren't going to support it. Their disdain for the egalitarian ideal is made manifest with quotes like this, again from the Heritage Foundation, from a piece called Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers And Men:

The primary cause of this national crisis, that is the decline of the family, is
the feminization of the American male. The first thing you need to do is sit
down with your wife and say something like this: “Honey, I’ve made a terrible
mistake. I’ve given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you
to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.

Of course, the piece concludes that the ONLY way to"reconnect" men with their family responsibilities and make them "sensitive" to their wife's needs is for the wife to submit to the "leadership" of her husband. Because the problem they see is NOT men doing less than they should, but women having more power than they should.

FVers hate women. And gays, and brown people, and basically anyone they see as standing in the way of the white male privilege juggernaut. They do not "love" marriage, despite what they say. They tolerate it, in its current form, only because they see it as a tool for reestablishing white male superiority. The minute they succeed in reestablishing the social order they want, all thoughts of "loving family relationships" will fall to the wayside. Because FVers don't really value families. They value what families can DO for white men.

Let's call shenanigans, and tell the Family Values crowd to stop lion.