An address to the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, Town Hall Conference Centre, Hobart, June 5, 2018
In December 1948, the international community gathered at the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Confronted by the horrors of the Second World War and egregious breaches of human rights in many places, world leaders sought to enshrine standards of conduct that respected the inherent dignity and liberty of each human being.
Led by the redoubtable Eleanor Roosevelt, the Human Rights Committee of the new organisation had worked for nearly two years to draft the Declaration. Australia was a significant supporter of the creation of the United Nations, and also the Universal Declaration.
Central to the Declaration is the bold assertion that “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want. . . (which) should be protected by the rule of law.”
Article 18 of the Declaration states that “Everybody has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in a community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
As the Harvard professor of law, Mary Ann Glendon, points out in her masterful account of the creation of the Declaration, A World Made New, Article 18 was a major achievement of the Human Rights Committee. Along with Eleanor Roosevelt, it was the work of other remarkable contributors, including Rene Cassin and Charles Malik.
Two decades later, the international community concluded a long process to transform the Declaration into an international legal instrument. Hence, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was drafted and adopted. Amongst the supporters again was Australia.
The Covenant expands Article 18 of the Declaration with three additional provisions.
First, “No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.”
Secondly, “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.”
Thirdly the nations that are signatories to the Covenant “undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.”
Australia is a signatory to the Covenant, but it has not been incorporated into our domestic law.
Parental rights
My starting point is the Covenant, because it clearly establishes parental rights under International Human Rights law. As the High Commissioner for Human Rights has indicated, in relation to Article 24, responsibility for children is primarily that of the family, particularly parents, of which the State has a duty to assist in discharging their responsibilities.
The primacy of parents is further reinforced in the later 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child. In particular, Article 14 provides:
States [Parties] shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
States [Parties] shall respect the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.
Moreover, Article 18 states, in part, that parents . . . have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child.
This is situated in the context of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserts:
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Hence, there is international consensus that human rights should be upheld, and that critical amongst these rights are the primacy of the family and the priority of parental rights. Moreover, it is the duty of government to reinforce these rights.
Yet today, there is a concerted campaign to undermine these rights and responsibilities, especially by proponents of cultural Marxism in various academic institutions. While the so-called ‘Safe Schools Program’ is the most recent example of this assault on the family and parental rights, it is not the only one. It is however an illustration of the cultural forces aligned against families and parents.
It is no accident that the founder of the program, Roz Ward, is an avowed Marxist.
Marxism
The origins of the modern assault on the family can be found in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Following Marx’s death in 1993, Engels edited and translated his writings. His work, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State argued that monogamous marriage guaranteed male social dominion over women, analogous, in communist theory, to the owners of capital over the workers.
Engels argued that the monogamous family:
Is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage. The latter is required, because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of their father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife.
Engels naively believed that if men needed only to be concerned with sex-love and no longer with property and inheritance, then monogamy would come naturally.
This theory was adopted as practice by the Leninists, as Geoffrey Hosking outlines in A History of the Soviet Union:
In the 1920s the regime tried to weaken the family as a ‘bourgeois institution’ [by passing new laws according to which] any stable cohabitation … could be considered a family … Abortion was available on demand [and] a partner to a marriage could obtain a divorce simply by requesting it.
The consequences were devastating. The country experienced a significant increase in divorce, bigamy, abortion and juvenile delinquency. Women and children were the victims of a legal regime that allowed the (mostly) males to dissolve their bonds with the mother and child. Faced with the growing social chaos, the Stalinist authorities restricted access to divorce in 1944. A divorce could only be granted by a court, and reconciliation was to be encouraged. The legal recognition of de facto relationships was abolished.
Soviet propaganda changed markedly:
The state cannot exist without the family. Marriage has a positive value … So-called ‘free love’ is a bourgeois invention … Moreover, marriage receives its full value for the state only if there is progeny, and the consorts experience the highest happiness of parenthood.
Despite the disastrous social consequences and the reversal of the policy by the Soviet authorities, the Marxist dream found new expression in the deconstruction of the postmodernists.
Deconstructing the family
One of the cultural influences most destructive of marriage and family has been the social philosophy of postmodernism and deconstructionism associated with the French critics Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Although this is not an essay on their works, some reference is necessary to demonstrate that the destruction of marriage and the family is not merely a consequence of their radical social philosophy; it is at its heart.
According to Professor Foucault, there is no objective truth upon which to base social structures, such as marriage and family. Rejecting reason, he argued that knowledge is a set of beliefs constructed to justify power relationships:
Sexuality (and social structures depending on sexuality like marriage and family) is something we ourselves create – it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret (unchangeable) side of desire. We have to understand what with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality: it is a (formless) possibility for creative life.
For Foucault, marriage and family are not fixed concepts. They have no meaning beyond the context in which they exist.
Foucault’s student, Jacques Derrida, regarded as the founder of deconstructionism, combined Marxist social analysis and Freudian psychological techniques to ‘deconstruct’ the pillars of western civilisation, including marriage and the family. In Glas, Professor Derrida deconstructs the concept of family by affirming the power of sexuality, while at the same time denying sexual difference is truly essential to human existence. Sexual difference does not belong to the existential structure of fundamental human existence (Dasein), according to the French philosopher:
If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the sexes, that does not mean that its being is deprived of sex. On the contrary: here one must think of a predifferential (non-sexually differentiated), or rather a predual (non-male/female), sexuality . . . a matter here of the positive and powerful source of every possible sexuality.
While Derrida relied, in part, on “Freud’s theory that civilisations are essentially neurotic and destroy themselves by restricting sex too much,” the British social scientist, Joseph Unwin, later discredited it. Surveying the major civilisations and societies over 5,000 years of history, Unwin reached the opposite conclusion:
In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.
Regardless of their historical legitimacy, the influence of the deconstructionists is evident in writings about modern ‘pure’ relationships. Beginning in the 1960s, some social scientists published negative views about marriage and family. An example well-known to scholars of the family is Edmund Leach’s 1967 Reith Lectures A Runaway World? in which he suggested that “far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Indeed, the nuclear family “is the most unusual kind of organisation and I would predict that it is only a transient phase of our society,” said Leach. Children “needed to grow up in larger, more relaxed domestic groups centred on the community rather than in mother’s kitchen, something like an Israeli kibbutz, or a Chinese commune.”
Despite the historical evidence that most people in Britain generally lived in nuclear families and births outside marriage were historically low by today’s rates, Leach was not alone in his distaste for marriage and family life. David Cooper and RD Laing saw the intense privacy of the family, with its network of introverted, intense and compulsory relationships as destructive of the individual’s self. Cooper described the nuclear family as “the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting;” and Laing claimed that the “initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother’s first kiss.”
Three decades later, the appeal of the Israeli kibbutz and the Chinese commune have somewhat diminished. Evidence has also continued to mount about the benefits for the health and well-being of stable family life. Despite this, Leach’s views continued to be recycled, for example by Anthony Giddens in his 1999 Reith Lectures. Not only are Giddens’ ideas reminiscent of Leach’s tilt against the family, even the title of his lecture series, Runaway World, is familiar.
In words similar to Leach, Professor Giddens asserts that “what most of its defenders in western countries call the traditional family was in fact a late transitional phase in family developments in the 1950s.” By defining the traditional family as “both parents living together with their children of the marriage, where the mother is full time housewife, and the father the breadwinner,” Giddens constructs a straw man against which to rail. For most families in the western world, two incomes is the norm.
“Romantic love is a modern invention,” writes the professor. “Marriage was never in the past based on intimacy.” This ignores thousands of years of history. From the Book of Songs to Shakespeare and since, authors and poets have written about romantic love and intimacy.
Professor Giddens would replace marriage with “coupling” and “uncoupling” – all done in a “democracy of the emotions.” As for children, parents in the past had them only for economic reasons: “One could say that children weren’t recognised as individuals.” In the end, Giddens is inconsistent. On one page, he refers to “coupling” and “uncoupling” and then to marriage “as a ritual commitment which can help stabilise otherwise fragile relationships.” But why bother if serial coupling is the path to individual happiness?
Having undermined the family, the deconstructionists and their latter day followers are now enjoined in the rejection of all gender differences. Ryan T Anderson writes: “At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims.”
Hence the Safe Schools Program which is squarely based on the failed Marxist philosophy. Roz Ward has argued that capitalism has promoted the ‘myth’ that there is a biological basis for gender identification and imposes cultural and moral constraints on sexuality that inhibits sexual freedom. This, she says, facilitates the exploitation of the working class:
To smooth the operation of capitalism the ruling class has benefitted, and continues to benefit, from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Capitalism, says Ward makes “us keep living, or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families.” The antidote to this, she claims, is Marxism which:
Offers the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today.
Hence, under the rubric of anti-bullying, the likes of Ward have sought to indoctrinate students, ignore parental rights, and undermine the family.
Not only are individuals able to determine their own gender from an ever growing list of descriptions, a new intolerance is being employed to silence anyone who differs. Hence laws in Canada and New York for example, seek to punish people who publicly disagree.
This Marxist fantasy has wrought social destruction in the past – and will again if we allow it to prosper.
Published by The Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies