Aug. 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:57
3056 Rise of the Left, Death of the Family | A Conversation with Phyllis Schlafly
In the last hundred years, the American family has been attacked, debased, maligned, slandered, and vilified by every facet of society. No family is safe from the official busybodies. 'Who Killed the American Family' reveals the concerted assault on the American nuclear family by many forces - feminists, judges, lawmakers, psychologists, school districts, college professors, politicians offering incentives and seeking votes, and more - opposed to the traditional American nuclear family, each with its own raison d'etre for wanting to abolish it. The wreckage of the American family leaves us with the inability to have limited government because government steps in to perform tasks formerly done by the nuclear family. Veteran conservative activist and thought leader Phyllis Schlafly explains how changes in the law, in court decisions, in the culture, in education, and in entertainment have eroded the once-precious institution. | Get "Who Killed the American Family?" by Phyllis Schlafly now at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938067525/?tag=freedradio-20
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Pleased to have back Phyllis Schlafly, an American constitutional lawyer.
Some would call her a conservative activist, I would say probably closer just to the middle of the bell curve bulge of common sense.
She's an author and a speaker.
She's written extensively on military matters and she led the campaign, a successful campaign against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
And she's recently written a book called Who Killed the American Family?
Thank you so much, Mrs.
Schlafly, for taking the time today.
So happy to join you.
For those of us like myself who kind of grew up in the divorce wreckage of the 70s and 80s and who have seen an endless parade of alternative family structures being proposed in society, what does it mean to say there is the American family and who would you put standing by the graveside?
Well, the building of the great middle class with a father provider and mother taking care of the children It was the foundation of our society.
That's when we became number one in economics as well as in military superiority.
And it was a way for people to live happily.
And it was just a great building of our country.
And that middle class family has pretty well disappeared now.
You can look at the statistics on that.
But nobody seems to talk about how did that happen.
And I don't think it was any accident.
I think there were certain groups of people who really didn't like the average American family for many reasons, and they set out to destroy it, and they've just about done it.
And you point out in the book, you say that this is a quote from the book, the Great Depression of the 1930s, when millions of men were unemployed, didn't kill the American family.
World War II, when we sent 16 million men to fight on faraway battlefields requiring long absences from home, didn't kill it.
So when you think of an institution that did survive, I mean, as you talk about it having developed in the early Middle Ages, survived things like the Black Death, the Crusades, the depopulation of the countryside under the enclosure movement in the 17th century.
It survived industrialization, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War.
This is an institution that seems to be pretty formidable, and to undo it seems...
It would seem like taking out an impregnable fortress.
So what do you think are the major factors that have managed to reduce it?
Well, that's what you really have to read the book to find out who killed the American family.
But there were a number of groups that didn't like the family for their own reasons.
For example, the feminists, they tell their friends that they want to kill the patriarchy.
They're very anti-men.
They were certainly behind the change in the divorce laws.
Which were just a tremendous change in our society that came about starting in the 1970s.
And you know, I grew up during the Great Depression, and even the black family held together during the Depression.
It was after that.
So the feminists were a major factor.
Another factor is, frankly, free trade.
They started sending the good American jobs overseas.
And no longer could the husband get a good $50,000 a year job to support his family.
And so when he couldn't, that meant his wife had to go into the workforce and maybe work at Starbucks or some minimum wage job.
And that was another attack on the family.
And then the whole of the media, the people who think they're experts, We're always talking down the family.
We didn't need the family anymore.
And certainly the family was not reinforced in school.
Although we see the recent statistics, you know, we've spent all this money to try to improve public schools and to eliminate what they call the gap between the high-achieving and the low-achieving students.
And they used to think the reason for the gap was poverty.
But late information shows it's the difference between those who grow up in a family with a mother and father and those who don't.
Well, that is something I've been reinforcing in this show, the degree to which, A, the welfare state is largely the single mother state, and B, that the children who come out of single mother households are at significant and highly elevated risk of a wide variety of social dysfunctions, which you really, well, society has a huge deal of trouble trying to fix After the fact, you know, prevention is worth many, many times that of cure.
And the prevention, of course, for single motherhood was the requirement for marital commitment before the production of children.
And that link really seems to have unraveled in an incredibly rapid period of time.
You could really date this from the mid-60s, I would say.
Oh, yes.
And something you said reminds me of another one of these powerful forces against the family are incentives.
And financial incentives are very powerful, both to rich and to poor.
And the incentives now are to the woman who has babies but not a husband.
And the more babies she has, the more goodies from the taxpayers' money she gets.
And so those incentives are powerful.
And it's extremely unfortunate that that was caused initially by Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty.
And the war on poverty really didn't advantage married couples, just women having babies, whether or not a husband happened to be around.
And of course, when you took away the husband's job and duty as a provider, he didn't see any need to stay around.
So he's sashaying on down the block to play with the boys.
Right.
Would it be fair to say that The creation of the single mother cohort is a specifically, maybe not consciously, but I think specifically Democrat strategy to create a group of dependent voters whose support can be ensured through their dependence on the state.
Well, I think that's extremely true and easily provable.
The Democrats want more people on welfare, want more people living on handouts from the government, Because they know that the Democrats have promised to continue and increase government handouts, whereas the Republicans seem to be always talking about cutting spending.
But the big spending is for welfare.
And a lot of people think the only people who get welfare are people who are out of work and completely down on their luck.
But actually, the big majority of them Are people who are working some kind of minor low-paid job, and they were able to cash in on everything from food stamps to extra money for children and various kinds, and it's a real racket.
Well, I think that the gap that you point out in the book, that single moms tend to vote Democrat, whereas married moms tend to vote Republican, can be kind of explained through economics as well, in that the married moms, when taxes go up to pay for the unmarried moms, it comes out of their husband's income, particularly if they're stay-at-home moms.
And so it's a wealth transfer from the husbands of married moms to the single moms.
And that's, I think, why we see this married women voting to the right and unmarried women voting to the left.
Yes, there are powerful incentives and disincentives.
And I do discuss those in my book.
You know, I think it's kind of amazing.
There isn't any other book like my book, Who Killed the American Family.
You find a lot of people complaining about the decline in the family numbers, But nobody has undertaken to explain how we got there.
And I think people are very much motivated by money inducements and cultural norms shown on the television.
And all these things provide inducements against the family.
And of course, the feminist ideology teaches women that men are the enemy.
And it teaches them that they're victims of the patriarchy.
Patriarchy has become a favorite word they talk about.
And they don't want the husband and the men to have any say-so.
They want the women to rule everything.
You said something, not in this book, but something I read a few years ago, Mish Lafley, that really, really stuck with me, where you talked about the sheer fun of raising children.
And you have, I think, six children and you were voted mother of the year.
And so I obviously am in awe of your parenting expertise.
But there has been such a negative connotation associated with, you know, the women who stay home and raise children and so on.
Could you tell a little bit about your perspective from somebody who, you know, did stay home with your kids and obviously have a successful intellectual career as well.
What are people missing when they look at staying home with kids and just seeing this drudgery?
Well, they're missing a lot of the fun and satisfaction of life.
Now, you know, stay-at-home mom isn't exactly the way it used to be.
Because the private industry has given us these wonderful labor-saving devices.
When I got married, the thing I wanted more than anything in the world was a dryer, so I didn't have to hang up my diapers on the line outside the yard.
And now, of course, we have washers and dryers and dishwashers and all kinds of labor-saving devices that have made housework and the care of children, or they even have paper diapers now.
I think of all the thousands of diapers that I washed out of the toilet for my six children.
And they've made it really so much easier.
And of course, people don't have as many children.
When I got married, most everybody in my town had six children.
But you don't find that so much anymore.
So there's all kinds of other times that you can do exciting things.
And enjoy life and pursue your interests.
I got active as a volunteer in politics, and that wasn't any full-time job.
I wasn't reporting to any boss, but I was able to go out occasionally, make a speech, and then come home and sleep in my own bed.
And so I was able to combine children and a very fulfilling intellectual career at the same time.
I think also for women who want to stay home, because there are so many women working outside the home, I think it's tough to find a neighborhood where you get that, you know, sharing stories over the backyard fence stuff that goes on where you can get a real community because a lot of these, I think they're called bedroom communities where, because there are so many people who are both working outside the home with their kids in daycare, anyone who does stay home doesn't kind of get that same benefit of community that used to be in the past.
Well, I think that's perfectly true, and people do miss that, and it's unfortunate.
But I don't regret my life in any way.
And also, I let my husband think he was the boss and make all the important decisions.
You know, I tell these women, oh, yes, he made all the important decisions.
For example, he decided that we could only have potatoes that were baked.
He didn't believe in mashed potatoes and other kinds.
And they had to be well, thoroughly baked.
And you know, these young women just look at me so funny.
Like, how could you put up with that?
But, you know, there are lots more important things in life than how long you bake your potato.
Yeah, like the happiness of your marriage would be sort of, I think we have bigger moral battles to win in the world than how much we boil our carbs.
Now, when we talk about financial incentives, something that I, because I've been happily married for many years, was something that was sort of off my radar until a year or two ago, where I was looking at the degree to which men are not getting married anymore.
I think one of the best sections in a great book is the section on incentives for divorce.
Two-thirds, of course, as you point out, and in some places it's even higher, the divorces are initiated by women.
And they don't cite abuse or infidelity as their cause, which was, I think, what was required before up until the 1960s here in Canada.
You needed an act of parliament to get divorced.
And now they basically just say, well, I'm dissatisfied.
And I think, as you point out in the book, they say the most powerful reason why wives initiate divorce is because I will win.
And this, of course, made men terrified of being dragged like a cat through a holly bush backwards in the court system.
What has changed since the 60s that has made such an unequal combat scenario in the family courts in America?
Well, I do blame the family courts.
I think they are one of the biggest foes of happy marriage.
And they not only...
The women filed suit In the big majority of divorces, not only because they know they'll win, but because they know they can take with them the children, the home, and the money.
So those are tremendous incentives.
And that's the fault of the family court.
Now, the family courts are supposed to be the lowest in the judicial hierarchy, but actually they're the most powerful.
They are absolutely controlling the The lives and the money and the residences of, what, 50 million Americans?
And who gave the courts all this power?
They were able to tell the divorced couple how they spend their money, who gets the money, and where the children...
You know, there are some of them who are telling the children what church to go to and what school to go to.
As I explain in the book, one of the big problems is this old English saying, the best interest of the child.
And when that was written into British common law by the famous British lawyer who did that, what it meant was the parents were best situated and qualified to decide what was in the best interest of the child.
But now, since the 1970s, The judges and family courts have taken that over.
So now the judges decide what's in the best interest of the child.
And there are all kinds of big and small decisions that have to be made in every family.
Is your child going to play baseball or soccer?
How do you decide what is in the best interest of the child?
You leave that up to just the inclination of the judge, whatever he likes.
And this is a removal of parental authority.
Which has certainly been part of the destruction of the family.
Well, and there is no, as far as I can see, no objective standard, as you point out, by which you can determine the best interest of the child, other than, which would be interesting to see in family court law, if the family courts really did Want to act in the best interest of the child,
wouldn't it be fair to say that, except in cases of abuse or perhaps infidelity, that they would say to the parents, no, you can't have a divorce, go to family counseling, go do whatever you need, but go and work this out, because what's in the best interest of the child is for you as a husband and wife to stay together.
And we know now, there are some recent figures that show that even after divorce, where you've got the parents who split up, The child is better off if he keeps a relationship with both the mother and the father.
And the children in school do better when they have the advantage of both a mother and a father.
And there's nothing that's gender neutral about what a child needs.
The child needs what the mother gives and what the father gives.
And it's very important.
So, there's just so many forces working against the family.
It's so unfortunate and you can look at the statistics and see how the number of people who are married has declined severely.
Yeah.
You mentioned earlier, and I sort of read this part of the book with great interest, I'm sort of a, I guess you could say, a rabid free marketer.
Unfettered capitalism is to me historically unarguable as the best way to create wealth and opportunity within a society.
But you did talk in the book about trade policies that drove jobs overseas and a statistic that I read that it still blows my mind every time I hear it is that you know since the 1990s 50,000 American manufacturing jobs have vanished every single month not every year every single month so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the inequalities in the trade deals that helped to drive these jobs
overseas well I think the expression free trade Which sounds good to conservatives, has been a great attacker of the family.
First place, it's a lie.
We allow tremendous cheating by the Chinese and other countries.
And if they abided by the rules, that would be one thing.
But they don't.
We stick by the rules because we believe in rules, but the Chinese don't.
And so they're cleaning our clock every day of the week.
And so that's unfortunate.
And then they lied to us about these trade agreements.
For example, when the previous one went through with South Korea, Obama promised that that was going to create 40,000 new jobs.
Well, it did, but they were in South Korea.
They weren't in the U.S. And so I'm tremendously offended with the way they lied to us about the whole subject of free trade.
And we don't have any world system that can really enforce these rules, and so we just live with it.
It's no fun playing with somebody who doesn't play by the same rules you do.
Yeah, and of course...
When it comes to these kinds of jobs, America has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and so, of course, it's really tough to compete with regions that have little to no corporate tax.
It has environmental regulations, which are...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
That's the reason why the Democrats are always pushing heavy immigration.
Big businesses want to bring in cheap labor.
That's what they want, because most of the people coming in Are poorly educated.
They don't even have a tenth grade education.
And they will work for much less than Americans are willing to work for.
So it's an attack on the family every way, both morally and financially.
And the last topic I wanted to mention was, and you touch on this in the book as well, that I've made this case that when you have a high regulatory environment combined with open immigration policies, it harms those who are struggling the most to rise from the lower economic areas.
And in particular, With black families, as you point out, and as Tom Sowell has pointed out, black families survived slavery.
They survived Jim Crow and the Great Depression and war.
And it wasn't really until the 1960s that you began to see the black family really begin to disintegrate.
And they have, you know, where the black family has gone in terms of disintegration.
Other ethnic groups seem to be sort of in hot pursuit off that cliff.
I wonder if you could talk about where you've seen any ethnic differences in how the family has been undermined since the 60s?
Well, I think it's been the powerful economic force of taking the good jobs away of the men, of the husbands, and taking away their ability to support a family.
And then you have the groups that really I want to get rid of the family.
And I include Obama in that.
You know, he made a speech up in Grand Rapids a couple of months ago in which he said, we do not think women should have the choice to stay home and take care of their own children.
They should all be in the workforce because that will improve our gross national product and be better for our country.
But it was very interesting that he used the word choice.
He said women should not have that choice.
Well, what was Obama to decide whether as a wife you are going to take care of your own children or hire some daycare worker to take care of the child so you can go on the workhorse and let him say the gross national product has improved?
Well, and of course, where are the feminists railing against this reduction of choice on the part of women?
Because I've always argued that the majority of feminism comes out of the purely Marxist tradition.
And of course, Obama was mentored by the Marxist tradition.
One of his great intellectual influences was an out-and-out Marxist.
And so the idea that they would have this view that the family stands between the state as it's currently constituted and its goal of expansion, that's the biggest block to state power is a healthy and conducive family.
And it's fine to say, well, it's going to increase our economic GDP to have women in the workforce.
But much like the national debt, that just pushes the dysfunction down a generation.
And it's the next generation that has to deal with the criminality and drug abuse and promiscuity and licentiousness of the kids who are raised without at least one parent there on a consistent basis.
Sorry, it's a minor rant, but this Marxist attack on the family is really trouble.
Yeah, well, the rant is absolutely true.
And you're telling some true things there.
And, of course, Obama was influenced by Olitski, who was...
Marxist-trained, and Betty Friedan, who started the feminist movement in this country, also had Marxist training when she was younger.
And they want to get rid of the family.
Those people want to get rid of anything that stands between the individual and the government, because they want the government to run everything.
And that isn't the kind of country we want to.
And I want to point out that the libertarians are An element of our society that is working hard to get the government out of this and that.
And they say they even want to get the government out of marriage.
But I will point out, they don't talk about getting the government out of family courts and out of divorce.
And it's the divorce and the breakup of marriage that is bringing government in whole hog into families.
So that the government, or some judge, is deciding how they spend their money, where the kid goes to school, where the kid goes to church, where they get to live, who gets the house, and all that sort of thing.
And I am waiting for the libertarians to get the government out of all of those what should be parental decisions And not trying to get the government out of it because the government is in it all the time and we don't want the government running our families.
Well, speaking as someone who's tried to get the libertarians to focus more on family matter with some success for many years, it is a frustration the degree to which people who focus solely on ideology don't understand that you cannot Reduce the size and power of the state without strengthening the family, that there's simply no way to do it because people respond to incentives.
Telling the government to reduce its power without dealing with the breakup and breakdown of the family is like telling somebody who's won the lottery to not cash it in because it's going to add to inflation because the government's just going to print the money.
They'll be like, no, I've got my winning lottery ticket and away that I go.
So focusing on the family to me is foundational to this great Mission of attempting to roll back the state expansion that has occurred over the past century or so.
That's right.
We've got to rebuild a family in order to have a bulwark against total government control.
And that's the only way to do it.
Because in the world, in the country that I grew up in during the Great Depression, the family, our government survived because the family is really an independent unit.
It's designed and equipped and motivated to support itself, not to look to some kind of a handout somewhere.
And the children who come out of intact and healthy families are functional to the point where they don't need a big state because they're not out making big disasters and committing crimes and getting addicted and knocking people up.
They're out there being responsible, mature adult citizens with the capacity to negotiate that you only get from family and you can't get from a daycare or other sort of pseudo-family institutions.
The kids that come out of healthy, intact and peaceful families are so functional that the state becomes like, well, why would I need that?
It's like It's like buying insurance for possession by a devil you don't even believe in, in some other religion.
You don't need it if you come out of a healthy, functioning family unit.
The need for the state evaporates to a large degree as well.
Yes, those are some very important points, and I do cover a lot of those in my book.
Who Killed the American Family?
I hope your listeners will get it, because honestly, I just don't think there's any other book that talks about that.
It talks about the people who are to blame for killing the American family, because the American family is the kind of country, is the kind of economic structure that enabled us to become a great nation, and we need to restore it, because that's where we're going to achieve less government.
These people talk about having less spending, less government.
It's not going to work unless we have more family.
Well, I really appreciate that.
We'll put links to the book below.
I hope that everyone, no matter what your political stripes, political ideology, will read the book and examine the arguments.
The references are copious.
The data is there.
And I think that your arguments, Mr.
Schlafly, are very compelling.
And I hope that we are always intellectually mature enough to follow the data wherever it leads.
So I really appreciate your time in writing it.
Thank you so much for your time today.
And I hope we can get this information into the hands of a few more people.
