Families—the “little platoons,” as Edmund Burke called them— decentralize power away from the state. That’s a good thing for anyone who values individual liberty. Undermining or eliminating the family and its moral underpinnings atomizes individuals, leaving them to face the state alone, making us all strangers to one another in the eyes of the State. What becomes most vulnerable, then, are all our personal relationships.
The hubris of this sort of social engineering—you’ll note it’s devoid of love—is mind-blowing to anyone who ponders it and should be anathema to real libertarians. It puts Cohen in the company of totalitarians who seek to destroy the family to “protect” the presumably downtrodden. Take, for example, gender theorist Martha Fineman, who promotes the abolition of state-recognized marriage so the state can better monitor individuals. Her rationale is that patriarchal men can harm women if marriage is protected by a wall of privacy. Here’s a choice quote on that from her book, “The Autonomy Myth”: “Once institutional protection was removed, behavior would be judged by standards established [by the state] to regulate interactions among all members of society.” (emphasis added)
Yes, the state can give “protection” of this sort. So can any pimp or mobster, for that matter. But centralizing power is an evil and nasty thing to play around with. Beware such ideas bearing the fig leaf of “libertarianism.” Unfortunately, libertarianism is now apparently amorphous enough and so wracked with factions it can be used as convenient cover for authoritarian ideas.
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