[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 43 (Tuesday, March 7, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H1120-H1121]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   PROTECTING THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Tennessee (Mrs. Harshbarger) for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. HARSHBARGER. Mr. Speaker, I start by saying I am honored to be 
the co-chair of the Congressional Family Caucus.
  We have seen the decline of the traditional family for many years, 
and it is not by chance this has occurred. We have come to a point in 
society that the restoration of the family is of the utmost importance.
  Russell Kirk wrote about the problem this way: ``We cannot feel any 
affection for our country unless we first love those near to us. The 
conservative feels that the family is the natural source and core of 
any good society; that when the family decays, a dreary collectivism is 
sure to supplant it; and that the principal instrument of moral 
instruction, ordinary education, and satisfactory economic life always 
must remain the family.''
  Kirk goes on to say: ``Now very powerful forces are at work to 
diminish the influence of the family among us, and even to destroy the 
family for all purposes except mere generation. Some of these forces 
are material and unintentional: . . . cheap amusements and 
transportation, which encourage members of the family to spend nearly 
all their time outside the family circle; the assumption of the old 
educational functions of the family by public schools . . . .''
  He continues: ``But other forces hostile to the family are not merely 
impersonal and unconscious; they are more or less deliberate, and they 
may be countered by intelligent action in the social and educational 
and political spheres. The chief of these ominous forces is the 
deliberate desire of certain people to have the political state assume 
nearly all the responsibilities

[[Page H1121]]

which the family once possessed. This movement is the most thorough and 
disastrous form of collectivism.
  `` `The shrewd totalitarian mentality knows well the powers of 
intimate kinship and religious devotion for keeping alive in a 
population values and incentives which might well, in the future, serve 
as the basis of resistance. Thus to emancipate each member, and 
especially the younger members, from the family was an absolute 
necessity. And this planned spiritual alienation from kinship was 
accomplished, not only through the negative processes of spying and 
informing, but through the sapping of the functional foundations of 
family membership and through the substitution of new and attractive 
political roles for each of the social roles embodied in the family 
structure. . . . What the totalitarian must have for the realization of 
his design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum.'''
  He goes on to list some of the deliberate techniques of the mass 
state for undermining the family.
  Number one is: ``Taking the instruction of children entirely away 
from their parents by the official adoption of theories that prescribe 
`educating the whole child' in the state schools, with a corresponding 
depreciation of parental intelligence and rights.''
  Number two is: ``Creating `youth organizations' to take young people 
quite out of the sphere of the family in their leisure hours and to 
indoctrinate them in the ideology of the mass state.''
  The third is: ``Abolishing the inheritance of family property, 
through confiscatory inheritance taxes or through income tax policies 
that leave small margin for family saving.''
  The fourth one is: ``Planned encouragement of divorce, `sexual 
freedom,' and `deprivatization of women,' through positive legislation 
or official propaganda, with the aim of weakening the bonds 
of affection within the family that offer a strong barrier to the 
wishes of the total state.''

  ``The traditional family--which, like many old-fashioned things, is 
an indispensable thing--gives us those roots without which we all would 
be just so many lonely little atoms of humanity, unprincipled and at 
the mercy of some iron political domination.''
  Do you know when this little book was written, Mr. Speaker? That was 
written in 1957.
  Kirk's insights about family, the importance of private property, 
education, religion, and a dozen other subjects not only remain 
completely sound but now seem downright prophetic.
  We were being warned about the attacks on the family unit more than 
60 years ago. That is why, as chosen leaders, we have the 
responsibility to protect the sanctity of the traditional family 
because marriage and family are institutions unique to human beings 
among all of God's creation.
  In modern-day wording by the author Tim Clinton in a book from 2021, 
he says this: ``Suffice it to say that the deterioration of the 
American family is the source of nearly every symptom of cultural 
decline, from criminal activity to plunging academic performances, from 
damaged mental health to poor physical health, from rising poverty to 
shredded social networks.''

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