[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 115 (Thursday, July 11, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4618-H4620]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE BREAKDOWN OF THE FAMILY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Posey). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to address some issues that I have 
addressed from this podium in the past, but I think the American press 
corps has still not picked up on them. They are issues that ought to be 
debated in the upcoming elections because I think over time, they have 
a profound effect on America.
  When I talk to people my age and up, they are almost uniformly 
concerned about where America is going, and they feel America is not 
particularly as great a country to raise children in as the America 
that they grew up in in the seventies or sixties or fifties.
  When I ask them why, they sometimes have a hard time placing it, but 
they list different things. One of the things they all talk about is 
the breakdown of the family.
  You have to wonder why this has happened or why they feel the family 
is not as strong as they used to be, but they are right if you look at 
the statistics.
  If you look at the number of children born without both a mother and 
a father in the home, around 1960, that was only 5 percent; it was 
rare.
  Then the Lyndon Johnson-led Federal Government began a so-called war 
on poverty. I call it a war on marriage. Between 1960 and the mid 
1990s, that 5-percent figure went up to 40 percent.
  Now, you may ask, was this just a coincidence? Did people believe in 
God less? Was getting married first as important? How did it happen?
  The American public should be aware that there are some people who 
always did want it to happen. Going back to Karl Marx, founder of 
Marxism, very connected with communism, the scourge of the 20th 
century, there was a goal to break down the family.
  They felt for the government to become preeminent, the family must 
shrink. The most important factor in raising children was no longer a 
mother and a father, it was the government.
  Beginning in the sixties, a variety of programs were passed, and it 
is kind of surprising because today we talk about equity which is close 
to equally. You would think the government would treat all Americans 
the same, but these programs provided benefits to people who had a 
certain income level.
  If you had a very low-income level, either because you weren't 
working yourself, or let's just take a woman as an example because 
there is no husband in the house working, you therefore became eligible 
for a variety of

[[Page H4619]]

benefits, some of which began in the sixties and some of which have 
been added since that time.
  We are aware of these benefits, and one of the most generous is 
housing for people without a major breadwinner in the home, and that 
can amount to a $700 or $800 or $900 a month benefit.
  We are all aware of the food stamp benefit, which you are eligible 
for if there is not, say, a man who is a breadwinner in the house.
  We have medical benefits. We have something called Pell grants, which 
provide free college both to parents of people who are in poverty or a 
parent in poverty and to that person themselves.
  I would like to recount an anecdote on Pell grants. I have given a 
talk like this for many years in Wisconsin. I would always give them to 
what used to be called the Tea Party movement, which was usually made 
up of a bunch of guys who were over 60 years old, but I talked about 
the benefits that the government gave to people that weren't married at 
that time.
  I talked to a young gal, because she was different from anybody else, 
and I asked her what she thought about my talk. She said, well, me and 
my husband got married before we had children, but none of my friends 
are getting married. They get free college, which is right.
  I wonder whether Senator Pell, before he came up with the Pell 
grants, knew that within 30 years of introducing the Pell grants, the 
young people would catch on that the government wanted them not to get 
married so that way, their children would get free college or they, 
themselves, would get free college.
  We now have the TANF program, which gives cash benefits to people.
  Indeed, there are over 70 government programs in which your benefits 
are based on percentage of poverty, which is to say you get benefits if 
you are not working hard and if you are not married to a spouse who is 
working hard. As soon as you have one person who is working kind of 
hard, they are going to make enough money, then they are not eligible 
for all these programs. When you consider the powerful forces who 
wanted to get rid of the family, perhaps this is not a coincidence.
  In the 1960s in addition to the Marxists, we had the angry feminist 
movement. There were feminists like Kate Millett, a name I remember 
from my youth. If you look up her speeches or comments, she wanted to 
break down the family and not have men in the family.
  I don't think it is a coincidence that at the same time these 
programs were expanding, the power of the feminists in this institution 
increased, and the result was we are going to have to have less men in 
the family.
  There is another big program, the earned income tax credit, which 
could easily give $6,000 or $7,000 or $8,000, which was formed by Jack 
Kemp, an entirely misguided Republican, who felt it was good to put out 
another program conditioned upon not having a good breadwinner in the 
household.
  In any event, I think when all these programs are done, we did work 
our way up to a point in which 40 percent of the children were born 
without two parents in the house. The effect of this, not only on the 
children but on the men, was huge.
  There is an important author by the name of George Gilder who we have 
long since forgotten. He is still alive, still kicking, and I hope he 
is listening to me.
  George Gilder investigated what was sometimes called the ghetto in 
Albany, New York. He followed a young couple, an unmarried couple, when 
the gal got pregnant, and he expected--back in those days when you had 
an unmarried couple and the gal got pregnant, that was cause for 
concern. People were not happy that the gal was pregnant. It was, like, 
what are we going to do?

  He found out already by the 1970s that it was actually cause for 
celebration. The mother and the father went from government office to 
government office picking up all these benefits.
  It meant that she would no longer have to live with her mother, and 
he wouldn't have to live with his father. He shouldn't be living in the 
household but as a practical matter he was. So a benefit for having a 
child out of wedlock was, all of a sudden, you got housing.
  Now, since that time, we have done something called a title 42 tax 
credit in which the government pays for 70 percent of housing that a 
property developer, who may also be a campaign contributor, is able 
build low-income housing, new low-income housing, superior to rental 
properties, which most other people get, and people below a percentage 
of poverty are able to live in title 42 housing.
  The property developer, who has now built very nice properties 
because the government is paying for 70 percent of them, he becomes 
very wealthy, and the new family or the new mother and child wind up 
living in an apartment nicer than most other people live.
  But in any event, George Gilder's observation was not only does this 
put the child in the long run in a more difficult position--and people 
who work hard, there are all sorts of family backgrounds, and they are 
doing a tremendous job, I understand that. Another effect that I don't 
know was necessarily anticipated by Lyndon Johnson is they kind of took 
the purpose out of a man's life because now they have a basket of 
goodies for the mom. She may be making $40,000 a year, $30,000 a year, 
and pretty soon, the couple realizes that if the guy is going to come 
in and make $35,000 or $40,000 a year, materially, he has done nothing 
to add to the family.

                              {time}  1315

  He winds up eventually realizing why am I going to live here? Maybe 
he moves out on his own, maybe mom kicks him out, but, in any event, we 
have made the man superfluous, which I think George Gilder would argue 
is the major effect of the war on poverty. They have taken away the 
purpose of the man to be part of a family.
  In any event, here we are in 2024 in a situation in which about 40 
percent of children are born to a couple out of wedlock, and, 
obviously, with divorces or people breaking up, that number can wind up 
even higher, which is a huge tragedy for America.
  If we want to get America back to 1960, when this was almost unheard 
of, we have to fundamentally change these programs. Of course, as you 
have a family breakdown you have other problems that we are trying to 
deal with here. As you have less marriages, you have a higher abortion 
rate, so a lot of these abortions have to be attributed to the war on 
marriage begun by Lyndon Johnson. You have children who maybe don't do 
as well in school, which can be attributed to this or who are more 
likely to be depressed or more likely to commit crime or have guys who 
don't have a purpose in life and are more likely to just hang out and 
do drugs and that sort of thing.
  I think this is a huge issue, and it is something our slumbering 
press corps ought to take up with our candidates for President and see 
if they plan on doing anything about it since the war on poverty in the 
1960s, I think, can universally be declared a complete failure. I would 
ask the press corps to look at this, and I would also ask leadership in 
both parties as they plan what they are going to do in January of 2025: 
Do you view this breakdown of the family as something the government 
should do something about? As far as I can tell it was largely caused 
by the government in the first place. People who wanted the breakdown 
of the family, people like Angela Davis, a well-known communist, people 
like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s, it appears 
that--not for everybody but for some of the principals who designed 
these programs--a goal was the destruction of the family. Of course, 
they have succeeded in that these single-family units are much more 
likely to depend upon the government.
  Every year, of course, I am lobbied by people who want the 
government, therefore, to take up an even greater role in their 
children's life, be it daycare, be it preschool, be it after-school 
programs, whatever. They clearly want the children raised by the 
government.
  I hope the press corps picks up on this, and I hope Republican and 
Democrat leadership put together some sort of plan for January in which 
we work our way back to where America was in the 1960s.
  The next issue I am going to take up, and it was debated on this 
floor quite a bit yesterday, but I don't think a certain tact was taken 
with regard to the bill. President Biden, one of the many

[[Page H4620]]

things that he champions and is proud of that he has done here, weighed 
in on Title IX and is trying to force a certain view of transgenders on 
American schools.
  It would seem to me that in life today the transgenders, at least we 
are told, are very unhappy people compared to their peers. 
Nevertheless, the Biden administration has adopted rules, the message 
of which is if a young person feels a little bit like a transgender or 
wants to be a transgender since it is kind of portrayed as a positive 
lifestyle in the news, if someone wants to be that way, the schools 
have to go out of their way and accept this lifestyle and maybe even I 
would say accept it to the degree to which you would say you are 
promoting the lifestyle.
  We have to say the best studies of gender dysphoria show that between 
80 and 95 percent of the children who claim to have a gender identity 
problem will snap out of it. If you read a book--what I think is the 
best book on the topic that I have read--maybe one of the worst things 
you can do to children like this is encourage them down the path--in 
other words, praise them for doing this, accept them for doing this, 
and you wind up in a situation in which they may not bounce out of it.
  This is my problem with the Biden rule.
  The rule is such that I believe that children who play with this sort 
of identity are more likely to wind up permanently experiencing this 
identity, rather than bouncing out of it as 80 to 90 percent are.
  In Europe, they have kind of backed off of the extreme view of this 
lifestyle situation because they realized that the more they talked 
about transgenderism, the more kids began to adopt it. They, therefore, 
feel that going all the way toward puberty blockers and cross-sex 
hormones may be very damaging, and the children will just wind up 
getting back to the norm on their own.
  I think as we discuss this topic, a lot of the verbiage is aimed at 
men participating in girls' sports, but I hope we are also looking at 
the more we normalize this lifestyle, which seems to be connected with 
depression and unhappiness, the more we do that, the more children will 
go down that path, the more it will give the medical profession an 
opportunity to prescribe more drugs, and even in some cases, do more 
surgeries.
  When we have a President who in extreme cases is even telling boys 
that it is fine, you can pretend you are a girl, we will accept you as 
a girl, go out for the girls' soccer team or whatever, I think we are 
very likely harming that boy who would probably, according to the 
statistics, snap out of it, but, instead, he is going to start down a 
lifetime, which may include puberty blockers and may include depression 
as he comes to accept the norm of being something which he is not.
  I hope this side of the story will be taken up not only in this body 
but by conservative press outlets who just solely focus--which is an 
outrage too--on the unfairness of having a boy compete in a girl's 
sport but also think on what you are doing to the poor misguided 
people, boys who think they are girls or girls who think they are boys, 
because as you affirm this choice you are going to get more and more 
people going down that path and more and more people, I think, winding 
up with unhappy lives.
  I have other things to talk about, but I think I will leave that for 
next week.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________