We all know about families - about how they both support us and drive us to madness at various times. But few of us usually write or think about family dynamics with the clarity of with Katha Pollitt or William Pollack and Todd Shuster. These three writers, whose essays appear in out text, present two very different views of the modern family and what is right and what is wrong with it. These essays remind us that there are complexities even to the most ordinary of topics and things that we little understand about the most commonplace of topics.
In her essay, Pollitt presents an argument that runs counter to a more common one - a perspective that we are prepared for from the moment that we read her title. For most of us understand that "family values" are supposed to be good things, things that we approve of. Families, after all, are supposed to be valued. But Pollitt reminds us from the title to her last word that everything can be and probably has been politicized. Family values is in no way a neutral term but rather a term that is now used by conservatives who wish to disparage the values of individuals and families who are different from their own.
"Family values" has in fact become a catch phrase for hate and intolerance - for gays, for feminists, for progressives. And yet because "family value" sounds as if it should be as all-American as apple pie, most of us are afraid to come right out and say that we disapprove of them, that we in fact hate the kind of hate and intolerance that this phrase (and the people who use it) represent.
Pollitt, however, is not afraid. She is perfectly willing to say what she doesn't like - what she hates about the idea that conservatives promulgate that there is one kind of proper family and one set of values. She argues that the major problem with most American families today isn't a lack of proper values but rather a lack of money. Conservatives argue that the family is in decline because ...