The Grooming of Society: Attack on the Family

The steady erosion of cultural values in the United States, based on the Judeo-Christian belief that all human beings have immortal souls made in the image and likeness of their Creator, did not happen by accident. There was a deliberate and concerted effort by the enemies of God to attack and destroy the institution that is the basic building block of society: the family.   

Grooming Americans to reject the Christian values they inherited from past generations was no easy task. It took a long time, and a steady diet of propaganda from academia, Hollywood and the mass media, to convince people that the institution ordained by God to sanctify its members and perpetuate the human race was restricting their freedom.

The attack on the family took two main avenues. Using lies, deception, and appeals to their selfish interests, Americans were gradually conditioned to view abortion and familial abandonment not as serious sins to be condemned, but as necessary paths to adult self-fulfillment.

The poisoned cultural wasteland we see before us is the result of the constant assault on the family. It should come as no surprise that suicide, mental illness, anxiety, drug use, violent crime and other pathologies are now running rampant.

Americans have been groomed to accept the grisly murder of unborn children ever since eugenicist Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1914. Thirty states passed legislation forcibly sterilizing what Sanger called “morons, mental defectives and epileptics.” Planned Parenthood would go on to become the top provider of abortions in the U.S.

According to Thomas Aquinas, one of the “primary precepts” of natural law – which all rational humans can recognize even without Divine intervention or ecclesial revelation– is that it is a person’s moral duty to protect human life, especially one’s own offspring.

A mother aborting her unborn child is a clear violation of natural law, but so is abuse, neglect and abandonment by a child’s father. Unfortunately, the numbers paint a very grim picture of exactly how many Americans have failed to fulfill their basic moral responsibilities toward the next generation.

There have been over 63 million abortions since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court released its disastrous Roe v. Wade decision. The scope of this holocaust is hard to grasp, but it most certainly has led to a cheapening of human life in America.

Millions of children who weren’t aborted by their mothers wound up being abandoned by their fathers, who were groomed by purveyors of pornography like Hugh Hefner, who founded the hedonistic Playboy magazine in 1953 with a nude Marilyn Monroe as its first “centerfold”. The trash that now fills our bookstores, libraries and airwaves with its perverted view of human sexuality is the end result.

This moral lawlessness by both women and men in our society has had a profoundly negative effect on children and the body politic.

The federal government’s own data show that children from fatherless homes account for the majority of runaways (90 percent); child behavioral disorders (85 percent); substance abuse (75 percent); aggression (75 percent); high school dropouts (71 percent); juvenile detainees (70 percent); and youth suicides (63 percent).

According to a 2016 study by psychologist Dr. Peter Langman, 82 percent of school shooters “either grew up in dysfunctional families or without their parents together (for at least part of their lives).” Only 18 percent grew up in a stable home with both biological parents.

Dr. Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, had come to the same conclusion in 2013, writing that “the social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer.”

And criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi also note that “such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates.”

Lawlessness begets more lawlessness. The breakdown of society began with the breakdown of the family, and no amount of hand-wringing by government officials who aided and abetted this decline will reverse the current downward spiral into chaos and despair. 

Our only hope is a society-wide return to God and family, where real freedom can be found.