Subversion of the Family Unit

Subversion of the Family Unit

  • Submitted By: dcs54
  • Date Submitted: 10/01/2008 3:33 PM
  • Category: History Other
  • Words: 547
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 2

It was widely agreed upon by my tutorial class that the nuclear family has changed in the last 50 years. The concept of a family has morphed from a ‘man and woman married for life’ to de facto couples, homosexual partnerships and marriages [with adopting children as an option], as well as polygamist marriages where more than one man or woman is shared by multiple partners.

The main contributor to this in my opinion [this view wasn’t really touched on in the tutorial] is the decline of Christian values in society. It has become socially acceptable to have children outside of marriage, to co habit outside of marriage, to have more than one sexual partner outside of marriage. This waning of societies ‘morals’ has lead to a grey area concerning the family – and marriage which was traditionally a religious institution has now become a social, and political institution [when a man and woman apply for a marriage licence they begin a contract with the government].

Before the advent of public television – only men wore pants, women wore dresses or skirts, only prostitutes wore make up and as late as 1912 in Chicago a woman could be fined for showing too much leg – and the miniskirt was considered whores attire. Terrible we cry, outrageous, how barbaric we all were! Yet a Muslim woman when witnessing the spectacle of a partial birth abortion [which is legal in much of the western world] says the same thing. It can be argued that Islamic tenets and fundamental Christianity haven’t changed their beliefs, but the Western world has through popular culture. And what was considered a basic tenet of society during the 1900’s has become considered oppressive and immoral today.

The feminist movement was an outgrowth of Marxist social and economic theory. When the promised uprising of the proletariat never occurred it was argued by Engels that the family was the institution preventing the growth of communism in the developed world. Because of this some argue that...

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