Since this topic is a radical topic, I'll give an equally radical response:
Whathastobedone wrote:The vast majority of conservative thinkers and intellectuals have said yes, and have provided strong arguments to support their assessments.
I spit on their arguments:
The vast majority of those supposed intellectuals also
refuse to use the power of State to defend that which they profess to care about, they instead advocate using it to prescribe just
one type of family, "The Traditional Family" which is a selfish little isolated bubble with a mortgaged little suburban home and a neatly tended back garden - doubtless trimmed by an illegal immigrant - and 2.5 children who grow up and learn how to kill themselves on the Western Diet.
The father is an unhappy grasping person with an inferiority complex, trying desperately to live vicariously through his
children's careers because his lack of decent education in his own youth. He drowns his sense of emptiness and his alienation from his own low-wage work and his disconnect from the land of his ancestors in alcohol, and then beats the hell out of his wife while in a drunken stupor at least once a week. He is never going to pay off the mortgage on his house, which is just one other way that the bankers will be raping him. This knowledge gnaws at his mind every night before he goes to sleep. He prays to the masculine father-figure deity that he was taught to worship in his youth, for some sort of intervention.
He finds that in his adulthood he is more fervent in his faith than he was in his teenage years - this is part of crisis where he desperately needs to talk to someone who can help him, but in this society that would be seen as weakness, so his only resort is the distant father-figure deity who never answers, but he '
feels in his heart' that the father-figure deity telling him to suck it up and 'man up' and accept that it's just how the Free Market works. By 'feels in his heart' he means that he heard it at Church last week.
The mother is a timid and simpering mouse of a woman, she displayed some talent in her youth, but this was suppressed by the patriarchal structure which wanted her to instead use her time cleaning up for and catering to men in domestic situations. This suppression was compounded by the religion of the masculine father-figure which always told her she was inferior and second-best, and that any ideas of superiority she might be harbouring, should be abandoned. She instead chose to channel those feelings of superiority into small and petty acts of cruelty to animals as a result.
She despises her existence, spending most of her days locked in nostalgia for a childhood she never really enjoyed, and so she fabricates her own memories in some vain attempt to embellish her own past - but since she knows it's a lie and why she is lying to herself, that only makes her more and more unhappy.
She is planning to kill herself. The next time that her husband gets drunk and raises his hand to her, she will pull use her Smith and Wesson pistol and shoot him three times in the chest before using the fourth bullet on herself.
The government has just passed a budget to
cut social services funding, it's announced on TV, the TV that is always switched on, 24/7. She doesn't care now, nothing matters anymore, because soon she will finally be free to walk through the door, and the key to that door is loaded and in her hand.
Whathastobedone wrote:do you think the world would be better off if families in the traditional sense didn’t exist?
The
traditional family
doesn't exist, it's a disastrous arrangement that you arbitrarily decided was traditional, when in fact it was created in the modern era as a response to industrialisation. It needed to be altered as society evolved, but you people arbitrarily decided to put the brake on that, so people are still expected to be living in family units
exactly like it's the 1950s, even though it is not 1950 and we know more than they knew then, and we have greater resources at our disposal for managing families than ever before.
If we actually allowed you to continue to enforce the 'traditional family', then that cynical little story I made up at the beginning of this post would become a more and more prevalent reality.
Whathastobedone wrote:If not, why?
Because
it takes a community to socialise young new citizens, and because families (with an 's') come in various shapes and sizes. Some of that socialisation will involve Local Social Services Authorities, Schools, and the State.
Whathastobedone wrote:I just want to hear a liberal perspective
I'm not a Liberal.
Whathastobedone wrote:Anti-Gay marriage
I have no problem with gay marriage.
Whathastobedone wrote:Anti-abortion
I fully support abortion, and the ability of a woman to make that decision at any time for any reason, because women are the mate-selectors, and women are the guardians of the population group and should be able to decide what will or will not be born.
Whathastobedone wrote:and often says "It's time we put God back in *insert country here*."
Which god?