The social justice warriors do not like the family.
The Farmington, Michigan, public schools hired a firm called “US2 Consulting” to teach them how better to be woke. The US2 “consultants” style themselves, “Social Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Consultants.” US2 Consulting seems to think that “familialism” is the new racism. Their website states:
If someone asked you, “Who is a part of your family?” Do you list blood relatives? Children? Extended family members? What about parents of friends who practically raised you? Some may define close friends as family, especially if they are estranged from their blood relatives. It also may not always be an easy answer and could create deep emotions. The way that we personally define family is something we learn from our environment and our culture, along with our circumstances.
A quick Google search for the term “family” brings up a definition from the Health Resources & Services Administration:
Family: A family is a group of two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption who live together; all such related persons are considered members of one family.
This is the same definition that is used by the U.S. Census Bureau to define families in the United States. This is also a definition that was frequently taught in schools for a long time. However, as you may have noticed in the initial reflection, there are many other ways in which a family can be defined. Not everyone has the same view on what makes a family. This definition excludes individuals who grew up in foster homes, were raised by grandparents or other relatives, and those who call non-related people family.
The government’s definition is a perfectly serviceable definition of family. The Marxists at US2 Consulting do not care one iota about the feelings of someone who grew up in a foster home or was raised by their grandparents (such people know better than most the value of the nuclear family because they acutely feel its absence in their own lives).
Rather, the purpose of the Marxist critical theorists’ criticism of the definition of a family is the same purpose behind their new, biology-free definition of men and women as only a choice of identity: to destroy the created sexual order and thereby hasten the destruction of our civilization so that it can be replaced by the Leftist utopia they intend to build atop the rubble of what they have destroyed.
Familialism is prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis or assumption of family structure. At the government level, an expectation is set for what makes a family, and this is an example of systemic familialism. While this definition will not be changed overnight, there are things that we can do to embrace different family dynamics:
· Use terms like “caregivers” or “designated adults” when talking to kids and teens about their family units. Allow them to define family themselves.
· Avoid making assumptions about family dynamics when someone refers to a member of their family.
· Educate yourself and others about the many ways in which families can be defined.
· Include books for children about topics like adoption, foster care, single parents, and other relatives as caregivers in classrooms and public libraries.
· Examine your own implicit biases around familialism and identify where your biases may have originated.
What other ideas do you have for identifying familialism and creating more inclusion for family structures that fall outside of societal expectations?
US2 Consulting isn’t wild about Christianity, either, as you might expect. One of the company’s memes on Facebook asks how Christianity played a role in colonization and explains:
“Christianity was one justification that European powers used to colonize and exploit Africa. ... To many European nations, Christianity represented Western Civilization and the basis for Anglo-Saxon morality. Christianity served as a major force in the partition and eventual colonization of Africa.”
Colonialism, Western Civilization, Christianity, all very, very bad. (By the way, this is an example of the ignorance so typically found among the ideologically dangerous: most Europeans were not Anglo-Saxons.)
US2 Consulting has a litany of “isms” and “privileges” that it wants you to know about and eschew, including:
Saneism: “Discrimination based on someone’s actual or perceived mental health.”
Misgender: “Referring to someone using gendered language, that does not correctly reflect the gender which they identify.”
Lookism Privilege: "Getting a front desk job over another individual, because you look the part.”
Intellectual Privilege: “Not worrying about whether it is necessary to tell someone your IQ (intelligence quotient.)” [?]
Heterosexual Privilege: “The ability to openly talk about one’s partner without being ridiculed.”
Hearing Privilege: “Going to a lecture without the need of an ASL (American Sign Language) interpreter or closed-captioning.”
Able-bodied Privilege: “Being able to go outside without getting stared at because of your different ability.”
If you’re tempted to laugh at this nonsense, stifle the urge. They will soon be cancelling, un-personing, and even imprisoning you if you don’t go along with it. They are vicious totalitarians.
Well now I was curious about “familialism,” having never heard of it before. So I did what we all do in this digital online age: I looked it up on Wikipedia (which, by the way, has been taken over by the Left and presents only the Leftist narrative on anything having to do with politics, ideology, or current events). Wikipedia tells me that,
“Familialism or familism is an ideology that puts priority to family. . . . In the Western world, familialism views the nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their child or children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning society and civilization.”
That’s an “ideology” now? I thought that was just simple reality. This is the new racism? This is what all the bien pensants are suppose to oppose?
If you would like an object lesson in why critical theory, the cultural Marxism current sweeping the West, is called “critical theory,” read the Wikipedia article on “familialism”:
Criticism in practice: Familialism has been challenged as historically and sociologically inadequate to describe the complexity of actual family relations . . .
Criticism from the LGBT community: From its inception in the late 1960s, the gay rights movement has asserted every individual's right to create and define their own relationships and family in the way most conducive to the safety, happiness, and self-actualization of each individual. For example, the glossary of LGBT terms of Family Pride Canada, a Canadian organization advocating for family equality for LGBT parents, defines familialism as: “a rigidly conservative ideology promoted by the defenders of "Family Values," who insist, despite all the sociological evidence to the contrary, that the only real family is a traditional 1950s-style white, middle-class household with a faithfully married dad and a mom whose sex life is strictly yet blissfully procreative, and whose high moral standards are passed on like old china to their perfectly heterosexual children.”
Criticism in psychology: Normalization of the nuclear family as the only healthy environment for children has been criticized by psychologists. In a peer-reviewed study from 2007, adoptees have been shown to display self-esteem comparable with non-adoptees. In a meta-study from 2012, "quality of parenting and parent–child relationships" is described as the most important factor to children development. Also "Dimensions of family structure including such factors as divorce, single parenthood, and the parents' sexual orientation and biological relatedness between parents and children are of little or no predictive importance."
Criticism in psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari . . . argued that psychiatry and psychoanalysis, since their inception, have been affected by an incurable familialism, which is their ordinary bed and board. Psychoanalysis has never escaped from this, having remained captive to an unrepentant familialism. Michel Foucault wrote that through familialism psychoanalysis completed and perfected what the psychiatry of 19th century insane asylums had set out to do---enforce the power structures of bourgeois society and its values: Family-Children (paternal authority), Fault-Punishment (immediate justice), Madness-Disorder (social and moral order). . . .
Criticism in Marxism: In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx describes how the bourgeois or monogamous two-parent family has as its foundation capital and private gain. Marx also pointed out that this family existed only in its full form among the bourgeoisie or upper classes, and was nearly absent among the exploited proletariat or working class. He felt that the vanishment of capital would also result in the vanishment of the monogamous marriage . . . In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published in 1884, Frederick Engels was also extremely critical of the monogamous two parent family and viewed it as one of many institutions for the division of labour in capitalist society. In his chapter "The Monogamous Family", Engels traces monogamous marriage back to the Greeks, who viewed the practice's sole aim as making "the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own". He felt that the monogamous marriage made explicit the subjugation of one sex by the other throughout history . . .
For Engels, the obligation of the husband in the traditional two-parent familial structure is to earn a living and support his family. This gives him a position of supremacy. This role is given without a particular need for special legal titles or privileges. Within the family, he represents the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat. Engels . . . equates the position of the wife in marriage with one of exploitation and prostitution, as she sells her body "once and for all into slavery".
Notice all the criticism? By the way, I never knew how much Marx and Engels hated the family until I read Jeffrey Johnson’s short book, “What Every Christian Needs to Know About Social Justice.” Disdain for the family has always been important in Marxism, because the kernel of Marxism is hatred of God and rebellion against everything God created and ordained, first among which was the family.
The story of “US2 Consulting” is a revealing glimpse into how the Marxist revolution is being carried out in the U.S. with such speed and thoroughness. We are paying for it with our tax dollars, and with our purchases of the products and services of big corporations. Marxist “consulting” companies charge big bucks to teach corporate and government employees how better to be woke. It’s a multi-billion dollar grift.
Since higher education was taken over by the Marxists several decades ago, Marxist college graduates have come to totally dominate the Human Resources departments of all significant corporations and government agencies. These people then hire their ideological compatriots in the “consulting” industry to come in and hold mandatory communist brain-washing sessions and involuntary Maoist struggle sessions with all the employees.
Anyone who is white, Christian, cisgendered (that is, anyone who agrees with God’s sovereign choice of the sex He assigned them at conception), heterosexual or otherwise normal is in for a huge load of abuse. US2’s website lists among their “core principles” the notion that “growth occurs in discomfort.” Anyone who resists this Maoist abuse is likely to be fired or disciplined. How long before they start building the concentration camps?
“Haven’t you read the Scriptures? Jesus replied. They record that from the beginning “God made them male and female.” And he said, This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” Matthew 19:4-5