This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
[Video: Margaret Atwood on 'The Handmaid's Tale']
If your family is sacred, why are all those old busybodies out there telling you how to run it?
Just this past week, the World Congress of Families, assembled in Salt Lake City, told all the households in its domain that they could start having more than one child.
Oh. Wait. It was the government of the People's Republic of China, sitting in Beijing, that issued that edict. Sorry. I get them mixed up.
China's one-child policy, of course, was roundly hated, by people of all ideological persuasions, as a dreadful attempt by the powerful to tell individuals how to make the most intimate and important decision any of us will ever make.
Even those of us who recognized the threat of global over-population, and that China's billions were a big part of it, looked with disgust at the very idea of a government presuming to tell its people what to do in that regard.
And, yes, it's not totally fair to get the WCF and the PRC confused like that. The Chinese government, after all, was making law. The result was a loss of the most personal of freedoms, coerced abortions, abandoned children, even killing baby girls because they weren't seen as valuable as boys and thus not worth wasting your one-child allotment on.
The WCF, no matter how much its speakers may preach and its listeners may cheer, is only making suggestions which no one is obligated to follow. And which, increasingly, they won't.
Same-sex marriage. Single parenthood. Married women who choose to delay, or totally pass on, childbearing. All of them are here and here to stay. All the hotel ballroom railing about ignoring the word of God won't change that.
And about that ranting. Did anyone else notice that the secular humanist Salt Lake Tribune played its coverage of all that anti-gay demagoguery on its front page Thursday, stressing the openly religious calls for Americans to fight back at the notion of marriage equality, while the LDS Church-owned Deseret News buried its version near the bottom of its local section, and focused mostly on the supposedly passionless argument that fewer marriages and fewer children will hurt society?
I wasn't there, but there is no reason to think that either article was inaccurate. I've covered enough meetings in my time to know that, once you abandon the idea of just regurgitating everything that was said, from the Pledge of Allegiance to the adjournment, it's all a matter of deciding what was really important.
It is significant that the newspaper owned by an ally of the WCF chose to downplay what usually makes news — conflict — and stress instead the stuff that might be seen as the vanilla part of the program. Specifically the growing fear on the right that people's own free choices about when, or if, to get married and when, or if, to have children are somehow a threat to society as a whole.
That fear is related to the Chinese government's relaxation of its one-child policy. Both are based on a not altogether irrational concern that fewer children means a population that skews old. And that threatens to become a world where too many retirees are being supported by too few workers.
But telling people to get married sooner and have more kids, no matter whether it is the state or the church that is doing the telling, is cruel to those listening and self-deceiving to those talking.
Considered statistically, in the aggregate, families are indeed economic units. But people are not statistics. The idea that families are created and run for the benefit of the state is downright feudal.
And the suggestion made by some at the WCF, that a good way to encourage marriage and families would be to cut back on the social safety net, is as absurd as it is harsh.
Nobody should enter, or remain in, an untenable family situation only because the alternative is destitution. Properly constructed and fully funded, by progressive taxation, a real social safety net will make family formation more likely, not less.
And if women are still choosing not to have so many children, then it is the government and the larger culture that must — and will — adapt.
To say that it is the free market in family formation that is wrong is like saying that the free market in technology should have refused to adopt automobiles, electricity, computers, cellphones, warp drive, etc., because the existing governmental and industrial infrastructure was inconvenienced and had to be changed.
So the problem is not so much that the WCF is selling hate — although it is — but that it is mired in denial. And it wants the rest of us to be stuck there, too.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, resents being treated as a number. Unless it is a really big number. With a dollar sign in front of it.