Family Breakdown and the Economy: Jennifer Roback Morse (Transcript)

We need to be concerned about the family.

You know, as I thank you, thank the Acton Institute, we know this very famous saying of Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. If people know anything about Lord Acton, that’s the one thing they know. I do hope that people will, if, when I die, this is what I want on my tombstone, kids need their own parents. They don’t need high quality daycare. They don’t need substitute parents or alternative family forms or father figures or mother substance. No. Kids need their own parents.

So thank you very much. Just make a plan. Put that on my tombstone.

All right. So that’s part of what we’re going to talk about today. So now there’s a card that some of you received as you came in. It’s this little card, this little thing that has red print on it. This presentation that I’m about to do, the slide show, I will send you a PDF copy of these slides if you would like to have your personal copy if you will sign up on this.

And many of you, I know, have been to Acton University and so you have heard different talks that I’ve done. At the last Acton University, I gave three interrelated talks on these topics and I’m sure they’re available in the Acton archives. I know they’re available at ruthinstitute.org, complete with the PowerPoint.

So if you want more detail about what I’m going to talk about today, you can go to those places, those resources, either here or at the ruthinstitute.org.

So I want to just say a few words about where I live now, Lake Charles, Louisiana. By the way, my little boy who flunked out of daycare is now 29 years old and is doing fine. So whatever else I may say today, don’t be alarmed about my son. But part of his story was that he had a rough time getting there and he got involved in drugs and alcohol and has recovered from that and is now part of the recovery community in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

So the thing about Lake Charles, it’s one of the fastest growing places in the United States, booming economy, absolutely booming economy. However, being in the South and being in a relatively low income area, family breakdown is everywhere. All right? Families either not forming or families falling apart after they do form. It’s everywhere.

All right? And so even though it’s religious, even though it’s very devout and it’s not fake religion, it’s very sincere, deeply held religion, there’s still, family breakdown is endemic over there. And it turns out that the employers in Lake Charles cannot keep their jobs filled. It is a big blue collar town. There are lots of jobs for people who don’t have a lot of education. But they cannot fill their jobs with people who show up every day sober and ready to play. They can’t find them.

And my son said to me one time when I was picking him up for something or other, he says, Mom, these guys I live with, these guys in the recovery houses, these guys at the meetings, they have no one. They have no one. If their car breaks down, they don’t have anybody to pick them up and give them a ride. They don’t have anybody to borrow 10 bucks from. Why? Family breakdown. Their parents are preoccupied with their latest love interest or with their own drug situation, right? Very common among the lower classes, the opiate crisis that you hear about from time to time.

Their own love lives are a mess, right? Instead of having a stable relationship where your sex and your childbearing are all put into one place under the umbrella called marriage, instead of that, it’s all fractured, right? So there’s no one to help each other. They have no one. And that’s why, even in a booming economy, they can’t keep those jobs filled. There are people who are living on the margins of society. The family is actually more central than the economy in many, many respects. And so that’s one of the first points that I want to get across to you.

So the outline of what I’m going to talk about today, I’ve got four parts, I’m organizing it around three book titles, okay?

Love and Economics, why the economy needs the family.

Marriage and Equality, I want to talk to you just a little bit about the devastation of family breakdown.

Thirdly, The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims, How the State Generates Family Breakdown, and a little bit about why the state generates family breakdown.

And then finally, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

All right, so first step, LOVE AND ECONOMICS, the family needs the economy. So this is the theme of the first book that I wrote, Love and Economics, which is back there on the table. And that is that for a free society to survive, you’ve got to have people who can control themselves and who have a conscience and who can use their freedom without bothering other people too much.

All right? So over the years, being here at Acton, I’ve given that speech a lot of times, right? The Love and Economics speech. And this is a basic theme that children need their own parents. You learn to control yourself, you learn to have a conscience by being in the personal care of your own mom and your own dad. Kids are not potted plants where you come and water them once in a while.

Okay? That’s how we kind of treat them, right? If you’ve got somebody to take care of their physical needs, it will all be good. Not true.

Attachment is extremely important, and that’s what Love and Economics, what that book is all about. So the conscience is developed inside of the family, and this is completely compatible with Christian teaching. I know from experience at Acton Institute events that we have a variety of Christian denominations represented here, okay? But I know, I also know, I’m pretty sure, that all Christian churches teach the same thing on this point, which is that the human person is meant for love, right? The human person is meant for love, and this is what John Paul II had to say about it in one of his first encyclicals. He said, man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself. His life is senseless if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own.

Well, where do we first experience it? In our mommy’s arms. That’s where we first encounter love. And when you see these little attachment disordered orphans who are left alone in their cribs, you can see the devastating impact that it has if you do not encounter love early in life.

Now, the Bible tells us very early on that it is not good for man to be alone, but science now tells us it’s not even possible for man to be alone. You see, because the left alone child, what happens to the left alone child? They die. They die. Even if you water them like potted plants, right? There’s something called the failure to thrive syndrome, which has been known since the 1940s at least, which is that kids need to be held. They need to have personal contact. If they’re separated from their mommies for long periods of time, it has a devastating impact on their development and particularly their psychological development.

So we now know that it is not good for man to be alone. We know that for sure. Science can confirm what we learned in Genesis in the very first chapter, that it’s not good and in fact not even possible.

And so one of the themes of love and economics is that more freedom and more so-called equality for adults is going to end up meaning less freedom and less equality for the next generation. And so this whole program we have of freedom, of sexual freedom, of family-building freedom, that is a short-term, that can only be a short-term policy, right?

Because as you move forward, the kids born into that situation are going to be less and less able, as time goes on, they’re going to be less and less able to confront life on its own terms.

LOVE AND ECONOMICS was written in 2001 and nothing that has happened since then has caused me to change my mind, right? Everything that I’ve seen since then simply confirms that kids need their own parents.

Okay, now let’s talk briefly about MARRIAGE AND EQUALITY. And as I do, would you please hand these two pamphlets out? If anybody, I don’t know if people pick these up on their way in, there’s two of them, one called Do You Know a Survivor of the Sexual Revolution, the other one called Counting the Casualties. If you have those, pull them out. If you don’t have them, please raise your hand and the staff will bring them to you while I’m talking.

So we’ll talk about these pamphlets in just a moment. Patrick and Anna are coming around and they see you. So the Ruth Institute has a dream. Our dream is that every child be welcomed into a loving home with a married mother and father. That’s our dream, that every child be welcomed into a loving home with a married mother and father so that every child can have a relationship with his or her own parents unless some unavoidable tragedy prevents it.

So that every adult, without exception, can know his or her cultural heritage and genetic identity. And when these rights of children are violated, we refer to that as a structural injustice to the child. Not to say that the parents involved are bad parents, that’s not the point, or that they have bad parenting skills, or that they don’t love their kids, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re saying that the structure of that family violates in some way the child’s right to a relationship with both parents.

And in some cases, they don’t even know who they are, they don’t even know who their parents are. And that means you don’t know who you are. So that’s what we want to talk about here in a little bit more detail.

Now there are two competing worldviews out here in our culture. One is the world view that is intuitively held, I think, by most people of faith, whether it’s been spelled out or not, but intuitively most people believe that every child, and hence every adult, has some identity rights and relational rights with respect to their parents. And by the way, that means adults have obligations to provide those things for children. Now we don’t usually say that too loud because people in our time don’t want to hear about their obligations, right?

The competing worldview is that every adult has a right to the sexual activity they want with a minimum of inconvenience. And children just have to accept whatever the adults choose to give them. We don’t say that too loud because we’d be ashamed of ourselves. We just blurted it out like that.

We’d be ashamed that we think that, but I think you recognize that this is roughly what a lot of people in our culture actually do think.

So let’s talk a moment about alternative family forms. At the Ruth Institute, we think about all of the alternative family forms, whether it’s happening through divorce, parents never being married in the first place, cohabiting, remarried, other forms of step parenting, anonymous donor conception. All of these are considered alternative family forms, all right? And it’s not family breakdown. We’re not allowed to say family breakdown. They’re alternative family forms because we don’t want anybody to feel bad. So therefore, we call it alternative family forms.

But what these all have in common is some kind of separation of the child from one of their parents, all right? And so let’s just focus for a moment on divorce, on the ISSUE OF DIVORCE.

In our culture, a lot of people have experienced divorce, a lot of adults, a lot of children. There are a lot of people my age whose parents divorced, right? And we all know people who’ve had this happen to them.

One of the most common things that we tell children, that the culture tells people to tell children, is this, Daddy and Mommy are getting divorced. We still love you, honey. We just don’t love each other anymore, right? You’ve heard that. This is what we’re supposed to say to people, okay?

Now from the child’s perspective, each parent is half of who they are. So when the parent is saying, we still love you; we just don’t love your other parent, right? You’re saying two things that are contradictory. In the child’s little mind, this doesn’t add up. The reason it doesn’t add up in the child’s little mind is because it in fact doesn’t add up, right? It actually is a contradictory set of things that we’re asking, you know, a five-year-old to figure out and to process.

So one of the things that happens to children is that they, particularly if there’s remarriage involved. Now those of you who are Catholic or those of you who read the Bible seriously, you know that Jesus said very clearly, no remarriage after divorce. He doesn’t say never get a divorce. He says if you remarry after, if you try to marry somebody else after that, that’s adultery. Don’t do it, right? I mean that’s pretty, pretty clear that he says that.

What we find now from the experience of children and from our social science studies, we find that Jesus was right. Wait for it. What a thought. What a thought. The Son of God saw it coming. Can you imagine? Okay?

It’s the remarriage that is so difficult for the kids because why? When mom goes off and remarries, that child feels like a leftover from the previous relationship. Mom’s now focused on her new husband. They have a baby together maybe, and everybody’s looking at that new baby. That new baby has a home where both of her parents are living, and the child from the first relationship has two half-time dads. Instead of having one full-time dad, she’s got two half-time dads, see?

So these inequalities creep in between the children of the original relationship and the children of the subsequent relationships, and this is what is so upsetting and difficult and painful for the children.

So now, if we take a look at this brochure right here, here we go, this one. I’m throwing my stuff all over the place. Do you know a survivor of the sexual revolution? That is a rhetorical question. Of course you do. Everyone knows a survivor of the sexual revolution.

When you open it up, if you open it up and look down the first column and run your eye down this very first column here, what you will see are a list of categories of people who have in some way been harmed by the modern sexual ethics, okay? And right at the top of the list, children of divorce, okay?

And then you look down a little further, children of unmarried parents, the reluctantly divorced man or woman, now look up at me when I use that term, reluctantly divorced. Have you ever heard that term before? You’ve never heard that term. But now that I’m saying it, everybody here knows somebody who wanted to stay married and who was divorced against their will. Think about that. Think about that.

How many people you know, right in this room. We could tell a bunch of stories about that and we have no name for those people. No social awareness of those people, right? So that’s kind of the pattern of this whole thing. The people who’ve been harmed by the sexual revolution are somehow marginalized. Their thoughts, their experience somehow never allowed to have a show on primetime TV talking about them, right? It’s always the next phase of the sexual revolution that’s on primetime TV. That’s who we’re supposed to be identifying with.

Well, when you open up this pamphlet and look down this column right here, what you’ll see is, is this what you were told? And what it says is, what these are, are lies. These are all the cultural lies that we’re telling ourselves that allow us to keep doing this stuff. And right at the top of the list, kids are resilient. You know what? They’re not. Kids are not that resilient.

Now we have a report that we include in one of our book clubs, The Effects of Divorce on Children, written by Dr. Pat Fagan, who’s currently at the Catholic University of America. What has divorce done to America? He goes through chapter and verse. He lists all the studies that have been done over the last 40 years talking about the negative impact of divorce on children. 40 pages, 333 footnotes of closely typed pages of things that are harmful to children or that we see a strong correlation between divorce and these kind of outcomes.

SO WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? The poor little kids were asking them to process something that can’t really be processed. It’s no wonder they have sleepless nights and poor educational outcomes and all of these other sort of therapeutic sounding things how we describe it. The fact is these little kids are upset and we’re asking a lot of them and we’re just passing it off like it’s nothing.

How many people are in this category? How many victims do we have? This pamphlet here is our estimate of some of these casualties of the sexual revolution. Children of divorce, we estimate about 45 million children of divorce of all ages walking around. Some of these you’ll notice that we have no data for some of these. That’s because we’re not even asking the questions that would allow us to know how many people regret their hookups or how many people cohabited for five years with some guy who decided he didn’t really want to be married to her and now it’s like, what just happened to my life?

We’re not even asking the questions that would let us know the answers to some of those questions. So I strongly recommend if you or any member of your family are dealing with an aftermath of divorce and you want to get some insight into it, this book by one of my colleagues at the Ruth Institute, Jennifer Johnson, Marriage and Equality, is a very easy read but it’s a very powerful read written from the perspective of a child of divorce and just what it meant to see her half-sister having a full-time relationship with both parents versus her having part-time relationships with both of her parents.

So now let’s talk about the state and HOW THE STATE GENERATES FAMILY BREAKDOWN IN THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION.

So the book that we have back there is called The Sexual Revolution and its Victims and you’ll notice that who we have on the cover of that book is Marilyn Monroe. Now the reason we think Marilyn Monroe is a good person to put on the cover of a book like this is because she is kind of a symbol of the sexual revolution and its victims. You can still buy t-shirts with her picture on them and she’s looking very sultry and beautiful and glamorous and all of that, right?

But they never show you the downside, the dark side of her life, which is that she died at an early age. According to her biographer, she had 12 abortions, okay, this is not a jolly existence that she had. That is a metaphor for the whole sexual revolution. We show the glamour, the fun, the freedom, and we airbrush out everything else. That’s the whole thing. That’s it. In a nutshell, that’s the sexual revolution for you.

So the way in general, the way the state is involved in the sexual revolution, and again, the talks that I gave this summer at Acton go into this in much more detail, but just briefly there are two basic ways that the state empowers itself through the sexual revolution.

First, family breakdown allows them to expand their programs and their expenditures. All right, now those of you, and I’ll talk about that in a moment, secondly, the impossible objectives of the sexual revolution require a lot of force to enforce and to bring about into being. So I’ll give you a couple of examples of each of these things.

So the fiscal implications of family breakdown, this is something that those of you who have libertarian fiscal conservative friends who may be not religious, this is something that they care about, right? They care about the expansion of the size of the state, but the fact is the social welfare programs that are supposed to take the place of the family, these are among the fastest growing largest expenditures of the modern state. So whether it’s education, criminal justice, psychological services, and so on, taxpayers are paying for a lot of the costs of family breakdown, and of course you’re not really making up for what the child lost, right?

You’re kind of putting Band-Aids on it with state money, but it doesn’t really heal everything as my son’s report from his friends will clearly show, you know?

So a few people have estimated the taxpayer cost of the decline of the family. One estimate, this is about 10 years old by now, the estimate was about 112 billion dollars per year the United States government spends on dealing with family breakdown. That’s the equivalent, to put it in perspective, that’s the equivalent of the GNP of New Zealand.

So this is not chump change that we’re talking about, this is significant money. And as I’m sure a lot of you have thought about before, many, many government programs, the people involved in those programs, don’t really mind if they expand. You know what I mean? I mean, I’m not going to stand here and say that the people at HHS want family breakdown to happen, right?

But there is this sort of logic of perverse incentives that can go, that can be at work in these kind of things.

So another way in which the state expands is with those reluctantly divorced persons. When I say reluctantly divorced, I mean that one party wants to stay married. No fault divorce means that the state takes sides with the person who wants the marriage the least. You never thought of it that way, but that’s what it means. The state is taking sides in a family dispute with the party who wants it the least.

And so, therefore, somebody has to step in to enforce the divorce, to separate them. It doesn’t happen every single time. But if it came to that, the police would have to come and remove somebody from the home. It does happen sometimes, not all the time. But in the background of every single proceeding is the fact that the police can come and make you move out of your house and enforce the separation of a person who’s committed no crime, enforce their separation from their assets and their children. That’s what the state can do.

Now, how often does that happen? How many reluctantly divorced parties are there? We don’t really know that much, but a recent study came out that I finally found somebody who estimated it. And if you ask people how often, according to that, over 70% of divorces take place against the wishes of one party.

So this little thing is what you have in your pamphlet. It says no data. Since this was printed up, I found some data, so I just want you to know that if you want to pencil it in. But anyway, if you ask people who wanted it to end most, and they have the option of saying we both wanted it to end, only 27% of men and 24% of women said we both wanted it to end. That means about three-quarters of divorces are reluctantly divorced people. So the state is empowering itself enormously by having this type of a policy.

Let me talk briefly with you about GENDER IDEOLOGY AND FEMINISM, which I’ve put in inverted commas because I don’t consider it particularly pro-woman whatsoever. But in the old days, feminism meant men and women are identical, except women are better. Right? Isn’t that the kind of feminism some of us grew up with? And so therefore, it’s a moral imperative to wipe out all differences between men and women.

Do you recognize that? It’s a moral imperative to wipe out all the differences between men and women. So therefore, guys, and this is the thing that you never see anybody admit, therefore the state must expand in order to achieve that impossible objective. And it is impossible. Men and women actually are different.

Y’all are probably old enough to have figured that out by now. And if you have children, you should know it for sure. If you’re a schoolteacher, you definitely know it for sure.

But here are a couple of examples of the gender ideology at work. Title IX demanded equality in sports programs. That is, colleges had to have an equal number of sports for men and women and an equal number of participants for men and women. Back in the day, I think under the Clinton administration, Title IX, interpreted in this manner, was the authority by which the federal government went around shutting down men’s athletic programs in one college after another. Right?

Some of you maybe remember this happening. Men’s wrestling programs all went by the boards. Oddly enough, they never shut down University of Michigan football team. I don’t know why. That never came into their minds. So, many things have flowed out of this idea that we need to have everything being equal.

But the gender ideology has morphed from this kind of equality to something new. This is a variation of the same ideology. At one time, and this is now true, public schools in a lot of places have banned father-daughter dances because that’s inappropriate sex stereotyping. But now we’re to the point where we are requiring gender neutral bathrooms, all right? Which is, these things aren’t consistent with each other, I’ll say something about that in a moment.

So the new gender ideology is that the state is required to wipe out all differences between men and women except for those that the individuals specifically choose to bear themselves. So again, another impossible moral imperative here. And who’s going to be empowered by that? Of course, the state and their ideological allies.

So here we have Bruce Jenner who wants to be called Caitlyn. I want you to notice the stereotypical image of femininity. This is what Bruce Jenner thinks it means to be a woman. Now I’m looking out here, there are a few of us, I’m not the only woman here. I just want to say, I have been a woman my entire life. I have never dressed like that. Okay, I’m just saying.

So we have a man, guys, we have a man telling me and you and all the other ladies here telling us what it means to be a woman. Okay. Now, the only reason this man gets the time of day is the following, I think. If you can make people say Bruce Jenner is a woman, you can make them say anything. That is the ideological importance of the gender ideology. This is a massive takeover of civil society by the state. That is why, even though it’s ridiculous, it’s not funny. These people are dead serious and I think they know exactly what they’re doing.

Here again is what I, this image I call Clueless Bruce. He actually said, the hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear. Ladies, is that really the hardest part about being a woman? I don’t know. I’m thinking childbirth. I don’t know.  Okay, but he gets the microphone, he gets TV programs, he gets to be on the cover of Vanity Fair and the many people who transitioned from one gender to another and then wanted to detransition because it didn’t work out. It didn’t live up to their expectations. It didn’t solve the problem they were trying to solve. Most people don’t get a picture on Vanity Fair. Isn’t that odd?

So what we’re dealing with here, again, is the contradictory visions that we’re trying to enforce. Now this one last one I can’t forebear. Like I said, I have a lot of other material in my slides from the summer. But now the federal government is pressuring people into saying that a person born a man who says they’re a woman can now participate in women’s sports. So this man here, this man here, it’s a man, guys, it’s a man. He won two girls state championships in track and field.

This man here, who thinks he’s a woman, is a boxer, is a professional boxer, and he was in a cage match with a woman and he permanently injured that woman. He basically, this is a man who battered a woman for money. This is the end of women’s sports. All that stuff that Title IX was supposed to be about, that’s not what it was about. That’s not what it’s about now. It’s about empowering the state. You’ve got to pay attention to this, that this is what it’s really all about.

So the sexual revolution is irrational, it’s impossible, and it cannot stand on its own. It requires force and a lot of propaganda. That’s what free market people need to start tracking. Just because it’s ridiculous doesn’t mean it’s harmless. It’s a totalitarian movement that no Christian should have anything to do with. They can make you say Bruce Jenner is a woman. They can make you say anything.

So I’m going to skip through some of these slides and just go briefly to what are we going to do about it. At this point, these are the cards that we need to be talking about. I don’t know if people passed these out or picked up any of these. Can you guys start passing these out? Sorry, I’m taking up a little bit more time than you thought. There will still be plenty of time for questions after this though. And your little red card that you have there.

So Lord Acton, meet Ruth. We’re going to be pals now here. I want you guys to understand that all of your values, everything you value, is at risk from the sexual revolution. Fiscal responsibility, yeah, that’s at risk from the sexual revolution. Limited government, yeah, that’s at risk from the sexual revolution. I hope I’ve convinced you of that. Your religious values, whatever your religious values may be, those are certainly at risk. The church is the last holdout against all this stuff, so they’ve got to come after us. And your own dear families, all the people who are dear to you are at risk from the madness, from the propaganda.

And so I ask you, hasn’t this gone on long enough? Isn’t it time somebody did something about it? Well, at the Ruth Institute, we think it is, and we want to invite you to be part of what we’re doing. So did you learn anything this afternoon? Yeah, would you like to learn some more?

Okay, so would you be interested in an easy, systematic way to educate yourself and your friends about some of these issues? So if you, like I said, if you’ll fill out this little red card, I don’t have it up here anymore, if you’ll fill that out, this is what I’m going to use to send you the PowerPoints if you want it. But also there are some things there that you can check off, and I want to just briefly tell you what they are. You can like us on Facebook and stuff, of course. If you do Facebook, you know how to do that. If you don’t do Facebook, never mind.

Okay, but then we have something that we call Ruth Institute Book Clubs that are on here, and we’re going to have an online training session in a couple of weeks that we like to invite you to be part of. So the Ruth Institute Book Clubs, you can see what divorce has done to America, is one example of that. There are these five cards back here which represent the five different curriculums that we have available to you now, and these are postcards that you can mail out to your friends if you want to invite them to participate. Okay, so that’s just for you to see that that’s what we have.

Of course, at the book club you will eat. That’s the first and primary thing is that we’re going to eat, right? I’m from Louisiana. Everything is an occasion for eating and singing and dancing and drinking. Sorry, all you Calvinist guys, that’s the way it is.

So at our book clubs you read, you’ll be inspired. You’re going to learn something. You’re going to learn a lot. Hopefully you’re going to make friends, and you will have the opportunity to live and put your ideals into practice, and of course, did I mention eating? That will happen too.

We’re looking for people who are fun-loving and reliable. You don’t really need a lot of qualifications to lead a book club. You just need to be interested, reliable, do what you say you’re going to do, have some enthusiasm and, of course, be literate, which I’m pretty sure covers everybody here, right?

So if you don’t feel motivated to help the Ruth Institute, that’s fine. I get that. You don’t necessarily want to think that I’m here just promoting myself, although I am promoting myself. You have to promote yourself a little bit. But if you don’t want to help us, that’s fine. There are plenty of other organizations you can be helping.

Okay, so I’ve listed a few of my favorites here, the Population Research Institute. These are ones that do things around the world and at the United Nations, because believe me, the sexual revolutionaries are very active in the United Nations. They’re very active in the international scene. They’re basically exporting our toxic sexual culture all around the world. And so if this bothers you, these are groups that you can be involved with, too.

So that’s all I want to say as far as my formal remarks are concerned. Please sign up to get the slides, turn in those little cards back there, and I’m open for whatever questions you guys want to talk about, including any of these slides that I zip through and you might want more detail on.

So thank you very much, everybody.

So they’re in charge of the microphone, so don’t look at me.

Trey Dimsdale – Director of Program Outreach at the Acton Institute

We have about 20 minutes for questions.

MALE AUDIENCE: Doctor, is there any place in history you’re aware of other than the recent one or two generations where societies have tried to reinvent the family in these odd ways that you spoke about, and did they have serious consequences or how did that happen?

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE: No, no. There’s no period in history that’s anything quite like what we’re doing now. I mean, you can look back in history and see different kinds of family forms. You can see different, you can see, mostly what you see are situations where, that truly are toxic patriarchy, you know, where men really have enormous amount of power over the family, and the things that modern feminists complain about, they’re just whining. I mean, if they knew anything, historically, you know, they would understand that Christianity lifted women tremendously and equalized, relatively speaking, the position of men and women in society. So you can look around history and see a lot of, you know, things that aren’t Christian, right? You can see non-Christian civilizations, but what you won’t see is a society saying there’s no difference between men and women. You will not see a society saying that sex does not make babies. Sex makes babies. Are we all good with that?

Okay, good. Because, you know, truly, we’re trying to, and I talked about this in one of my talks this summer on AU, we’re trying to recreate society around the idea that sex is a sterile activity, and babies are thrown in as a lifestyle choice, or they’re a mistake, right? There’s never been a society that has tried to organize itself around that idea.

Now, the idea that children really, truly need their own parents, that is, I think, a relatively modern idea, but even in societies that were kind of casual about how nice you were to kids, right, or whether kids were treated like little adults or so on and so forth, there are a lot of different views about how to treat children, nobody ever said that it doesn’t matter who you’re related to. See, nobody ever tried to say a thing like that, right?

So those are some of the things that we’re doing that really are radical, and I think have no chance of lasting, because they’re just too unreal.

MALE AUDIENCE:  Right here. I’m Deacon Jim Thorne, I’m an ordained Catholic deacon, and I’m also a spiritual director, and in many of the people I deal with, I’m seeing society as really changing the understanding of love. They’re seeing it as a feeling rather than a commitment, and the first time they bump heads in a relationship, particularly in marriage, the first thing they do is flee, and they don’t sustain what they really went into as this moral conviction to stay with that person for life, and it’s becoming pandemic in our society.

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE: I’m sure that’s right. I have no doubt at all that that’s right, and in fact, in Love and Economics, in my book Love and Economics, I have a whole chapter in there called Love is a Decision, right, which is what Christianity has always taught, that love is not a choice or not a feeling. Love is not a feeling. Love is a decision. It’s a series of decisions that you make independently of how you feel, and that’s how charity becomes a virtue, and so on and so forth, so you are 100% correct. This view of love is a kind of consumer good view of love, right? It’s about, am I satisfied with this consumption good that I’ve purchased, and if I’m not, I take it back, or trade it in or something. You are absolutely right.

This is completely sabotaging people’s ability to get married and stay married, and ironically, a lot of the young people who feel that way have been deeply wounded by the instability of their parents’ relationships, and they don’t want that. They don’t want that, but they don’t know what to do, and that’s a core thing, which you just mentioned, so thank you for bringing that up.

MALE AUDIENCE:  I took a course from Dr. Dan Cruzey, who teaches at Kuyper College, and it was on the book of Proverbs, and of course, the book of Proverbs has a different reason for the Proverbs, but he was saying that every surrounding culture around Israel had a standard of living, which are a way of life, a moral code that was expected to be enforced, either by prison or, you know, self-discipline, and there is only one culture in history that does not have such a moral code, and that culture is the United States and other Western countries right now, and that cannot remain.

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE: Yes, I agree with that, with this one little footnote that I would add to it. Once you’ve swept the books clean of what we’re used to thinking of the moral code, in fact, what’s happening is we’re replacing it with a new and truly unsustainable moral code that enforces the strictures of the sexual revolution, so if you go back to this pamphlet and you look at what it says in this column over here, these lies, that’s our new moral code, that kids are resilient, and that there are no problems associated with hooking up, and as long as you consent, it’s okay, so that means that if it wasn’t okay with you, right, if you got your heart broken during a hookup, you’re the one who has a problem, you’re the one who has to sit down and shut up, you’re the one who has to conform, right, so there is a moral code, but nobody has the guts to name it, that that’s what it is, that they’re becoming more and more willing to name it, you know, and tell us that we’re immoral if we don’t use the right pronouns, you know, that kind of thing.

But in fact, there always was a new moral code coming in, and you know, you can look at it this way. A friend of mine, Steve Baskerville, who’s written a lot of very brilliant things about divorce and the divorce culture, he says the pattern of the sexual revolution is this, they start out saying, we’re going to liberalize this, so everybody can do whatever they want, so you look like you’re free on the front end, but when things, as things unfold, it turns out something has been criminalized, and you’re less free on the back end, so just take campus dating culture, a lot of you grew up in an environment where men and women were not allowed in each other’s dorms, you know, and all kinds of things like that, there were some very serious rules around, that were designed to limit the opportunity to have sex with somebody you weren’t married to.

Okay, so now we’ve liberalized that, everybody can have sex with anybody they want at any time, you can go have it in your dorm room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it’s all very liberal, but, but, a young man can be accused of date rape and have his life ruined with no evidence whatsoever, now is he free? Okay, he’s kind of paid a price for his freedom, right, and so, and look at it from the girl’s point of view, the girl can be, you know, going along minding her business and all of a sudden she’s in a compromised situation, she didn’t want to be in that situation, she didn’t want to be assaulted, she didn’t want to have the date rape drug put in her drink and so on and so forth, so you’re less free in the end, right, and instead of having an informal enforcement of morality, the only thing left is the long arm of the law with strict standards of proof, evidence, all that kind of stuff that you can prove in a court of law, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have to get to the point where you’re in a courtroom, right, it should be that you’re saying, buddy, you’re messing with my sister, cut it out or I’m going to knock your block off.

You know, there should be some informal mechanisms of saying this is not acceptable behavior, then you don’t have to get up in court, you know, it doesn’t come to that. Anyway, I digress, but this point is a very important point that he’s making, I think.

MALE AUDIENCE:  First of all, I’d like to thank you for a common sense clarity to issues that often are less clear, but it seems to me that I’d like your opinion. And that is whether it’s Nazism or Stalin’s 30 million Ukrainians or we could go back in history if we want, these various things, whether it’s the sexual revolution or calling people racist or whatever it might mean to somebody, are all just tools to accomplish an end where there is a few people who are your totalitarian masters and enslave the rest of us. What is your opinion?

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE: Well, in one of my lectures this summer, I actually dealt exactly with that point and that is I would say to you that the sexual revolution is comparable to those earlier totalitarian movements in exactly the same way. They hold up an ideal that sounds wonderful, but it’s actually impossible. So, the communists wanted to create a prosperous society without any property rights. No, that’s not going to happen, right?

The Nazis wanted to create a society of brotherhood and unification, but the only way they could do that is by wiping out all the people who didn’t fit in. You know, completely contradictory, self-contradictory.

What I would say to you is that the sexual revolution is a totalitarian movement in exactly that same way. It’s not left, it’s not right. I don’t think it’s correct to say this is a left-wing movement. That is not really, that is kind of a diversion, you know, to think like that because if you look, you will see plenty of people in the Republican Party, conservative people, you know, who have no problem with the sexual revolution, right? You’ll see that.

You can see that a lot of this is a bipartisan business, a lot of it. And I think it’s, I think that it’s the prospect of having a lot of power over other people that is so appealing, you know. And just like the communists, they’ve got their useful idiots. You know, they’ve got people who stand out there and say, oh, isn’t this wonderful and it’s so great for me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it’s all propaganda. You know, that’s really all propaganda.

So, there are many, many parallels, but I would say to you, don’t get hung up on left and right. The sexual revolution is its own thing. It’s its own totalitarian movement. And the fact that we haven’t figured that out, that’s why it keeps going on unopposed. You know, we keep saying, gee, this doesn’t look, gee, it sounds good, sounds harmless, you know, qualities, but no, that’s all kind of window dressing.

Who’s got the mic? There we go.

MALE AUDIENCE:I think that you’ve addressed this to some degree, but this is the question on the mic. These are incompatible worldviews. Sexuality is at the very core of who we are as human persons. So, these are incompatible. If we do not say or do anything, if we try to blend in, try to get along, what actually will be the outcome? I mean, we refer here to totalitarianism, but I’m wondering if we don’t say anything and we don’t put ourselves on the line for this, what is the potential outcome here? Because I don’t see these being compatible.

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE: No, you are 100% right about that. One of these worldviews is going to drive out the other. Okay? One view of marriage will drive out the other. One view of sexuality will drive out the other. Okay?

We talk about live and let live, but that mask is quickly falling away, okay? The idea that we’re going to be allowed to live and let live, it’s not going to happen because you’re going to go into, somebody’s going to have to decide in a school what the rules are going to be. Somebody’s going to have to decide in the corporation what the rules are going to be. And one set’s going to drive out the other. And while you might think in principle it would be possible to mutually coexist, I think that’s not going to prove to be the case. I mean, the sexual revolutionaries themselves have made it clear that they mean to wipe out opposition. That’s, to me, the significance of the Health and Human Services mandate that was threatening to crush the Little Sisters of the Poor for not changing their health insurance programs, right? You’ve got to wipe out all these dissenters, right?

So I think I agree with your assessment. One will drive out the other. This is not like a free market in religion or something like that where people can agree to coexist. I don’t think it’s like that. Where will it end? This summer, when I gave my talks on the sexual revolution, I lay out, there are three main planks to the sexual revolution. There is what I call the divorce ideology, which I talked about here today. There’s the gender ideology. And then there’s something that I usually call the contraceptive ideology, but Acton didn’t want me to call that. Call it that because they’re afraid we would flip out the non-Catholics.

So I’m going to tell you, that is how I think of it, but for that lecture, I called it the culture of death, okay? The culture of death and the state, okay?

So what I mean by the contraceptive ideology is not whether or not you can buy birth control pills. It’s whether or not you’re going to build your society around the idea that sex is normatively a sterile activity. And so you can only have one answer to that question. Either sex is a sterile activity, and that’s the norm, and everybody, if you have a baby, that’s nice maybe, but it’s not the main point, right? Or we accept that sex is a potentially fruitful activity, fertile activity, and we plan for that. We build society around that, okay? You can only do one of those two things, all right?

So that’s what I mean. When I say the contraceptive ideology, guys, I’m not trying to make you feel bad or something or take away your pills. I guess most of us here are past the point where we need pills or anything like that, but anyway, you know what I’m trying to say. That’s not where I’m going with this, right? It’s the ideology. It’s the ideology that’s the problem.

So where are these ideologies going? What’s the end game of them? The end game of the gender ideology is clear now. It should be 100% clear. Their end game is to wipe out all references to male and female throughout law and society. That’s where they’re headed, okay? That’s where they’re headed.

The end game of the divorce ideology is to completely disconnect parenthood, legal parenthood, from biology. The reason gay marriage was so important to them is because gay marriage fed both of those purposes. See, and now that they got gay marriage, they’re not talking about that anymore. Do you notice that? They immediately went to transgender stuff. That was like the very, you know, they didn’t even pause, right? They went straight on to transgender stuff.

And the contraceptive ideology, you guys, the end game of the contraceptive ideology is population control. That’s where these people are headed, right? Population control. Do you hear what I said? Okay, so they like China. The reason they don’t, you never hear them complain about it. Did you know that the Chinese birth control police, the family planning police in China, that’s over a million people. They have over a million people enforcing the family planning laws. That’s the largest law enforcement organization in the world, probably, I think. If somebody knows of a bigger one, tell me.

But, I mean, that’s a lot of people enforcing this thing. The reason you never hear any Western, liberal, modern human rights advocates criticize that is because, secretly, they like it. They believe in it. Okay? So that’s my assessment of where these things are headed. Not to freak you out or anything, but, you know, come on, you guys. I’m out here every day, all day, fighting this stuff. I could use a little backup. So be freaked out and help me out.

Okay, next question.

MALE AUDIENCE: So I was just wondering, for these data in the white pamphlet, is this annual data or not annual data, and how can we, if I might speak for young people, how do we go about fighting this notion of the consumer good mentality of relationships for this issue?

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE: Okay, I have a, there’s a spot on our website, and I think it tells you, right across here, it tells you where to go to get the numbers that back this up, you know, what this came from. And some of these are cumulative. These are cumulative numbers, almost all of them. And like I said, this one, and some of them are real rough and ready estimates, but I explain all of that in that, you know, that little website there, if you want to get, if you want to figure out where I got it.

How can young people help? Oh, I’m so glad you asked that. I’m so glad you asked that. My experience with young people is to start with the divorce issue. I actually ended up developing this way of thinking when I was involved in dealing with the gay marriage issue. Because I knew that kids need their own parents, I could see that by redefining marriage we were going to end up redefining parenthood, and we were going to end up loosening the ties between children and their parents. That’s kind of what was going to have to happen as a result of that particular redefinition of marriage.

And so I would be out on campuses all the time talking about it, especially at law schools. And, you know, it was a tough row, right, to be the only person on the law school campus who believed what I believed. But over time I realized that most of the young people in the audience, maybe not the professors, but the young people, many of them had experience with divorce. Because they’d already been two or three divorces by the time they got to law school.

So I started, I learned to start with that point and to say, okay, you guys, look, we redefined marriage in 1968. We removed the presumption of permanence from marriage in 1968. And we were told, oh, the kids will be fine. We have studies showing the kids will be fine. Oh, it’s only going to affect a few people. Oh, how is somebody’s divorce going to affect your marriage?

Now, you look back on that and you go, every single one of those things turned out not to be true. And so now those students are like, oh, you know, now their wheels are turning a little bit. And I think in your initial encounter, that’s what you’re looking for, is to get the wheels turning. So that’s a general answer, specific answer.

For Further Reading:

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: Louise Perry (Transcript)

How to Educate Your Children: Jeff Sandefer (Transcript)

Marriage, Family and Parenting: Paul Washer (Transcript)

The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Stephen J Shaw (Transcript)

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