For a long time I was anti-family. I come from a troubled background, and for a long time I wanted nothing to do with family at all. Then I had a family of my own, and I realized how stupid I had been. My daughter is the best thing that ever happened to me. She loves me very much, and I love her.
Now there are some who believe that family is sacrosanct. There are others to whom family is a dirty word. I have known a brilliant physicist and astrologer named Robert. He was in favor of love, but he was against family. I am now in favor of both.
It took me the efforts of many people to come to this point. It is not an easy thing at all to get someone as rigidly set in my ways as I had been to see reason. I am now grateful for the efforts of these people, even though at the time I had not been.
What is my view of family? Simply that it is as good as the people who are a part of it. Same is the case with anything human, including things such as business and government. I have been blessed with a wonderful child who has always been a sweetheart. But then of course there are many people who get bad kids, and there are many people who are bad themselves and treat their children badly.
Now one project of some in Far Left has been to do away with family. I've known a woman whose mother attempted to kill her when she was 13. She ran, and she wound up in government care. Her view of government care was not good. They had no love for her, and they treated her and others there badly. She ended up saying that she would rather have put up with her mother and her crazy stuff instead of going through what she had gone through.
So we are seeing some in conservatives saying that, according to liberal policies, government is going to be raising many of the children. That is certainly undesirable. Even if the parent is a bad person, children love them and care for them. I have known people who were raised with abusive parents, and I have known people whose parents left them. The children raised in abusive situations both love and hate their parents. The children whose parents left them hate them, period.
Is family something that deserves to be honored? Yes, it is. It is however not something that should be deified. Anything human is capable of being good and bad. There most certainly need to be laws – and credible enforcement of laws – in place to prevent some of the situations that I have known, such as when a person kills his child, rapes his child since he was 3 or breaks every bone in the child's body. However that does not mean that families should be broken up or that children wind up in government care.
Some things should be illegal. There needs to be a real-world reason for parents to treat their children rightfully. However it is not right at all to break up families, especially for minor reasons, such as minor violence or verbal abuse. My former wife's boyfriend before me did wrong things to his son, but I ended up concluding that they were not grave enough to disqualify him from being a parent. That as opposed to the father of her daughter before him, who did things that were grave enough. So that while, as is typical in such situations, I and her former boyfriend do not get along, I never attempted to replace him as a father, and I never attempted to keep him from being the boy's father or from having a meaningful relationship with the boy. This stance did a lot to destroy my relationship with my former wife. However I believe that this stance is the rightful one.
Now many people who end up working for such things as government care start out with idealistic considerations. But many of them end up quite nasty. According to the person I listed, they treat the children as criminals even though they have not committed any crime. And these children, having had it drilled into their heads that they are trash, do in fact become criminals.
So I believe that family really is something that should be respected. However once again it is not something that should be deified. Nothing human deserves to be deified. It is composed of sinful people. We see this with things such as business and government; we also see this with family.
Do not break apart families, even in case where there is abuse. Instead punish the people who do genuinely bad things with significant prison terms so that people know that a crime behind closed doors is still a crime. Domestic violence is a crime – rightfully. So are such things as incest. But do not deny children the attention of loving parents. And do not let significant numbers of children be raised by people who do not care about them and see and treat them like trash.