I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying “woke”, “critical race theory”, ““grooming””, and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open.
You never see the inverse. There is no ConservativesofTiktok getting churches harassed into shutting down for the day or calling in threats. You don’t see cringey boomer memes on the left. And whenever I openly express those feelings, try to create that sentiment; I get shut down. Noone agrees, I’m often shamed and muted. I just don’t understand why that parity exists, it’s extremely isolating to feel so alone in this
I actually protested for marriage equality here in Illinois; my wife and I refused to file our marriage license until the law was updated and asked our wedding guests to forgo gifts and instead donate to Lambda Legal and other organizations also working for marriage equality.
So when I say “families”, I do mean queer couples as well. But also intergenerational households. The focus on individualism and geographical mobility has been destructive to intergenerational wealth and wisdom, to familial connections, and to mental health. It’s one of my big gripes with the way capitalism operates in the US, honestly; the balance of power lies far too heavily with employers rather than the workers and this often means that family life suffers for the sake of economic advantage.
But yeah, I’m also talking about children. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t want kids should be pressured to have them, but for those who do want kids, that’s something we as a society should encourage. To that end I favor pronatalist policies as well as policies that seek to make adoption easier and less expensive, especially domestic adoption.
And while I know sometimes pronatalism is used as a fig leaf for anti-immigration sentiment, that’s not the case here; I’m very pro-immigration for a variety of reasons but it’s no secret that immigrants tend to have larger families and are more likely to have international households.
Hear hear! The government should completely get out of marriage and leave it to religion, or completely go in on encouraging marriage (actually domestic partnerships) between whoever if we think it’s going to be good for communities. Before Obergefell I would’ve said marriage is old, let religions have it. Encouraging people to take part in their community, have close ties with benefits like hospital visitation, tax breaks, etc should all be domestic partnership based, and we should’ve made everyone get domestic partnered - marriage should have conferred no civic benefits. As is, we have a weird hybrid religious and civic thing called marriage but at least everyone has access now.
But yeah as far as encouraging families we should do the same incentive wise with having kids and immigration to help with our birth rate problems, and continue trying to make home ownership more affordable (and more varied - looking at you missing middle housing) and encouraging it to again, incentivize investing in local communities. Civic policy like this stuff gets jumbled and we should be more clear about what we want to incentivize and why.