Another leftist “scholar” has surprised the world by radiating contempt for marriage – and she’s woven Cultural Marxist racialism into the smothering narrative fabrication.
Benjamin Vogel reports for The College Fix that George Mason University professor Bethany Letiecq released the hounds of useless multisyllabic word salad to let married people, the engaged, or those hoping to wed the love of their lives know that they are not thinking for themselves and are, in fact, responding like trained animals to a vast, centuries-long conspiracy of white-male malevolence.
Oh, yes. The “Patriarchy” is in there, too, in case you wondered…
Notes Vogel:
“’Marriage fundamentalism’ advances ‘white supremacy,’ according to a George Mason University professor.
‘I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy,’ Professor Bethany Letiecq wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
‘Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family,’ she wrote.”
Well, at least it’s just a theory, and she’s open to discussion about it.
Or, maybe not.
Writes Vogel:
“She did not respond to two emailed requests for comment on her views sent in the past three weeks.”
So much for Socratic dialogue.
“Letiecq employs ‘critical family theorizing…to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages [white heteropatriarchal nuclear families] and marginalizes others as a function of marriage fundamentalism.’”
So, despite having more than our full of “critical race theory” and “critical literature studies, i.e. Deconstructionism,” we now get “critical family theorizing,” the act of criticizing you for your choice in getting married or respecting the institution of marriage, while said critic also tells you that you are ignorant of your own reasons for thinking as you do -- that you just don’t know better.
You’re not as “enlightened” as she, and you cannot recognize the ways you have been suckered by “institutional” pressures from society that perpetuate “unequal power relations” and white-male-domination, and which also marginalize “others.”
Related: Race Matters on PBS: Blame Lack of DEI for Blacks Failure in Academia?
Curiously, researchers from multitudinous institutions, in numerous nations, have shown that this “evil institution” Letiecq seems to think harms non-whites, is strongly correlated with greater prosperity and lower crime for non-whites.
Even as far back as 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor for President Johnson, issued a lengthy, tax-funded, report on the importance of the nuclear family in promoting prosperity for the members of the family and the society at large.
Decades later, the Heritage Foundation found that the poverty rate for single-parent families was 80 percent higher than for married couples with children, and:
“Children living in single parent homes are 50 percent more likely to experience poverty as adults when compared to children from intact married homes.”
In his wide-ranging, evidence-filled 2023 book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” Hoover Institution scholar and economist Thomas Sowell noted that, with the rise of Johnson’s unconstitutional, welfare-handout “The Great Society” programs – which have been perpetuated and expanded in subsequent national and state government policies and promoted in the media to everyone’s detriment but the politicians -- crime rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates exploded in minority communities. Yet, as Sowell points out, in the two decades prior to the ’60s, minority communities saw declining crime rates.
Sowell also observed that, prior to the “Great Society” and the growth of “victim-culture,” out-of-wedlock birth rates were lower among minority groups than among the majority white population, but:
“(I)ntellectual elites, politicians, activists and ‘leaders’ — who took credit for the black progress that supposedly all began in the early 1960s — took no responsibility for the painful retrogressions that demonstrably did begin in the 1960s.”
And today, notes Vogel:
“Marriage scholar Brad Wilcox disagrees with the George Mason professor (Letiecq).
‘Marriage is an institution that has advanced the common good in many civilizations, from Europe to the Americas, and from Asia to Africa,’ Wilcox told The Fix via email.
'Marriage benefits children of all racial and ethnic backgrounds,’ the University of Virginia sociologist and director of the National Marriage Project wrote. He also recently published a book about the benefits of marriage.
He pointed The Fix to several articles he wrote that show the importance of married fathers and the harms of single-parent households.”
And then there’s this…
What is Letiecq to tell the media-adored, oft-ill-defined “LGBTQ+ Community” – whatever that is anytime the term is used as a political cudgel to acquire more power and play favorites – who fought for “gay marriage”?
Related: WHO Selects 'Trans Activists' To Create World Parenting 'Rules'
In 2006, I had the opportunity to write a piece for the Mises Institute entitled “Don’t Let Government Define Marriage (Or Optimal Child-Rearing Environments).” It allowed me to reveal much of the troubling history behind the massive error of putting the religious institution of marriage into the hands of the human-controlled state. The article reached readers at about the time when LGBTQ lobbies were pushing for state and national politicians to make the legal term “marriage” apply to unions of same-sex couples.
Perhaps these people, too, are working for the evil “white supremacy” cause?
Is that what one is to take from this George Mason professor? Or is it more likely that her claims about marriage are unfounded and absurd, and are offered to continue promoting the canard that Americans live in a culturally “oppressive” society and they don’t even realize it, that, of course, they must be shown the “light” of leftism, and let to the nirvana of government making everything “equal” based on political control – the equality of being subjects in an increasingly tyrannical United States?
It’s one thing to note the danger of putting the definition of “marriage” into the hands of government. It’s another thing to claim that the original institution of marriage is dark and nefarious.
Hopefully, people will be able to see the difference, even as propagandists try to claim that the idea of holy matrimony is racist and devilish.
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