Biden-Harris Breaking the Ten Commandments: Part Five - The Federally-Funded Attack on the Family
This is the fifth installment in The Western Journal’s series “Biden-Harris Breaking the Ten Commandments.” Click here to read the rest of the series.
God created one of the world’s most powerful and long-standing institutions with the Fifth Commandment.
A man, married to a woman, living under the same roof as their children. That simple unit, the nuclear family, is the bedrock of Western civilization.
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you,” Exodus 20:12 said.
In the original text, the Hebrew word for “honor” means “to be heavy.” The authority given to mothers and fathers has a spiritual heft to it.
Parents are to be treated seriously and not undermined.
There’s a good reason for this. Paul refers to the Fifth Commandment as “the first commandment with a promise,” and we find that promise in Exodus.
The second half of Exodus 20:12 tells us that following the fifth commandment has practical benefits: “… that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
In other words, the Israelites are told by God Himself that honoring parental authority is a key to living “long,” i.e. sustained prosperity through generations.
As is evidenced by the subsequent flourishing the nuclear family brought about in the Western world, that promise eventually extended far beyond just the Israelites.
And yet, as most of today’s parents’ rights advocates will tell you, the Biden-Harris administration has worked to undermine parental authority to an unprecedented degree.
The Biden-Harris Attack on Parents
Vice President Kamala Harris is well-known for producing word-salad speeches. Many critics of the vice president attributed the following quote to that penchant, but, as vacuous as the quote may appear at first glance, it does offer a somewhat meaningful glance into her administration’s agenda.
Profound words by Kamala Harris:
“The children of the community are the children of the ” pic.twitter.com/qVcsLbGjup
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 18, 2024
“The children of the community are the children of the community,” Harris said at a September political conference in Washington, per Fox News.
The Biden-Harris approach to families can be summed up with this one quote. To them, the ultimate overarching authority over children, the most basic unit of the family, is the “community.” To the progressive, “community” is synonymous with “government.”
Many Biden-Harris policies give authority that should reside with parents to the government.
Perhaps the most pressing example of this is the Biden administration’s ongoing attempt to redefine Title IX protections to include “gender identity.”
For those who may be unaware, as it currently stands, Title IX protects individuals from discrimination in education-related programs based on their sex.
The Biden-Harris effort to broaden that definition to include “gender identity” would create dire repercussions for parents, as attorney Kristen Waggoner explained in a January Op-Ed.
“[T]his policy would pose a direct threat to children and the rights of parents. Specifically, it would create intimidating pressure on schools to treat gender-confused kids as the opposite sex without telling their parents,” she wrote. “If left unchecked, it could impact millions of children and their families nationwide.”
Public schools’ pushing of gender ideology, far-left racial essentialism and other divisive belief systems have been well-documented over the last few years.
When parents began discovering and pushing back against these ideas being taught to their children, the Biden-Harris DOJ treated those parents like terrorists.
Attorney General Marrick Garland himself announced the FBI would be weaponized against such parents in a 2021 memorandum.
Family-Killing Welfare Policies
None of the above even comes close to the damage being done to the family by the Biden administration’s aggressive expansion of family-killing entitlement programs.
Historically, government welfare programs have weakened the American family through two means: subsidizing single-parent families and punishing lower-income individuals who decide to marry.
“The enabling or facilitating effect is the first mechanism by which the welfare system discourages and undermines marriage. This effect occurs when welfare encourages and sustains the formation of single-parent families that would be unlikely to emerge in the absence of welfare support. It has played a powerful role sustaining both the long-term growth of single parenthood and the decline of marriage,” The Heritage Foundation noted in a 2022 report.
“When the War on Poverty began in 1964, 7 percent of children were born outside of marriage. Today, the share is 40 percent. Nearly all of this growth in non-marital childbearing has occurred among less-educated women. Some 59 percent of children of mothers with only a high school diploma are born outside of marriage. Among college-educated women, the number is only 10 percent.”
The failed War on Poverty effort expanded drastically under the Biden-Harris administration thanks to the Build Back Better bill.
As a result, so did the problems it caused.
Before the bill’s passing, The Heritage Foundation noted how the bill would drastically increase marital penalties and single-parent benefits, both of which created powerful added incentives keeping parents from coming together to form intact families.
As noted by the Maclver Institute, fatherlessness is the single biggest predictor of childhood poverty. Roughly 46 percent of fatherless children live in poverty.
Even though the government has stepped in for those fathers for decades now, things aren’t getting any better for those families.
By handing out checks and breaking up families, the Biden-Harris administration has only served to break up more families, depriving them the opportunity to benefit from following “the first commandment with a promise.”
Parental Authority Trumps Government
God is the ultimate authority over all things.
In his infinite wisdom, he has delegated some of this authority to some world institutions and leaders. As was detailed at length in the introduction to this series, the government is God’s sword, his chosen representative to punish evil-doers.
Parents, on the other hand, are God’s appointed authority over children and families.
Since our culture is godless, it seeks to replace God with government. In doing so, the wise and good delegations of authority given to us by God through scripture have slowly evaporated.
Throughout our nation’s history, this regression has advanced to the tipping point we’re at now, with a federal leadership that believes children belong to it.
No matter what they say though, remember this: Scripture teaches us that children belong to their parents, not the state.
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