The Most Extraordinary Thing in the World: The Natural Family

“Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity.”

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

― G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton made these striking claims in a time of change. By the late 1800s, in part as a result of the industrial revolution, the family structure was at grave risk. Increasingly, both parents had to work outside the home to provide for the financial well-being of the family. In some cases, no doubt, doing so brought a greater sense of personal freedom. But early on, Chesterton insisted, as many do today, that society cannot thrive without strong families.  

What does the modern concept of seeking “unlimited liberty” (personally, at the expense of the family) look like today and what are its fruits?

More recently, the sexual revolution of the 1960s arguably had deeper and more long lasting harmful effects on the critical family structure. With the introduction of the first approved birth control pill in the United States, people began to separate sex from children and family. Ironically, the birth control pill still had a pregnancy rate associated with it. From this the idea emerged of abortion as a backup measure to avoid having children. 

The prevalence of premarital sex and out of wedlock children skyrocketed. According to this Brookings Institute article, after the introduction of the birth control pill the rate of unmarried women who used the pill at first intercourse rose from 5% in 1965 to 15% in 1970, and the rate of abortions for unmarried women grew from roughly 100,000 a year in the late 1960s to more than 1.2 million in the early 1980s. The vast majority of women who had abortions in 2021 were unmarried (87%), while married women accounted for 13%. In addition, in 1965, 34% of black infants and 3.1% of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64% for black infants, 18% for whites and is currently even higher. 

After the enactment of no fault divorce in 1969 in California, divorce rates skyrocketed and  divorce statistics from the year 2022 indicated 43% of first marriages ending in divorce and 60% of second marriages ending in divorce. During this period the notion became widespread that the father was not needed for the family unit, and this notably continues in custody cases. According to statistics from 2022 around one in four children were living without a father in the home. This Pew Research article from September 12, 2019 indicated that the rate of single parent households in the US was the world's highest.

And what are the fruits of these trends?

As reported in a Wall Street Journal article, Steven Baskerville says “virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide and psychological disorders–all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor.” These effects, including poverty, are disproportionately noted in the African-American population, as first studied by the Department of Labor in the Moynihan Report around the time of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Not surprisingly, there is a high percentage of children with unwed mothers among African Americans. 

A worrisome result of this breakdown of the family has been the increase of violence among those who come from families of divorce and/or of those without fathers. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has written that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” More rarely, this is also noted in the high proportion of families of divorce among school shooting perpetrators in recent years. 

The American Solidarity Party offers fundamental solutions to restoring the family as the vital unit in our society. Its official platform states:

“The American Solidarity Party believes that the natural family, founded on the marriage of one man and one woman, is the fundamental unit and basis of every human society. Family breakdown is a key contributor to widespread social problems in this country. In order to promote stable families, it is in the interest of the state to support marriage recognized as the exclusive union of one man and one woman for life. At the same time, we recognize that the state must support the needs of all people—especially children, as well as the elderly and disabled—regardless of household structure.”

With regard to labor, the platform states:

“The state should thus reasonably ensure that work is justly compensated, safe, and does not unreasonably impinge upon those other aspects of life that are essential to the flourishing of the individual, the family, and society. Our goal is to create conditions that allow single-income families to support themselves with dignity. [We support] labor market regulations, the expansion of employee ownership, support for caregivers, and policies that address the cost of living…to make a family wage a reality.” 

The American solidarity party also applies the idea of subsidiarity in order to support the most important unit of society–the family–with multiple policies: increased paid family leave, reasonable work hours, tax policy and public assistance which encourages marriage and discourages divorce, an economic system which encourages more local autonomy for the economy for the benefit of the family.

Some might say “it's the economy stupid,” but more fundamentally it really is about the family. The policies of the American Solidarity Party reflect this vital understanding.

As the Society that bears his name has reflected on Chesterton’s views on family: “Chesterton is attacking the modernist notion that connects happiness with something called ‘liberty’ and unhappiness with something called ‘limitation’ but the idea of perfect freedom and escape from all limitations is delusion. Liberty, Chesterton argued, is merely the right to choose between one set of limitations and another. It is limitations, he wrote, that create all the poetry and variety of life.”

It is refreshing to see a political entity like the American Solidarity Party whose efforts are directed toward the placement of reasonable limitations on the unreasonable seeking of liberty. And it is encouraging that these efforts are mainly directed towards rebuilding and strengthening  “the most extraordinary thing in the world,” “an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”