drugs, "entertainment," and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and familial ties; our preference for "nonbinding commitments"; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality ; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we "impose" our morality on others and thus invite others to "impose" their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude to the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the progaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.

Having come to see America in this way, I could understand why the family issue had come to play such a large part in the politics of the seventies and eighties and why so many Democrats had drifted away from their party. Liberalism now meant sexual freedom, women's rights, gay rights; denunciation of the family as the seat of all oppression; denunciation of "patriarchy"; denunciation of "working-class authoritarianism." Even when liberals began to understand the depths of disaffection among formerly Democratic voters and belatedly tried to present themselves as friends of the family, they had nothing better to offer than a "national policy on families"—more welfare services, more day-care centers, more social workers and guidance counselors and child development experts. None of these proposals addressed the moral collapse that troubled so many people—troubled even liberals, although they refused to admit it publicly. Liberals and social democrats showed their true colors when they belatedly pronounced the family a "legitimate object of concern," their words dripping with condescension.

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