–Alan Mercer

On CBC Radio news this morning (CBC News: World Report, May 12), the last segment begins with a mocking of the traditional family, with some audio from the old days that goes on about women working in the kitchen.

I guess the CBC assumes that women are doing really well now, so they don’t bother to compare any statistics about health or quality of life from that time to now.

Also, I guess somebody is always trying to associate family kitchens with oppression and misery although that association doesn’t register with me. I guess they believe nobody would want to work in a kitchen unless they’re paid minimum wage by some strangers–with taxes deducted.

The CBC journalists explain that the family has “changed” and now we have all shapes and sizes of “families”.

A woman, apparently a teacher, is interviewed along with the children in her class. According to her, there are different combinations of “parental units” – two men, two women, etc. She tells the children: “your parental unit is here”. The children “all have parental units”.

So I’m just relieved that loving your “parental unit” is still approved behaviour.

I believe Canadians probably do feel intimidated about disagreeing with this redefinition of “family”. The government has gradually introduced various categories of “hate” speech even though the Charter guarantees us freedom of conscience, religion, speech, and association.

There isn’t much science in this news piece, but I suppose that intimidation through law has to be “scientific” in some sense if it has effectively silenced opposition to “change” and has supposedly altered our beliefs about reality so much.

The Soviet Union was an attempt to create a “scientific” society and it was also created by revolutionary subversive change-agents.

It was very successful, in a sense, because it created multiple generations of people trained into obedience and subservience to government – not much different from us.

Now we have many people–trained by education, government, news, entertainment and pornography–and endocrine-disrupting chemicals possibly–not to “believe in” the traditional family. We are headed straight into Huxley’s Brave New World as more of us don’t want or can’t have children.

I’m not allowing words to be redefined for me by authoritarian cliques. I’m not surrendering the meanings I grew up with. Harrap’s Pocket English Dictionary (1983) gives these definitions:

family:

[…] n. (a) a group of people who are closely related, esp. mother, father and their children; f. planning = birth control; f. tree = table of the family going back over many generations. (b) group of animals/plants, etc., which are closely related.

marriage:

[…] n. (a) state of being legally joined as husband and wife. (b) ceremony …

husband:

[…] 1. n. man who is married to a certain woman. …

wife:

[…] n. … woman to whom a man is married. …

mother:

… 1. n. female parent …

father:

… 1. n. (a) male parent …

The old definition of “family” connects with biological realities having to do with “generations” and words like “related”, “mother” and “father”. “Related” is why we have the word “relative”.

The redefinition of these words will make sense from a social engineering perspective when we are living in a world in which we are not allowed to or not able to reproduce naturally.

When we surrender words to redefinition in this way–words related to a natural institution that provides structure and support for most people–when words are given new, contradictory and invalid meanings, we are surrendering the future to totalitarianism.