Sex, Family, and the Culture Wars

Taking a traditional view on the family, gender roles, and sexuality, the author compares four accounts of the family: sociobiological and categorical, which view the family as normative and a natural phenomenon, and liberal and libertarian social-constructivist, which view the family as a social construction. He argues that reducing the family to a social construction is incomplete because that ignores its biological and moral bases. He describes what he believes to be the proper structure, moral authority, and social and political significance of the family, and concludes that it is the primary social, moral, and political category and that redefining it differently from marriage between husband and wife creates social, emotional, psychological, and financial costs. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Extraordinary social and moral shifts have taken place in Western societies. Sex isno longer the exclusive province of husband and wife set within monogamous marriedfamily life. The world is awash in sex: advertising, books, magazines, movies,sex clubs, internet pornography, etc. Parents, traditionally responsible for guidingtheir children’s moral and social development, have been effectively sidelined bycommercial and governmental interests.This volume pursues a detailed study of how changes in social life dating fromthe sexual revolution of the 1960s have affected the family. Cherry shows thatattempts to redefine the family away from the marital union of husband and wifecome with real costs: social, emotional, psychological, and financial. He arguesthat while political campaigns have fueled attempts to undermine the traditionalfamily, to pretend it possesses no basic biological, social, or moral reality, suchideologically driven undertakings are injurious to society.Acting as if there are no consequential differences between traditional marriageand other sexual lifestyles ignores significant data demonstrating the importanceof the traditional biological family to the well-being of men and women, and thesuccessful raising of children. The family possesses a biological and moral beingthat is foundational; an essential building block of society. Cherry argues thatthe family is the most incontrovertible field of conflict in the culture wars; othersmight conclude that it is the decisive battleground.