Like a whirlpool, sin has a powerful vortex effect. Before we know it, we find ourselves in over our heads – and getting out is so much harder than getting in.
Iain Duguid

Family Why Celebrate A Substit

Family Why Celebrate A Substit

FAMILY: Why Celebrate a Substitute?

The cover illustration for a special edition of Newsweek shows a family strolling into the sunset. Husband and wife walk arm in arm. They clasp the outstretched hands of a son and daughter. They are one in spirit, with a purpose.

It is an idyllic scene straight out of the past. But this is 1990, and the family unit is splintered, facing enormous challenges, not the least of which is society’s latest effort to redefine what the family should be.

A family used to consist of a bread-winning father, a stay-at-home mother, and a couple of happy and well adjusted children. We were Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best….committed and joined ’til death do us part. There was a stigma to being divorced and remarried. We did not know any homosexuals.

But everything has changed. The Newsweek special edition, “The 21st Century Family” makes that clear. The “typical” family, and the values it represents, receives short shrift.

Today, many families consist of only one parent. Where there are two, both often choose to bring home paychecks. The kids, if they choose to have any, experience a day-care or latchkey existence. A woman who stays home to raise children is considered odd.

This weakened commitment to family is taking its toll. Newsweek says demographers expect fully half of all first marriages to fail. Second marriages are even more doomed, with six of 10 collapsing. One of every four children is being raised by a single parent. About 22 percent of children are born out of wedlock. About a third of those are born to teenage mothers.

And so the family has come to mean far more than ” Ozzie and Harriet ever contemplated.

Newsweek’s special edition shows us photos of homo-sexual men and their adopted children, and of a lesbian couple celebrating their “commitment” ceremony with rings and a cake. Aside from the cover no photos depict what used to be the celebrated family: a husband, wife, and children. Has that become a museum piece?

  • Consider what constitutes a family in 1990:
  • Single parents, divorced or never married, with natural or adopted kids.
  • Extended stepfamilies, formed by “survivors” of ruined earlier marriages.
  • Homosexual male partners raising adopted children.
  • Homosexual women becoming impregnated artificially so they can have children with their lesbian partners.
  • Single woman having babies by donor insemination.

Some of these families are created by tragic necessity. A parent whose purpose has taken must make the best of a terrible situation. When the children of such a relationship turn out well, it is a credit to the partner left behind. But others willingly set up unconventional relationships, which often are doomed from the start.

Thus, the family today, so broadly defined” is sputtering like a badlytuned engine running on only a few cylinders. And we are seeing the consequences in all kinds of morbid statistics, including child abuse and neglect. We can only speculate how the offspring of homosexual “families” will mature. And what of the children who never know one parent, or who wind up raised by surrogates in day-care centers?

Yet society encourages us not to see the shortcoming of this divergent, often misfit, collection of relationship. The voices acceptance span a broad spectrum. Everything is accepted, from divorce, to having children out of wedlock, to homosexual conduct. Society ignores biblical admonitions against such activity. Those who follow God’s principles are dismissed as irrelevant.

As Newsweek writes, we are supposed to be “glad to live in a society that is more comfortable living with gay couples” working women” divorced men and stepparents and single mothers – people who are reaching in some fashion for self-fulfillment.” Being broad-minded and accepting is promoted as a strength. To challenge the validity of the relationships that pass themselves off as families is considered narrow-minded and bigoted.

Even the courts have recognized deviations, setting standards, for instance, that can allow homosexuals to declare themselves as “families” and adopt kids.

Yet, thankfully, not all have accepted this logic: Even Newsweek acknowledge that, quoting one critic: “You can call homosexual household ‘families’ and you can define ‘family’ any way you want to, but you can’t fool Mother Nature. A family is a mommy and a daddy and their children.

The people who endorse broad definitions of the family substitute counterfeits for the biblical standard. And like all fakes, they can never deliver what they claim.

–Editorial from Moody Monthly February 1990