A few days before his final confirmation hearings, during a nationally televised interview with FOX News, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was asked about Julie Swetnick’s allegation that he attended parties in high school where he touched girls “without their consent” and played a role in facilitating gang rape. Kavanaugh dismissed Swetnick’s memory by describing it as “ridiculous and like something from The Twilight Zone,” Rod Sterling’s classic science fiction series which, according to its opening sequence, took place in a “fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man.”

Kavanaugh’s comparison was unfortunately apt for how he and other men in power reacted to the recollections of Swetnick, Deborah Ramirez, and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford over the past few weeks. This was especially the case during those final hearings, when Senators on all sides of the political spectrum joined the then-nominee in suggesting that Dr. Ford’s sexual assault did not take place in the realm of normal American life—the wholesome world they all apparently live in—but rather an alternate dimension of the United States in which men violently dominate women with regularity.

This sort of illogical thinking was common on The Twilight Zone, which despite its surreal set-up was very much about the human condition. It depicted extreme scenarios like alien invasions and dystopian futures to illuminate the terror lurking in our cookie-cutter American neighborhoods; the propensity of people to bury their insecurities beneath the desire for power—with little regard for its impact on others. Or what Serling himself once described as “man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”

On the Republican side, this self-righteous perspective was maintained by bolstering Kavanaugh’s claim to being an all-American Christian kid at 16; a boy living universes away from the kind of parties where drunken teens force themselves onto classmates. In his testimony Kavanaugh painted his drinking and partying as completely normal for a young man, and Republican Senators were eager to accept and celebrate this (very) limited picture of normative white masculinity in 1982.

Meanwhile, the Democrats created their own image of Kavanaugh as an abnormally aggressive man. Men like Richard Blumenthal asked him about excessive partying, lewd yearbook quotes, and how often he drank to the point of forgetting parts of the night before, but each time Kavanaugh simply denied he did anything excessively at all. He angrily maintained that he did not live in that other dimension, but only the one where top-of-their-class young men occasionally have some beers with their bros. Kavanaugh went to great lengths to emphasize this American manliness, making sure to mention details like “Roger Clemens was pitching for the Red Sox” when asked about a booze-filled baseball trip he organized in law school.

The Senators failed to name then—even as they commended Dr. Ford’s bravery and spoke at length about what her message might mean for other survivors nationwide—the reality that “normal” American men not only like beer and baseball, but also regularly hurt women.

Senators suggested Dr. Ford’s sexual assault did not take place in the realm of normal American life, but rather an alternate dimension of the United States in which men violently dominate women with regularity.
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In fact, only 10% of American men list baseball as their favorite sport today, but a 2017 study found that 32% of college-aged men would have “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they could get away with it. And though beer is the drink of choice for 41% of Americans, a staggering 81% of women in this country report being sexually harassed. 1 in 6 American women have survived an attempted or completed rape, the perpetrators of which are overwhelmingly men (and mostly white). All of which is to say, misogyny is at the very least as American as beer and baseball.

Yet, as Kavanaugh performed his exasperation at being linked to sexual violence, the men in the room never admitted that the scene Ford described was very familiar to them as well.

When Kavanaugh posed a threatening question back to Amy Klobuchar about her drinking habits, none of the other men chimed in to affirm that yes, they too have silently listened to, witnessed, or participated in the dehumanization of women. Men like Sen. Dick Durbin never countered the narrative that the multiple accusations against someone like Kavanaugh were “absurd,” but rather set out to prove that this straight white man, who attended elite schools and has remained in positions of power his entire life, would be unique in his behavior if he once used that power to hurt a person of another gender.

Misogyny is at the very least as American as beer and baseball.
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That is the lie—the binary of “good” and “bad” masculinity— that men so often hide behind. The same illusion, compounded and mirrored by the lie of white innocence, which carried a racist misogynist to the presidency two years ago even after he admitted to sexual assault. It’s no surprise then that President Trump himself has openly attacked the credibility of the Democratic men since the hearing, saying “I watch those senators on the Democrat side and I thought it was a disgrace. Partially because I know them…They are not angels.”

The fear men have to speak the truth about power in this country, who has it and how they got it, ultimately bolstered Kavanaugh’s “twilight zone” case for the Supreme Court. He knew it and Trump knew it. Kavanaugh’s faux-shock at being among the accused worked in the same way as Trump’s claim to “locker room talk” before it, because the other men in the room insisted on maintaining their own facade of innocence—afraid that if they spoke about patriarchy, they too might get kicked out of the club.

That is the lie—the binary of good and bad masculinity— that men so often hide behind.
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In one of the more famous episodes of The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” a seemingly perfect community is whipped into frenzied paranoia by a series of strange occurrences—beginning with a power outage and a little boy’s story about shape-shifting creatures—which ultimately leads them to turn on each other in search of the monster amongst them. The episode ends with a bloody brawl on Maple Street that exposes who these people really are.

Though many powerful men have reacted to the #MeToo movement by expressing fears of a “witch hunt,” the reality is that they themselves maintain the perception that some men are monsters worth stoning, while the rest are innocent bystanders. For instance, Matt Damon—who played Kavanaugh in a Saturday Night Live skit recently—once publicly worried about the “culture of outrage” targeting his friends in power, saying “there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.” Which, just like Trump’s worrying for “young men in America,” expresses a desire for a hierarchy of masculinity rather than a willingness to look in the mirror.

Like those on Maple Street, the men in power in Hollywood and D.C. choose to ignore the systemic issue at hand, and instead focus on preserving their own position—regardless of how it might harm their neighbors. The Democratic men of the Senate, glad to use their five minutes during the hearing to perform their “decent” masculinity, were playing the same game as Kavanaugh: a game of avoidance and imagination. It’s not that many didn’t declare that they believed Dr. Ford, but that nearly all of them were unwilling to state that they have contributed to the culture which allows such violent acts to persist.

What patriarchy promises these men in exchange for this deflection, especially the white men, is the chance to play the hero on TV again (just like “good” Will Hunting). Meanwhile, Trump and his friends can confidently call survivors liars, knowing that the men around them will never expose the actual lie of masculinity.

But what might change if we weren’t afraid to connect sexual assault to that celebrated culture of drinking “brewskis” and playing football? What if we admitted on the largest stages that Brett Kavanaugh’s allegiance to American manhood is precisely why we should be terrified of giving him more power?

Among the most harrowing moments of Dr. Ford’s testimony was when she described Mark Judge’s actions—and inaction—while Kavanaugh was assaulting her in 1982. According to her account, Judge alternatively stood by laughing, encouraging his friend, and half-heartedly asking him to stop while Kavanaugh attempted to rip off her clothes. Dr. Ford even spoke of making eye contact with Judge at one point, hoping he might intervene. Yet he did nothing.

What if we admitted on the largest stages that Brett Kavanaugh’s allegiance to American manhood is precisely why we should be terrified of giving him more power?
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As long as men are unwilling to risk being as vulnerable in front of men as Ford and Anita Hill have been, the Kavanaughs and Trumps of the world cannot truly be challenged. They can yell and demand respect, because they know that we will adhere to the rules of the game.

To look on as someone is sexually assaulted, or to remain quiet as people are dismissed for sharing their stories of assault, is a dehumanizing way of being. Yet the illusion of normalcy, and the burying of empathy, is precisely how men have long cemented their power in this country. As the narrator says at the end of that episode on Maple Street, “the tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions.” Men are well-practiced and well-rewarded in maintaining our illusions.

Michelle Bender grew up in the same town as her Native American family, but never met them as a child. When her adoptive mother would take her to the local store in Seminole, Oklahoma, an older man, who often sat outside, would tell her she looked familiar.

As a baby, Michelle was adopted by a non-Native family who created what she describes as a safe and happy home. Yet, Michelle always felt like a part of her was missing. “I felt like I was a child with nowhere to belong,” she says. “I was a person who was wandering through this world without an identity.”

When Michelle finally connected with her family as an adult, she met the man who she had seen outside the store all those years ago; he was her great uncle. He told her that years ago, when he learned that his baby niece was up for adoption, he contacted Tulsa County DHS and told them he wanted to raise the child. The county would not even give him an application.

Today, Michelle works for her tribe, Seminole Nation, and helps place Native children who are up for adoption with family members or in other Native homes in accordance with federal statute. “I had a family member that would have raised me. I would have known my culture, I would have known my heritage. And I would have known my family. I would have had a sense of belonging. But the workers here in Oklahoma didn’t adhere to ICWA,” says Michelle.

I was a person who was wandering through this world without an identity.
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Michelle’s adoption out of her tribe and away from her family happened in violation of federal law. When the Indian Childhood Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed in 1978, Congress admitted that 25-35% of Native children had been adopted out of their homes, families and tribes by White and non-Native families. Indian Country lost an entire third of one generation of children. According to the law, when a Native child’s home is deemed unfit, family members, other tribal members, and then other Native homes are to be prioritized for placement. ICWA has been praised by national child advocacy organizations as the gold standard for child welfare.

Yet today, ICWA, the only law protecting Native families, is under threat by a conservative-backed legal campaign to have it struck down by the Supreme Court. Four cases challenging the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act are currently in U.S. appellate court, including one case brought by the state of Texas.

As Trump’s inhumane policy of separating immigrant families made headlines this month, media outlets and social media posts have drawn parallels to the U.S. government’s long history of separating families of color. While Native American families are still recovering from the U.S. policies of both Indian Boarding School and forced adoption, this tragic chapter of U.S. history is far from over.

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Even with ICWA in place, more than half of U.S. states are out of compliance. In South Dakota, Native Americans are less than 15% of the state’s population, but Native kids represent 50% of all children in foster care, with almost 90% of them being raised in non-Native homes. In Minnesota, Natives Americans are only 1.4% of the population, but Native kids represent 23.9% of the kids in the state foster care system.

From reporting to placement, racist and implicit bias put Native families at greater risk of losing their children. Compared to their White counterparts, Native families are twice as likely to be investigated when abuse is reported, twice as likely to have allegations of abuse substantiated, and four times more likely to have their children taken away. While some states have worked to remedy this inequity, this statistical disparity is actually growing, and the gap has nearly doubled since 2008.

While Native advocates say that the federal government needs to act to strengthen ICWA, a powerful conservative think tank is fighting to have the entire law declared unconstitutional.

Several national organizations are fighting to overturn ICWA, but the most well known and well-resourced is the Goldwater Institute. Goldwater is funded by Trump’s biggest campaign donor, the Mercer family, and other powerful political influencers including the Koch Brothers and the Devos Family. Over the past five years, Goldwater has relentlessly represented foster parents who want to illegally adopt Native children in violation of federal law with the hope that someday one of these White families will win their case in the United States Supreme Court. According to Goldwater’s website, ICWA violates the equal protection clause of the constitution by treating Native children “differently,” and the Supreme Court should “agree that this codification of substandard treatment should not stand.”

While Goldwater postures as promoting racial equity, the language they use to describe Native children and families is deeply racist. Deliberately drawing on stereotypes, they argue that Native children with low blood quantum or who haven’t lived on a reservation are not Native enough for the law to apply. Sadly, this argument is working. In the most famous ICWA case to date, the media and the court were obsessed with a Cherokee baby’s blood quantum. While blood quantum was factually irrelevant to the legal questions raised in the “Baby Veronica” case, the first sentence of the majority opinion of the Supreme Court reads, “This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2 percent (3/256) Cherokee.”

While Goldwater postures as promoting racial equity, the language they use to describe Native children and families is deeply racist.
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The type of litigation that the Goldwater Institute mounts is extremely expensive. To say that a conservative advocacy organization—that has shown no other interest in either child welfare nor Native rights—is making this investment based solely on the concern for the wellbeing of Native children is highly skeptical. Many legal experts in Indian Country see the end goal of Goldwater’s attack on ICWA as a back door route to undoing the legal structure that currently protects tribal sovereignty.

“When you look at the complaints you can see that they are attacking, in a very aggressive way, not just ICWA’s application under the constitution, but tribal sovereignty and tribal federal trust responsibility,” explains David Simmons, Government Affairs and Advocacy Director at the National Indian Child Welfare Association. “They are not just gungho about trying to push ICWA out of the way, they are also trying to undermine all of the precedent, all the federal law, all the court cases that have established tribal sovereignty and govern Native rights today.”

American Indian reservations comprise only 2% of all land in the United States but hold an estimated 20% of oil and gas reserves, 50% of uranium reserves, and 30% of all coal west of the Mississippi. In 2009, The Council of Energy Resource Tribes estimated energy resources on tribal land were worth about $1.5 trillion. A possible and convenient side effect of the Supreme Court striking down ICWA is that the decision could also gut the legal precedent holding minerally rich lands in trust for tribes—opening the floodgates not only for predatory adoption of Native babies, but also resource extraction on tribal land.

A possible and convenient side effect of the Supreme Court striking down ICWA is that the decision could also gut the legal precedent holding minerally rich lands in trust for tribes.
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Sandy White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) was born before ICWA was signed into law. Of her mother’s nine children, eight were taken away. White missionaries got Sandy and, among other physical and emotional abuses, they told her that her Native family never wanted her. As an adult she reconnected with her tribe and became a staunch advocate for ICWA. Today, she helps organize gatherings and healing spaces for other Native children who were adopted out.

When I ask Sandy what would happen to Native families if ICWA was declared unconstitutional she goes silent. After a long pause she says, “I guess it would be just like it was before ICWA was passed. We would become targets again… It would be another collective wound.”

To put it in blunt but unsurprising terms, the world is in shambles right now. Fascism is on the rise again. Hate crimes are up in the U.S. Water crises loom on the horizon. Wealth inequality has never been higher. Climate change and natural disasters abound. Mass shootings galore. Police brutality and racism. A rising threat of nuclear war.

Amidst this nightmarish backdrop, many people — particularly younger Americans — are in search of answers, trying to identify a root cause for all of these problems. And one that’s emerging front and center is our entire economic system.

A 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that a slight majority of liberal Democrats held “negative views” of capitalism. In 2016, a Harvard University study revealed that 51% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 “don’t support” capitalism—and only 42% support it.

So if not capitalism, then what?

The study found young people favor socialism, but that’s not the only alternative. There has been an uptick of interest in a 170-year old political system — that dirtiest of C-words.

Communism.

Amidst a nightmarish backdrop, many people — particularly younger Americans — are in search of answers. Communism.
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It’s no secret that the United States doesn’t have the best relationship with communism; “dirty commie” is an insult as American as apple pie. Much of this is rooted in the The Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, which fueled the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and which had a lasting effect on how people in the U.S. view the political system. Since then, the U.S. government has interfered in multiple countries — supporting coups and assassinating leaders — in order to weed out communism anywhere it popped up. Or was even perceived to pop up.

For some, communism brings up images of the oppressive reigns of Soviet-era Stalin and China’s Mao, and the widespread murders attributed to their regimes. Communism is sometimes thought of as Big Government coming and taking everything you own.

Critics of communism say it goes against human nature, that it can’t work because people are naturally lazy and/or selfish, that it won’t work if the state gives citizens food and shelter for nothing. Frank Zappa famously said, “communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.” Others say it conflicts with people’s desire for freedom by forcing them to submit to the will of big government.

But is that what communism really is?

To understand the goal of communists, it’s necessary to have a nuanced understanding of communism and its relationship to Marxism — that political movement that so many in the so-called “alt-right” are constantly railing against.

A quick overview: Marxism draws from the work of Karl Marx, a German philosopher, historian, and economist from the 1800s. He and Friedrich Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto of 1848, and since their passing, communists and other Marx/Engels fans have been interpreting and developing upon their ideas. One expert called communism “the endpoint of Marx’s ideas.”

According to Marx, there is conflict between two classes of people. These are the capitalists — people who control the means of production, such as business owners — and the working class, who actually produce all the concrete goods of our society. In its purest form, communism espouses the belief that the means of production should be in the hands of the workers — not the government.

What many people think of as communism is actually closer to socialism, a related system that has many similarities to communism. It is socialism, not communism, that relies on “big government” to get things done. In socialism, the government owns the means of production rather than the people. In a true communist system, government as we know it today would likely not exist.

In its purest form, communism espouses the belief that the means of production should be in the hands of the workers.
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However, it’s important to keep in mind that these are ideas. The theories of socialism and communism are continually being developed and not every communist agrees with the next about how government should look in a communist society. Many value the idea of a true democracy rather than a representative democracy — every person gets an equal vote on every issue in the community. No one person is given power over others. There are no presidents, no governors, no mayors. In this form, communism actually overlaps with anarchist ideas more so than it does with socialist ideas.

In any case, in recent months, communist ideology has seemed to catch on with more Americans. The Communist Party USA — a national communist organization with 7,000 registered members — has reported a significant spike in interest and membership. According to one article, CPUSA had 5,000 members in April 2017; at that time, the organization’s international secretary said, “There is growing interest in communist ideas.”

Local groups, too, have been invigorated. In my own backyard, the Seattle Communists, a chapter of the Pacific Northwest-based Communist Labor Party, has seen its numbers swell. The organization, which came to life as a spin-off of the Tacoma Communists, had only three dedicated members in the summer of 2016. Now it has 25 to 30 registered members, and a lot more people involved in its community programs (plus more than 800 Facebook followers). It also has high-profile partnerships, including with 2017 mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver.

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Why the change? Sophia, Seattle Communists’ secretary-treasurer (who doesn’t want her last name used), has no doubt that the increase in membership has to do with the results of the 2016 election. She calls it the “Trump bump” — and the Seattle Communists aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed.

“Public receptivity has gone from, ‘Is this a joke?’ in 2010 to, ‘Why do you hate freedom’ in 2012 to, ‘Yeah fuck Trump’ in 2016,” a representative of the Tacoma Communists told me. “Blessedly, we hear ‘Where do I sign up?’ just as frequently since last summer.”

This trend parallels the increase in membership for far-right groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the Klu Klux Klan has anywhere between 5,000 and 8,000 members today. And far-right activity has been featured in the news much more than anything the communists are doing, likely due to the well-documented violent tendencies of fascist and white nationalist organizations. It also helps that they currently have a strong figurehead in Donald Trump, who has been reluctant to condemn them and has employed their people in the White House.

Further, communists believe that fascism happens when capitalism is under threat. As the economic system becomes unstable, white working class people are directed to blame immigrants and people of color and are steered toward white nationalism. Meanwhile, those with class and state power use fascism to defend against the rise of the rest of the working class as their quality of life plummets. In this sense, simultaneous rises in both far right and far left ideas are inevitable under capitalism.

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Against the backdrop of rising hate and bias nationally, coupled with Seattle’s rampant income and racial inequality, it’s unsurprising to see communism take flight.

“We don’t want the government to own everything,” Sophia tells me. In fact, she emphasizes, communists are widely against the U.S. government — they view it as an oppressive entity and an enemy of the people.

“What is government but a tool that a class uses to control society?”

What communists really want is for state and economic power to be put back in the hands of the community. For it to be communal. Hence, Communism.

To that end, the Seattle Communists — whose slogan is “fight the power, serve the people” — leverage community programs centered on efforts to build social institutions so that people don’t have to rely on the government. Their long-term goal: make it so every part of society is controlled by participatory democracy rather than state power.

The group’s earliest community involvement was in response to the rising rates of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, one they felt the government wasn’t responding to effectively. So the organization revived the “Q-Patrol” program, where volunteers are trained in self-defense and de-escalation techniques. The group is also involved in a “serve the people” food delivery program, launched last October to bring free groceries to poor households.

The group’s idea is to actively work to improve the community in order to gain trust, so when participants hear about communism, they won’t immediately dismiss the idea. Sophia repeatedly tells me about “making the leap from protest to action.”

Although there are misconceptions about communism, Sophia believes that the word doesn’t carry the same stigma that it used to. At least in Seattle, she is frequently asked why she uses the word communism because “doesn’t it scare people away?” But only once has anyone told her that they actually object to the term. “Everybody thinks that everybody hates the word and is scared of the word, but in my experience, not a whole lot of people are.”

The real challenge is to prove that their ideas work.

Many of us grew up with the message (some would say propaganda) that communism is impossible, evil, or both. But a new day might be dawning. It’s possible that communists haven’t seen this kind of interest in their ideas since they were so thoroughly persecuted in the 1950s.

I myself have become very interested in alternatives to capitalism in recent months, and although I can’t say for sure if communism is the answer, I also definitely don’t believe it’s evil, as I was taught growing up. I also know there’s a lot more to it than I could possibly get into in one article.

If you’re interested, there’s plenty of reading out there — and you won’t be alone in your exploration.

By Nicole Rodgers

Marriage rates have been declining for more than half a century and single women now outnumber married ones. There are few guides better at navigating this new landscape than Rebecca Traister. In a recent New York Magazine article, adapted from her soon-to-be-released book All the Single Ladies, she offers an insightful, nuanced analysis of the plight and power of unmarried women “taking up space in a world that was not designed for them.”

Traister argues that the current democratic policy platform may be more liberal than it has been in a generation in response to the growth of unmarried women. It’s about time. Public policy has lagged almost criminally behind in meeting the needs of single women, and especially single mothers, for decades.

But while a policy platform that stands to benefit unmarried women and mothers is necessary, it is not sufficient. There is no substitute for identity politics. Part of why the U.S. still has such inadequate public policies is the fear of publicly supporting families that conservatives have already convinced us are unequivocally bad, subpar alternatives to the married nuclear variety, especially “single mother” homes.

Progressives should confront conservatives’ favorite national pastime, shaming single mothers (especially if they are low-income or women of color), with an equally powerful dose of approval and respect: Dignifying them by publicly affirming their inherent worth and equality with other families. That is still the third rail in politics.

Case in point: strongly “endorsing marriage” has become the one of the few agreements across political lines, even in today’s politically polarized environment. “Nearly everyone agrees that marriage itself offers stability and economic benefits to couples and to society at large,” historian Andrew Yarrow recently stated in the New York Times. (Who would want to disagree with “nearly everyone”?)

There are serious consequences to this. If everyone agrees that marriage benefits society at large, it’s no surprise that married nuclear families are the gold standard against which we are all judged, and against which so many fail. Letting this idea go unchallenged creates a harmful cognitive dissonance that undercuts the work of progressives.

Marriage has been in the limelight for a decade now as the fight for marriage equality mobilized much of the country around a critical civil rights battle culminating in last June’s Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing the right to same-sex marriage. But outside the context of marriage equality, “endorsing marriage” is hollow. It does not lead toward a realistic or reasonable solution to anything. There is plenty the government can do, but successfully making and maintaining good marriages is not one of those things, as virtually all evaluations of large government funded marriage-promotion programs have shown.

Indeed, if marriage is what makes a family whole (a belief still imbedded in our language of “broken” and “intact” families), it follows that declining marriage and increasing non-marital birthrates would be used as evidence that the American family is in crisis. But as historian Stephanie Coontz has painstakingly documented, marriage has never been just one thing, and norms dictating the role of marriage and family have evolved significantly over time.

Marriage has only been a love-based institution for the past 150–200 years, and used to be rooted in assumptions of wifely subordination and male domination. Enslaved people were often not permitted to marry, since they were considered the property of enslavers. In the agricultural era, husbands selected partners based on strength and childbearing abilities, as they needed labor for the family farm.

And until quite recently, women were still expected to marry for social respectability and financial security. Once middle-class women entered the paid workforce in droves during the 1970s (“working class” women have always done just that — worked) one of the main reasons for getting married disappeared, and many marriages dissolved.

The idealized period in the postwar 1950s and ’60s when the “traditional” nuclear family model was briefly dominant is still misunderstood as a halcyon era, the passing of which is opportunistically lamented when bemoaning how family life has changed. “People may be disappointed that we don’t have more stable, long-term traditional marriages, but people have to understand that, inside that model, was a lot of suffering, heartache and exploitation,” sociologist Philip Cohen has cautioned when talking about that period.

Endorsing marriage has become a dog whistle, used to prime racist, debunked stereotypes about so-called absentee black fathers, to invalidate non-nuclear family arrangements, and to treat those within them as failures. The 35% of children today living in single parent families deserve real champions, but empathy for their hardships (and the hardships of their parents) is an empty gesture if it is used as evidence for policies designed to rebuild more nuclear families rather than to fight for the equality of existing ones.

Marriage as the neoliberal answer to systemic, structural problems like poverty displays a willful ignorance about what marriage is and isn’t and what the state can and cannot do. Saving marriage is not like eradicating smallpox, reducing smoking, or improving motor vehicle safety. It cannot be “fixed” with a public health intervention.

Marriage as the neoliberal answer to systemic, structural problems like poverty displays a willful ignorance about what marriage is and isn’t and what the state can and cannot do.
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Of course, affirming non-traditional family models does not mean condemning marriage. The two are not mutually exclusive. We are living at a time when the best marriages are better than ever before. But only those who have the time and energy to invest — along with access and availability of good partners — are experiencing these historically unprecedented benefits. That gives marriage a socioeconomic dimension that manifests in even greater inequality. Poor people are not only missing out on the potential rewards of marriage they may want, but being vilified for failing to do so.

This is why the dogma, masquerading as common sense, that individuals should be married and financially stable before having children is so dangerous and flawed. It excludes large swaths of the country — people who for a variety of reasons outside their control will never meet those two conditions — and suggests that they do not deserve children.

Half of the adult population is not married, and nearly a third of Americans are in or near poverty. That is a lot of people who don’t fit these criteria. Follow this path too far and you get dangerously close to eugenics.

Why do we continue to treat the decline of marriage as a problem that needs fixing at all? The most generous interpretation is that is where we have let the data lead us, as seems glaringly apparent from the dozens of reports released in recent years in the U.S., many from conservative and moderate think tanks, with the same finding: That family structure matters, and children raised in stable, married two-parent families typically fare better on a number of outcomes than those raised in single-parent homes. This is a reasonable, if partial, descriptive finding.

But it has been contorted into a mandate for more stable married parent homes, and few have been brave enough to respond with the truth: that it is a waste of energy and resources to continue to prescribe the un-prescribable. Plenty of countries have more single parents than us and much stronger and more stable families. Allowing families and children to struggle in poverty has always been policy choice, not the inevitable result of a specific family structure.

The myopic focus on married-parent homes as best for children has also caused a neglect of the data that contradicts this narrative, and plenty exists. One of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies that looked at adolescent well-being across twelve different family “types” found that one group of adolescents actually had better outcomes than children raised by married parents in their first marriages: Children raised in multi-generational households with never-married single mothers. Doesn’t that suggest that we may be thinking about the ingredients of good families, and the importance of marriage, all wrong?

The dogma, masquerading as common sense, that individuals should be married and financially stable before having children is dangerous and flawed.
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Right-wing conservatives may be out of touch with the values and lives of mainstream America, but they still claim the monopoly on “family values,” and their misguided nostalgia masquerading as policy thrives because of a huge, unimaginative void when it comes to alternatives.

With high profile organizations like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, conservatives have created an enormous, generously funded infrastructure that promotes a “God-ordained institution of the family” and “marriages that reflect God’s design.” A lack of intentionality and imagination in developing other roadmaps has allowed the messages of the right to drift slowly and imperceptibly toward the center for decades.

A framework for supporting families that meets them where they are is not abstract or impossible. It is the difference between policies intended to “endorse” marriage and help revive married nuclear families and public policy that start with the goal of supporting families as they actually look right now. It is the difference between the deeply offensive, paternalistic belief that even though low-income single-mothers have made mistakes we should still help them so their children can “break the cycle of poverty,” and believing that families led by single-mothers have as much inherent value and dignity as anyone else.

It is recognizing that poverty is an issue of systemic inequality, not personal failing. In everyday practice, it begins with conversations and questions like: “What do we know about why some single-parent families thrive while others do not?” not ones that begin with the question “How can we decrease the number of single parents homes or get them married?”

We honor families when we not only create policies that address the existing circumstances of people’s lives, but when we affirm them without measuring them against the nuclear family ideal. For too long, we have let the idea that marriage is the key to our society’s wellbeing stand, when in fact, achieving wellbeing — through financial stability, access to fair-paying work, healthcare, housing, and a strong communities of friends, family, and intimate partners — does not require or depend on marriage at all.

The conversation about the future of marriage and families requires vision and bravery. For politicians and policy makers, bravery means refusing to waste time tepidly endorsing marriage, and instead, publicly advocating for the worth and dignity of families and individuals as they are now. Bravery is saying that marriage does not need saving, but real people do.

This piece originally appeared in Alternet.