On ‘The Death of the Family’

I’ve mentioned a couple times before on this blog how politicians sometimes make the right decision for the wrong reasons. In a similar vein, James Matthew Wilson, over at Front Porch Republic, republishes a longer version of ‘The Death of the Family’, his article from 2008 on Sarah Palin’s, and most ‘conservative’ Americans’, understanding of the family and marriage.

Is Palin’s an outrageous statement? Not entirely. Her divagations seem rather to spring from a dimly contemplated prejudice, and, like most prejudices, they cling to an image of social forms and behaviors that actually work, and greet with skepticism proposals to endanger or even interpolate that image. Prejudices are intrinsically pragmatic and usually salutary, but we are, as a “culture,” now locked in a debate about the nature of marriage, family, and society that could only occur after two centuries and more of the decay of those institutions. We cannot, for the moment, rely on contemporary prejudices to sustain us, because the practices that gave birth to them were already on the down-slide.

Read the rest here.