It is no surprise that academic journals occasionally publish articles deeply critical of things faithful Christians and some conservatives hold dear.
But the well-respected Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF), which has long reframed from publishing overly woke diatribes, has finally submitted to this trend.
Bethany L. Letiecq, a scholar from George Mason University’s College of Education and Human Development, has just published a new article in JMF entitled, breathlessly, “Theorizing White heteropatriarchal supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the mechanisms that maintain family inequality.”
Of all the problems humans are facing today, who knew this was one of them?
Professor Letiecq contends that “Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family.”
Well, plenty of scholars who are not fundamentalist in anyway, but very mainstream, beg to differ on the goodness and superiority of the married, two-parent, natural family. Just a few examples are here, here, here, here, here, and here for starters.
Yet, professor Letiecq is undaunted.
She asserts that the belief that marriage is very good for humanity belongs in the same nasty bucket of systemic racism itself. To her, the two go together like peas and carrots. She says as much here: “Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy.”
She coins a new phrase for her ideological purposes: “White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs),” as if Black, Asian and Hispanic married intact families do not exist or are wholly different and more wholesome than White families.
It is a very provocative, if baseless, accusation she is making here. But she soldiers on in her lengthy piece, claiming, “I demonstrate how, since colonization, marriage fundamentalism has undergirded the privileging of WHNFs and the perpetual marginalization of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families.”
Does she really expect any intelligent reader to agree with her that the colonists had immigrants, which all of the colonists very much were, and all sexually experimental family forms clearly in their cross hairs when they supposedly founded “marriage fundamentalism” way back when. She ignores the fact that marriage between mothers and fathers is a human universal, existing across all human cultures throughout the ages and human experience.
Anthropologist Donald Brown explains this in his ground-breaking book Human Universals. He demonstrates that it is humanly universal that the family fundamentally orders society and consists, most often, of adult males and females cooperating together in the union of marriage to raise, feed, educate, and socialize the next generation. It is what humanity does, and no society can exist without this essential function.
But Letiecq asserts this very good and essential thing is a very bad thing and drives inequality. She demonstrates her substantial misunderstanding of what family is and does when she claims, “I question a society that espouses the virtues of liberty and justice for all, while coercing some of its citizens to enter into an institution built upon White heteropatriarchal supremacy to gain access to those benefits, rights, and protections.”
Marriage is the institution that creates a better life for all – women, children, men, and society are large – because it coheres the people together who care for one another most. This is true for all classes of people.
This is precisely what the historic Moynihan Report, published in 1965 under the Lyndon Johnson administration, was all about. It stated that Black Americans would never realize the fullness of the American dream as long as their families continued to weaken. And experience of the following decades has only served to support that conclusion. That fact is what additional sociological research from leading mainstream and center left think tanks is all about, as seen here, here, here, here, and here.
Scholars can publish a great deal of extremely helpful material for those who seek to strengthen the family and help all citizens gain a better, healthier, more productive life. We try to highlight as much as that research as we can here at the Daily Citizen.
Unfortunately, this latest offering from the otherwise fine Journal of Marriage and Family is certainly not one of them. They can and should do better.
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