October 14, 2003, here on slacktivist: The abstract ‘family’
This is a recipe for bad thinking and worse policy. There is no “the family.” There are only families. Policy, like love, cannot have an abstract as its object.
Whenever you hear a politician or pundit talking about “the family,” substitute “American families” and see whether the statement makes any sense in the real world.
Quite often it doesn’t.
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