Tax incentives and a culture that increasingly eschews the value of the traditional family are to blame for the breakdown of the American family, conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly said Friday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"It didn't die automatically," Schlafly said. "When our country was founded we were a country of what they called nuclear families, that is a mom and pop raising their own children in one household and that kind of an institution is really an economic entity. It's able to support itself and make its decisions, but once you break it up you bring the government into the picture and that's what's happened and that's why our welfare spending has just skyrocketed because when a woman is having babies without a husband to be the provider she looks to the government to help her out."
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Pop culture, filled with television shows depicting single-parent families and other influences "putting down and acting like a family isn't important" have eroded the culture and damaged the country economically, she said.
Schlafly tackles the subject in her latest book
"Who Killed The American Family?"
"There are people who say, oh we've just got to deal with the fiscal issues and not worry about the moral and social issues, but what are we spending the money on? We're spending the money on people who are not able to support themselves because they have rejected the nuclear family."
After a period of
welfare reform that required people receiving government assistance to work, President Barack Obama immediately abolished that directive "by the stroke of a pen that he brags about," she said.
The American tax code was revised to incentivize people having children without getting married, she said, in essence having the federal government subsidize the American family.
While parents once were entitled to make decisions "in the best interest of the child," the courts have taken over.
"Somehow in the 1970s' the judges took over that, they redefined it and now it's judges who are deciding what is in the best interest of the child and they don't have any law or scientific backing and it just, they're just ruling by the seat of their pants whatever their preferences are," according to Schlafly.
"The result is just a disaster, but what it means is that the government is making ordinary decisions about what the kid does that ought to be made by the mothers and fathers. We even find, there are even some judges who have decided what church the kid's going to go to or whether the child is allowed to be homeschooled or whether he can play baseball or soccer. Well, these are not decisions for a judge to make. It's the parents who ought to decide what is in the best interest of a child."
Asked by host J.D. Hayworth whether the issue is a bipartisan one, Schlafly responded that "an overwhelming majority of single women, especially with babies, voted for Obama.
"They know that single women are their best and most reliable constituency so it is a political issue in addition to everything else, but it's also a breakdown of our society and we're not going to be able to rebuild a decent society unless we rebuild a family," she said.
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