First Things RSS Feed - David Wagner https://www.firstthings.com/author/david-wagner en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:51:53 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/david-wagner 60 The Family and the Constitution https://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/08/the-family-and-the-constitution https://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/08/the-family-and-the-constitution Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 -0400 The family occupies a precarious position in the liberal democracies of today. It still exists; it sometime flourishes; mainstream public policy experts are rediscovering its importance—but at the same time, it is under ideological assault, sometimes in the name of individualism, sometimes in the name of an ill-defined “community” whose agent is, naturally, the state. In the face of this assault, defenders of the family find that there is, in fact, an imperfect fit between the individualism that underlies contemporary moral discussion, and the quintessentially interpersonal nature of the family.

We did not get into this predicament by accident. Mary Ann Glendon, in The Transformation of Family Law , identifies the ideological wellspring of the present assault on the family:

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