**Previously Recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // October 2014**
When former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was being groomed to run for President, he made the foolish statement that the next President should call a truce on the so-called social issues. However, Americans do not want a leader who is unable or unwilling to articulate and lead on important social issues.
Four years after Daniel’s mistake, many have failed to learn that lesson.
The New York Times now proclaims that the libertarian moment has arrived, meaning libertarian ideas about marriage and the family. We hear many people say the libertarian view is to get the government completely out of marriage.
But where did that idea come from? It’s not found in works of classic libertarian writers.
Frederick Hayek’s book called The Road to Serfdom, is a major source of libertarian thought. Yet neither this nor any of Hayek’s later works questioned the value or necessity of civil marriage in a free society. Even radical libertarian Murray Rothbard, who wanted to privatize nearly everything, never suggested privatizing marriage.
Famous novelist Ayn Rand, whose works attacked conventional beliefs like Christianity, never questioned the necessity of civil marriage defined by law. Nothing in their writings suggest that regulation of marriage is somehow inconsistent with individual freedom. None of those famous libertarians wanted to abolish civil marriage.
So where do these anti-family ideas come from? They come from Karl Marx and writers on the left. Karl Marx hated what he called the bourgeois family. If communism is to succeed, Marx wrote, the bourgeois family must be destroyed. As conservatives seek new leaders, let’s insist that our candidates recognize that marriage and the nuclear family are the essential foundation for a free and prosperous society with limited government.
