During the 1976 presidential campaign, candidate Jimmy Carter hatched some chickens that have now come home to roost. After he had been caught talking out of both sides of his mouth on abortion, he tried to defuse that issue by talking about the breakdown of the family and promising to convene a White House Conference to discuss the family.
Four years later, all the depressing statistics about family breakdown are considerably worse, and the White House Conference, which will take place in three installments starting June 5 (in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles), has had a shaky takeoff and seems headed for a crash landing. One Administration official admitted to the Wall Street Journal: “We wish the whole thing would go away. It’s been a nightmare.”
The word has gotten around that the original name of the event, White House Conference on the Family, was changed to White House Conference on Families so that it would not appear to be advocating any one particular lifestyle. The inferences that can be drawn from that have been exacerbated by the various definitions of a family which are bandied about in conference circles such as the one proposed by the American Home Economics Association: “two or more persons who share … commitments … regardless of blood, legal ties, adoption, or marriage.”
The President appointed a national advisory committee which followed the peculiar pattern of previous commissions on social issues such as those on International Women’s Year and on International Year of the Child: a broad balancing of geographic, racial, sex and age factors to “cover” the narrow selectivity of appointees whose ideology ranges from liberal to far left.
Something called the “Coalition for the White House Conference” established itself as a nongovernmental group to guide the White House Conference on Families and is apparently a powerful force behind the conference. It is primarily made up of social service organizations, but it includes such anti-family groups as the National Gay Task Force, Zero Population Growth, Planned Parenthood, the National Alliance for Optional Parenthood, and the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.
The executive director of the federally-funded White House Conference on Families is John Carr, who has a long record as a left-wing social activist and is a board member of the Americans for Democratic Action. The ADA is committed to abortion on demand, homosexual rights, and federal control of health, housing, education, and the economy.
The fifty state WHCF conferences which took place this spring were designed to give the appearance of grassroots participation by electing some delegates to the three national conferences in the summer. However, the delegate selection process was rigged so that a maximum of 30 percent of the delegates could be elected, while the other 70 percent were appointed by Governors or by steering committees made up of government employees and social services personnel who have a vested interest in the results.
Even the election of the 30 percent was rigged in such a way as to make a farce of the election process. In some states, the professional staff selected those who were permitted to vote. In other states, the professional staff selected all the candidates who could appear on the ballot. It is easy to “win” an election if you can choose the voters or the candidates.
After the elections were over, the national WHCF staff appointed several hundred delegates at large in order to make sure they control the overwhelming majority. The WHCF staff even presumed to appoint delegates to represent the states of Alabama and Indiana after their Governors withdrew those states from the White House Conference.
The national WHCF conferences will not be conducted according to democratic procedures or any recognized rules. Delegates will be arbitrarily dispersed to workshops at which “facilitators” skilled in the tactics of producing an artificial “consensus” by group dynamics will guide the delegates into supporting proposals that the federal government solve all their family problems.
Meanwhile, the “alternate lifestyle” advocates will be promoting a new definition of the family in order to give social dignity and governmental recognition to immoral living arrangements. This charade just proves the folly of putting three million federal tax dollars at the disposal of what Senator Gordon Humphrey calls “the social service bureaucrats and assorted counterculture zealots.”
