I feel the same way about the family, in all
of its diverse manifestations, though I worry
about it much less. It too has forces arrayed
against it, not the least of them economic, but
none of those forces seem as formidable and
firmly grounded as the family itself. That I believe families can be a force for good, I have
already said. But even when they stand in the
way of “the good,” retarding progress and diluting idealism, forever threatening to put a
paunch on Che guevara and a breast pump
on Elizabeth gurley Flynn, I find them virtuous. visionaries who coax us to the “larger
embrace” can sometimes squeeze us to death,
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were
born, and what happened before that is myth.
—V. S. Pritchett, 1968
and even if they don’t, you can bet their followers will. It is then that the family, with its
shortsighted loyalties and pedestrian needs,
acts as a brake on ideology’s merciless wheels.
Before the Law and the Prophets, there were
Adam and Eve.
Speaking of marriage in words that also ap-
ply to family, Supreme Court Justice William
o. Douglas wrote that it “is an association that
promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony
in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty,
not commercial or social projects”—including,
one would like to add, the social project of a
constitutional amendment defining marriage
as “the union of a man and a woman.” Douglas
was writing for the majority in Griswold v. Con-
necticut (1965), a landmark decision for repro-
ductive freedom and privacy rights, but he was
also speaking for the Botto family’s prerogative
to tell their twenty thousand comrades when it
was time to go home. It is almost as if Douglas
sees the family as a kind of judiciary in human
affairs, a tribunal that sits for life and from time
to time declares itself constitutionally unable to
abide this or that attempt to legislate happiness.
The image of a nuclear family boisterously self-
absorbed on an extremely cramped and crumby
picnic blanket may not be anybody’s picture of
a flying-carpet ride to paradise, but it is just
about everybody’s best insurance against being
dragged into utopia by the hair.
