So Gov. Bill Lee has signed a declaration proclaiming June to be “Nuclear Family Month." The response to the resolution has been what you’d expect. People are rightly seeing this as a metaphorical middle finger to Tennessee’s LGBTQ residents. But y’all, if you just read the headlines and the new name of the month, you are missing some of the most hilariously unhinged stuff I have ever seen someone willing to put their signature on.
It starts out with the expected bullshit: “Whereas, the nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world; and whereas, the nuclear family was the basic building block of Tennessee’s society throughout her formative years ...”
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Can you even imagine the delusional gall it takes to sit in a state built through the enslavement of people talking about how Tennessee was built on one man, one woman and their kids? Gov. Lee, the 1850 and 1860 slave censuses are freely available. They list people’s ages and track whether they’re “mulatto.” Setting aside everything else a discussion of that term would entail, it is direct, bodily evidence of white Tennessee men raping women who are not their wives. We’ve got thousands of people listed on those pages who are embodied proof that the basic building block of Tennessee in its formative years was one husband, one wife, their children, the people they owned (a subset of those people being the people the husband raped) and their offspring.
Next the proclamation launches into how bad it is for kids to grow up in “fatherless families.” It then drags poor Peter Langman into this mess by stating that he found that 82 percent of school shooters were "raised in an unstable family environment." The implication is that Langman’s research shows that most school shooters grew up in “fatherless families.” Unfortunately for this argument, Langman makes his research freely available. I was able to easily find his summary of said research — and let me just say, if you choose to click this link, you’re going to wish that many of these school shooters had grown up in truly fatherless homes. Because you’re going to scroll through pages of “father beat him with belt,” “father beat him with belt, hit him in head with a can, hit him with shoes,” “father threatened to shoot him,” “father admitted to using riding crop in the beatings,” “father blasted six pet cats with shotgun and flung carcasses into tree” and other litanies of evil.
I mean, maybe save the Langman references for a “For the love of God, Get Divorced Month” proclamation.
But even bringing up research that unintentionally makes a convincing case for divorcing your abusive partner is not the unhinged part.
No. For that I give you: "Whereas, Tennessee’s values do not align with the humanistic, globalist ideologies of the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and like-minded organizations that fight for population control through the means of promoting sterilization and abortion practices.”
Sit with that. Just let it sink in. Gov. Lee just signed a proclamation passed by the Tennessee General Assembly positing that we need to protect the nuclear family from the World Health Organization. This is practically gibberish. If your elderly relative started going off about how the World Health Organization was plotting against the nuclear family, you’d just assume it was time to look into memory care. We might as well go ahead and make the tin foil hat the official state hat, because I think it’s plausible that this proclamation is evidence aliens are scrambling the state’s brains.
OK, but let’s be serious about this for a minute. Marriage rates among heterosexuals aren’t declining because of the WHO or the U.N. or lax divorce laws or people hating God or whatever. People want to get married. In the abstract, it’s a great deal. You find someone you think is awesome, and you officially make yourselves a team. Everyone’s burden is lighter with two people carrying it. You can pool money and resources to achieve your goals. When you’re scared or over-tired or sad, you have someone to rest against. Hell, just the benefit of being able to say, “I don’t know what to do,” and having someone give a shit is worth everything. Not to mention the private jokes, the years of shared experience, the just being known deeply by another person. If both parties are all in, it’s great!
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But young people can’t afford to live right now. There aren’t good jobs. Hell, there are barely enough bad jobs to go around. Pay has not kept up with inflation and the cost of living. If you do land a good job just starting out, it still doesn’t mean you can find your own place to live. Have you been out to eat lately? Where are these young people supposed to take each other out on dates, assuming they find a good job and land a place to live? And then, even assuming they’re able to do all this — find a job, find a place to live, find a partner to marry — how are they supposed to be able to afford kids?
In a just world, “Nuclear Family Month” would develop the same ring as “Let them eat cake.” It’s just so out of touch and cruel. One more way in which rich old people remind struggling young people of how the basic good things in life aren’t available to them.
But the insidious part of this symbolic proclamation is how it shifts the responsibility for this sad state of affairs off of the leaders in Tennessee — who have failed to bring in enough good jobs to support the increase in nuclear families they want to see — and onto some amorphous globalist humanist cabal out to get the family.
I mean, honestly. This is the second year Gov. Lee has basically shrugged off any money to help feed children over the summer. Are those the actions of a man who truly gives a shit about encouraging the formation of nuclear families? Of course not.
But as long as you’re blaming the gays or the globalists, you’re not blaming Republicans. So that’s a win for them, and another loss for the nuclear family.
