Democrats pay political price for war on families
The media fixate on the gender gap while ignoring the family gap. The latter is one more sign of the Democrats’ decline.
This year, President-elect Donald Trump won voters with minor children living at home by a 9-point margin – 53% to 44%. In 2020, 52% of these voters backed President Biden.
All of the hot-button issues in the 2024 campaign affected families. The cost of food, transportation and housing increased from 22% to 50% in the past four years. Monthly mortgage payments are up 89%. Many young families can only dream of buying a home of their own.
The Democrats’ open border – 11 million unvetted aliens, including gang members – has taken a horrific toll on families across the country.
Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan who entered the country illegally, was just convicted of the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. In Texas, two illegal aliens are charged with murder, sexual assault and kidnapping in the death of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.
The Democratic governors of New York, Illinois and California have vowed to resist Mr. Trump’s plan to deport criminal aliens. That’s how much they care about America’s families.
Families nationwide suffer from “woke” policies. Breaking ranks with his party, Rep. Seth Moulton, Massachusetts Democrat, said he didn’t want to see his daughters run over on the playing field by boys on girls’ teams.
In 2022, 17-year-old volleyball player Payton McNabb was hit in the face so hard by a ball spiked by a biological male that she suffered partial paralysis.
The 2021 Virginia governor’s race put the war on the family center stage. In Loudoun County, Virginia, parents protested sexually explicit material in school libraries and transgender policies.
A man was arrested at a school board meeting for an outburst over the 2021 assault of his daughter, a ninth grader, in a girls’ restroom at school by a boy wearing a skirt.
Following a request by the National School Boards Association, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the FBI to investigate dissenting parents as domestic terrorism threats.
In a starkly revealing moment, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe – a Democrat running for the office again in 2021 – declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
In other words, parents are to provide the funds for public education, surrender their children for indoctrination and keep their mouths shut.
Families were so appalled by his comment that Mr. McAuliffe was defeated that November by political neophyte Glenn Youngkin, who ran on a parental rights platform.
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, the father of three, said the Democratic Party’s leadership is made up of “childless cat ladies” who have no stake in the future. Vice President Kamala Harris has two stepchildren but no biological children.
While they spurn procreation, progressives have a burning desire to control the education and upbringing of your children.
They’ll help your minor daughter get an abortion without your knowledge or consent. If your adolescent son thinks he’s really a girl, they’ll help him transition.
“The left has become explicitly anti-child and anti-family,” Mr. Vance said. “They’ve encouraged young families not to have children at all, because of concerns over climate change,” despite coming depopulation because of rapidly falling fertility.
In 2018, a feminist writing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. declared, “Procreation is becoming a public health concern, rather than a personal decision.” Climate totalitarians think they can get away with anything by calling it a public health concern.
The left’s war on families dates back to Karl Marx.
In “The Communist Manifesto” (1848), Marx and co-author Friedrich Engels called for the abolition of the “bourgeois family,” which they asserted was based on the subjugation of women and children, comparable to capitalist exploitation of labor.
Revolutionary movements have embraced this doctrine as a core principle. Black Lives Matter proclaims, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights described the family as “the fundamental group unit of society” and as such “entitled to protection by society and the state.” As president, Barack Obama tried repeatedly to have this language repealed.
If the U.N.’s 1948 definition of the family were in a resolution before Congress today, how many Democrats would subscribe to the language, which would probably be denounced as heterosexist and hateful?
Families with minor children are the future. Their move to the GOP shows which party is on the side of history.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.