Family values are under attack in America and threatened by a number of liberal social trends

Our Morgan ancestors had a solid belief in family as the fundamental social unit, which they struggled to preserve. This can be observed in the way family members worked together and stayed together. Most of our Morgan/Radford clan left Utah, went to Wyoming together, and settled near each other in Southeastern Idaho. They were not always successful in their struggle to preserve family. Some families broke up. But the effort and sacrifice they put into family stands as a beacon for us in these more hedonistic times.

At the core of many of our social problems today is the fact that the family is no longer understood to be the foundation upon which an orderly society is built. It is so easy for a society to become distracted by government social programs, psychological theories, utopian ideas, charities, free lunches, and all sorts of do-gooder causes, which have a tendency to mislead us into thinking they provide the answer to constructing and maintaining an orderly, productive, society. While all these are undoubtably of some value, they cannot succeed unless they contribute to the formation, stability, and long term viability of the family.

In support of this argument, note that there are more do-gooder causes and government social programs today than ever existed in the past. But today more than 40 per cent of America's first marriages end in divorce. Cohabitation by unmarried heterosexual couples has risen from 500,000 in 1970 to over 5 million today. Procreation outside of marriage, although the seedbed of millions of individual tragedies and myriad social pathologies, has lost it's stigma and now 33 per cent of births - including about 60 percent of births to women younger than 25 - occur to unmarried mothers. More than 20 per cent of 15 year old girls will become mothers before they are out of their teens. This rapid decline of marriage, the single most important foundational social institution, has occurred during four decades of mostly peace, prosperity and expanding government social programs.

At the root of the social battle for the soul of America today are the differences in philosophy between those who would tear down most of the society previous generations have built in America and replace it with their radical social experiments, and those who would continue to build on and elaborate on the society previous generations have created.

What this comes down to is the difference between liberals and conservatives in America. Two things need to be kept in mind when trying to understand the philosophies of these two opposing camps. (1) America became a great nation through the practice of conservative principles the relied on God, the institution of marriage, and the family, to create strong, moral, responsible individuals. (2) Liberalism in America, in it's drive to remake the society in some utopian image, has drifted dangerously toward anti-Americanism and Communism and away from God, marriage and family. In addition, they have drifted away from the American constitution as they persue their goals through activist judges instead of through votes by representatives of the people. This nation was well founded and the founders intended that social change take place through the representatives who are elected by the people, not through the demands of noisy, law breaking demonstrators and their activist judges who legislate from the bench.

The essence of conservativism is understanding what it is you want to conserve. There are two principles that conservatism is built on. (1) The need to preserve the bedrock instituions that create individual people who are guided by their own moral sense of right and wrong. Otherwise there are not enough laws upon the face of the earth to preserve a prosperous and orderly society that offers the greatest opportunity to every individual. (2) The need to create and maintain a strong, healthy economy. Without a strong, healthy economy societies descend into anarchy, corruption, poverty, war, and disregard for the rule of law as the fundamental protection for the rights of individuals.

Human societies are very complex. The human child requires fifteen to twenty years of protection, nurture, teaching and emotional security to reach maturity and gain the capability to integrate itself into a highly complex world. Buy it's very nature then, this long and difficult process requires a stable home and social environment, which calls, in turn, for a society that changes slowly and thoughtfully. Liberals in America, in their impatience to reach for utopian changes, have pushed America into social experiments that have enormous long term unknown, and potentially dangerous, consequences. The simple wisdom of measured and thoughtful change by building on the known and moving carefully into the unknown is best for the long term survival of the culture because it minimizes the danger of setting off social trends that damage lives and create unsurmountable problems.

And the bottom line for each individual is holding the understanding that individual responsibilities come before individual rights. It is our responsibility to uphold the laws of our country, to raise our families to be good citizens, to give to our employers and associates an honest days work, and to avoid the seductive trap of tapping into the government dole to obtain something that we could provide for ourselves. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has to be paid for by someone. The current campaign to put rights before responsibility in America is a very dangerous trend because it leads to (1) dependency on government, which, in turn, leads to socialism, and (2) it leads to the character weakening practice of blaming others for things that happen to us which, in turn, fattens the trial lawyers and further weakens the sense of personal responsibility in the society.

Click on the link above to be taken to the Morgan Family Pioneer Heritage website with pictures and life histories of the Thomas Morgan families from his wives Ann Ollen Watkins and Nancy Jane Radford.