Kiss the family good-bye.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Use of concepts with negative connotations; development of a left-wing policy that reflects Americans' beliefs - Class Notes - Column

Let's forget about the family. It's one of those concepts the left has been harping on for some time, without getting anywhere. I'm proposing a list of such terms that, as tar as I'm concerned, the right can have.

My main group of what we might call negative keywords includes the following: "family," "community," "neighborhood," "grassroots," "empowerment," "the people."

"Family" heads the list because it is both the most seductive and the most insidious. The seductiveness makes sense - after all, who actually opposes the idea of family? We're all aware that the right looks to demonize us as a fringe element of freaks, alien from and hostile to the values of a supposed mainstream. Pointing out that we have families counters the image of the left as rootless kooks or demons. So the temptation to try to "take the family back" from the conservatives is powerful.

The desire to make a left program symbolically consonant with "ordinary" Americans' attitudes isn't new. It's what prompted Eastern European immigrant Communists in the 1920s and 1930s to adopt "American" surnames. It also has undergirded a lot of sectarian groups' fetishes for stereotypes of working-class behavior - beer-drinking, homophobic, macho style. And, as comes through most clearly among defectors from the Democratic Party's liberal wing, it's a slippery slope.

There are two main problems with the "take back the family" stratagem. First, the "family" in American political debate still means the patriarchal, nuclear household. So we must load cumbersome qualifications onto family imagery. We have to point out, for instance, that by "family" we mean any set of individuals who understand themselves to be committed to one another in a primary, durable way. We have to do that, rightly, to make clear that we don't want to diminish the legitimacy of a wide variety of nonheterosexual, nonnuclear household arrangements.

It's certainly necessary to combat the use of family rhetoric, which the right uses as a weapon against anyone who doesn't conform to conservative patriarchal ideals. Contesting for ownership of a label whose popular usage is saturated with evocations of a narrow, conservative moralism, however, is not obviously the most effective way to do battle. The real issue, after all, isn't whether "families," by whatever reckoning, are suffering or being undermined by rightwing policy initiatives. It's that the right's program impoverishes and otherwise endangers large numbers...