Amid “lockdowns,” “shelter-in-place,” “mask wearing” and “social distancing” orders the coronavirus pandemic has been a time of reaffirming the “centrality” of family in our lives.
For utopians of the “radical left”, though, the pandemic is the perfect time to deconstruct “flawed, traditional familial bonds” and remake the world along the lines of “new-and-improved” collectivist possibilities.
Author Sophie Lewis puts it bluntly in a recent opinion piece at Open Democracy: “We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”
Imagine my shock listening to this academic “hydrofeminist” who’s every other word was ah…ah…ah, just like Barack Obama’s if…if…if…if.
The author of “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family”, Sophie Lewis’ academic work “focuses on eugenic, bio-conservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.
Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it’s time to abolish the family,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”
“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an abuser’s dream – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”
And yet as extreme as Sophie Lewis’ anti-family, anti-capitalist animus sounds, everything she proposes is simply “the abolition of capitalism; the abolition of private property; the abolition of traditional kinship; the abolition of literally every single tradition and institution of Western civilization, to be replaced by the enlightened, peaceful, self-regulated structures of communism – just as Karl Marx envisioned.”
Family abolitionists like Lewis are “mainstream Progressives.” What makes them seem “extreme” is simply their unabashed “openness” about their aims.
I swear that a “lot of this stuff” is just people trying to look busy to “keep their jobs.” There is no way you can put those words in that order without trying to “impress” somebody somewhere. Even a mental patient with “206 personalities” couldn’t come up with this crap.
There’s no “nightmare” the Left won’t pursue to achieve its “earthly” paradise.