Focus on the Family

Posted on May 4, 2004 in Citizenship Compassion Reading

This ends my thoughts on politics Tuesday.

By family, conservatives think of the parents, the unchallenged power of the Father or other head of the household.

By family, I mean the whole network of relationships: the persons engaged in the marriage and the children who are born to or otherwise placed under the care of the adults in the household. The presence of either one of these suffices to make a family.

In her essay “Somebody’s Baby” Barbara Kingsolver writes:

….airplanes can be a splendid cultural magnifying glass. On my family’s voyage from New York to Madrid we weren’t assigned seats together. I shamelessly begged my neighbor — a forty-something New Yorker traveling alone — if she would take my husband’s aisle seat to another row so our air-weary and plainly miserable daughter could stretch out across her parents’ laps. My fellow traveler snapped, “No, I have to have the window seat, just like you had to have that baby.”


As simply as that, a child with needs (and ears) becam an inconvenient thing for which I was entirely to blame. The remark left me stunned, as always happens when somebody speaks rudely to me, momentarilly guilty: yes, she must be right, conceiving this child was a rash, lunatic moment of selfishness, and now I had better be prepared to pay the price….

here in the U.S. we are blazing a bold downhill path from the high ground of “human collective,” toward the tight little den of “self”. The last time we voted on a school-budget override in Tucson, the newspaper printed scores of letters from readers incensed by the very possibility: “I don’t have kids,” a typical letter writer declared, “so why should I have to pay to educate other people’s offspring?” The budget increase was voted down, the school district progressed from deficient to desparate, and I longed to ask that miserly nonfather just whose offspring he expects to doctor the maladies of his old age.

It’s hard to tell if the woman on the airplane was a feminist or not. An ugly swell in my stomach suggests that she thinks of herself as “pro-choice”. Or perhaps she is one of those selfish-singles who votes Republican for the tax breaks. Her words suggest that she supports only the choice she made.

Family is the beginning of compassion, not the limit. Barbara Kingsolver’s daughter is mine, too. And yours. Let’s act responsibly.

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I add to this a request to Google Bomb: Compassionate Conservatism.