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Law and the Crisis in the Family
| Article
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18148 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
809 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The developing crisis in the family is the subject of this month's symposium in the Currents in Modern Thought section. Plato's austere concept of family, at least as presented in The Republic, severely devalues the human need for close nonutilitarian human relationships that provide a foundation for mutual parental support and the raising of children. It is probably no accident that children brought up in kibbutzim in Israel lacked strong moral character. The family is a necessity for the development of a desirable human personality, a necessity that is imbedded in our evolutionary development.
That these claims are as surely correct as empirical statements can be, does not mean that the nuclear heterosexual family is the only form of relationship that can satisfy these needs. Various forms of polyandry and polygamy have provided satisfactory matrices for human development in the past. The Torah recognized polygamous relationships. And the Catholic Church authorized polygamous unions after the devastation of the male population in Peru in the Gran Chaco War.
If the Supreme Court were to take its newly generalized doctrine of privacy seriously, it might argue that the laws mandating monogamous unions are unconstitutional. From the standpoint of the abstract way in which the court considers cases, that might be a better claim than that offered in Roe us. Wade for the "right" to abortion. No direct interest is threatened by non-monogamous unions, whereas it is difficult to argue that the fetus is without rights even if one argues that the mother's rights are stronger.
However, so much the worse for a generalized doctrine of privacy.
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