Last week was a bad week for the American family. The Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Skrmetti to allow a Tennessee law that bans puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-affirming surgeries for transgender minors. Meanwhile in Georgia, doctors delivered Adriana Smith’s son via an emergency C-section. The 30-year-old mother had been declared brain dead after suffering multiple brain bleeds, but doctors at Emory University Hospital had kept her alive on ventilators since early February, against the wishes of her family, because they feared that removing her from life support would violate Georgia’s highly restrictive abortion law.
While Georgia’s Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, claimed in May that the state’s law did not require pregnant women to be kept on life support, hospital officials insisted that the legal ambiguity left them with no choice. And other elected Republicans seem far less certain than Carr about what the law intends. State Senator Ed Setzler, who sponsored the bill Emory cited in its decision, said in a statement to a local television station, “I’m thankful that the hospital recognizes the full value of the small human life living inside of this regrettably dying young mother.… I would be thankful if the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act played a small part in … allowing at least one of the two lives now hanging in the balance to be saved.”
Because of the rhetoric of the culture wars, we have grown accustomed to seeing both the opposition to legal abortion and to gender-affirming care for minors as a conservative position, the views of those who advocate for the “traditional” family. As a result, we might be unfazed by these recent events. But that would be a mistake. These two incidents reveal how removed the MAGA camp is from the “family values” Republicans of the 1980s and 1990s. The authoritarian right is taking aim at the family and advocating for a level of state control over our private lives that would make the most committed Marxist blush.
Progressives are right to see the Skrmetti ruling and the Georgia hospital’s decision as attacks on autonomy, but that is only part of the story. The minor plaintiffs in Skrmetti do not possess full legal autonomy, and neither did Adriana Smith. So the question in both cases was about who should be allowed to make decisions for them. Historically, it has been the assumption of Anglo-American law that in such cases, a member of the person’s family should stand as that person’s representative in all matters from property to medical decisions. Hence the idea of next of kin. Practically speaking, this is one of the most important functions of the family, and it grows from a basic understanding of what family is. From Ancient Greece to the modern age, conservatives have assumed the family to be the first, natural, and primary organizing block of society, with a claim on us as individuals that supersedes that of the state.
This is the moral of Sophocles’s Antigone, in which the titular heroine defies the edict of the tyrant Creon (symbolic of state power) in order to bury her brother Polynices, in obedience to the primordial laws of kinship. It is why Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher (most famous for his opposition to Caesar’s rise) who was hardly a radical, wrote, “The first bond of society is in marriage itself; the next in children; then a single household with all things in common. And that is the beginning of the city and, as it were, the seedbed of the republic.” And it is why Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, opposed the French Revolution, declaring, “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it.”
But this is not the view of men like Ed Setzler. In his statement about Adriana Smith, the state senator said, “Mindful and respectful of the deep pain of this young mother’s family, the wisdom of modern medical science to be able to save the life of her unborn child is something that I am hopeful in future years will lead to great joy.” Of course, he’s not really just talking about the “wisdom” of modern medicine but the opinion of Emory’s doctors and lawyers, not to mention the law he helped create. And he is saying that these opinions—this wisdom, if you would prefer—should be substituted for the family’s authority and wisdom. He is saying that the state decides what kind of medical care your child receives. The state decides whether your brain-dead wife remains hooked to machines.
He’s not alone. Again and again, MAGA authoritarians have been willing to invoke the power of the family when it can be leveraged to their own ends, but are quick to override that power when it cannot.
So on the one hand, Republicans claim in their party platform to “promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents.” But their actions betray their rhetoric: There is a GOP campaign in statehouses around the country to pass laws requiring schools and teachers to out gay and trans students to their parents, an effort most assuredly aimed at terrorizing queer children with unsupportive families. This is not about a parent’s right to know but an effort to deputize parents in the state’s campaign against their children. Because when the family stands as a barrier to Republicans’ imposing their draconian will, they have proved more than willing to ignore parental authority. For example, what could be more transparent (and frankly silly) an interference with a parent’s right to direct her child’s education than banning drag story hours?
The MAGA movement, it turns out, is essentially anti-family—and not just in the anti-LGBTQ way that the “Free Mom Hugs” crowd worries about. It is important to remember that in many ways the new American authoritarianism has risen out of the collapse of the family within certain parts of society. Across huge tracts of Middle America, poor and working-class Americans have seen the family disintegrate as a stable institution. Poor and working-class people are less likely to marry and more likely to divorce than their middle- and upper-class counterparts. Not only do they have more children outside of marriage, but single mothers among the working class are better off staying that way. (Maybe that’s why single moms will be the hardest hit by the GOP’s planned budget cuts.)
The vice president himself is a product of this culture of familial failure. Let’s not forget, one of the most shocking facts of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir that elevated JD Vance to the national zeitgeist, is the casual domestic violence among Memaw and Papaw, the would-be heroes of the story and the stable adults in his life. Is it a surprise, then, that this movement doesn’t exactly trust families to protect the vulnerable when their families are often so fraught with violence, instability, and addiction?
It is a position that, though understandable, is not defensible. While it is true that individual freedom underlies the modern tradition of liberty, the state’s deference to the family has much older roots and in the modern context has served as a safeguard to personal liberty. It is the sole assurance that even when we are unable to act for ourselves, it will not be the state that acts in our place but those who know and love us.
What we are witnessing is not the preservation of tradition but its perversion. The American right has long claimed to defend the family as a sacred institution. Now it is dismantling the very legal and moral principles that made that claim coherent. No amount of “family values” rhetoric can hide the fact that what MAGA authoritarians seek is a society not founded upon the bounds of kinship, but constructed by the power of the state. If we are to preserve both liberty and the family, we must learn to tell the difference.
