DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) – Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of the Ruth Institute,
launched a petition to “Make the
Family Great Again.”
“The president campaigned on the promise to Make America Great Again. But only the family can help him fulfill that promise,” Morse said.
The “Make the Family Great Again” petition urges the newly established Commission on Unalienable Rights,
under the umbrella of the secretary of state, to consider certain fundamental principles the basis for articulating unalienable rights:
- Marriage and the family are universal institutions for the stability of society and the continuation of the human race.
- Children need their mother and father.
- Stable loving families provide the basis for strong societies, including thriving economies, national security and international peace.
Morse argues that the most sustained attacks on the family are not coming from the “culture.” Instead, the government itself has created much of the
anti-family climate, she says.
A case in point, according to Morse, includes the government refusing to enforce the marriage “contract”; no-fault divorce means the government always
takes sides with the partner who wants the marriage the least.
Another includes the government mandating and financing sexual education in public schools which promotes the LGBT ideology, including transgenderism.
She said they are mostly asking President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who launched the Commission on Unalienable Rights,
“to recognize the family’s right to exist” and “to stop actively attacking it.”
The family advocate’s 2018 book, The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why the Church Was Right All Along,
presents a 15-point manifesto for the family.
The first 10 points address things the government should stop doing, including “sex education in public schools,” “taxpayer-funded Women’s Studies
and Gender Studies programs at universities” and “the ‘marriage tax’ from all welfare programs.”
The author argues that the sexual revolution did not just happen but was
deliberately created by “elites” (named in the book), harnessing the power of the state, which allowed them to inflict “three false and calamitous
ideologies — contraception, divorce and gender” that have led to widespread and profound misery.
Overall, Morse maintains that committed
Christians have the best chance of offering the world what it is really looking for.
Pope St. John Paul II, who lost all of his immediate family — mother, older brother, an infant sister and father — by the time he was 20
years old, is sometimes remembered as “Pope of the Family.”
The sainted pope penned a “Letter to Families”
which he said gave him “a welcome opportunity to knock at the door of your home, eager to greet you with deep affection and to spend time with
you.”
To make the family holy again, the Pope wrote, “[T]he question of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is an integral part of the ‘civilization of
love.'”
He argued throughout the letter that, in order to fulfill its missionary mandate, the family has to abandon the view that it is “a victim of the culture”; instead it must see
itself as “a protagonist in its transformation.”
He reminds people they are not defeated and have freedom in Christ to embrace and live the truth of their humanity, a freedom that is neither understood
or experienced in a life of sin.
For the Pope, building “a civilization of love” depends on sacramental living and active commitment of spouses.
Pompeo initiated the Trump administration’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights on July 8.
The commission was created, according to Pompeo, to provide him “with advice on human rights” and to carry out “one of the most profound reexaminations
of the unalienable rights in the world since the 1948 Universal Declaration”
— and one engendered by reference to the “unalienable rights” that “are endowed by the Creator” cited in the Declaration of Independence.
The Ruth Institute is a global interfaith coalition created to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Its resource center provides decades of research and educational tools to support individuals and families harmed by divorce, the hook-up culture and
other forms of family breakdown.
The Rev. D. Paul Sullins, Ph.D., a senior research associate at the Ruth Institute, did a recent study which found that “the spate of child sex abuse in the 1970s and 1980s was strongly related to a concentrated presence of homosexual men in the Catholic priesthood.”
The Ruth Institute’s petition, including notable signers from both inside and outside the United States, can be found online.