America by Heart

by Sarah Palin

  What the Founders focused their energy on, then, wasn’t a government that sought to control or shape families, but a government that could capitalize on the virtues of trust and self-restraint that families create—a government that could respect and honor good citizens by allowing them to live and prosper in freedom. The Constitution’s relationship to the family, then, was meant to be reciprocal: to depend upon the virtues of family life to make its system of government work, while protecting the freedom of families to create self-governing citizens.

  One of the nation’s foremost experts on the family, Allan Carlson, describes this reciprocal relationship:

  The Founders assumed that most American eyes would be turned toward home, which would provide an ordered society within a regime of liberty . . . Defense of this social order, this society of households, lay with the states and the people. The U.S. Constitution presumed a nation of families and ultimately relied on the spirit behind the Bill of Rights—specifically, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which reserved the rights of the people and the power of the states—as the primary bulwark against social experimentation.

  Our leaders in Washington today have completely abandoned the idea of a government that relies on strong families at the same time that it respects the liberty and rights of these families. When we have government taking over our health care choices and seeking to influence our end-of-life decisions, we have a government that doesn’t respect the sanctity and privacy of families. When we have a government that seeks to tax every aspect of our daily lives in the name of building a “green” economy, we have a government that doesn’t respect the Tenth Amendment and that rides roughshod over the more responsive level of government, our state governments. When we have a government that is spending away our children’s and grandchildren’s patrimony, we have a government that no longer regards us as citizens of a republic, but as subjects of an all-powerful nanny state—which is to say, as children of an all-encompassing, all-wise, all-powerful mother. Our federal government was never intended to become this.

  Families matter. This was something that our Founders took for granted, but it’s a truth we commonsense conservatives are increasingly forced to defend these days. And it’s a case we’re having to build in our writing and our governing as we go along. After all, the damage done to the American family by widespread divorce and children without fathers is relatively recent in our history. It was the mid-1960s before divorce and single motherhood really began to take off in the United States. And it was another twenty years before the country really began to feel the effects of the decline of the family in rising crime rates, drug abuse, and long-term welfare dependency.

  I thought of this as I, along with so many Americans, watched the horrific images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005. Here was a failure of government on all levels—local, state, and federal. At a time of their greatest need—a violent and ruthless act of Mother Nature—government failed the citizens of New Orleans at the most basic level.

  But Hurricane Katrina revealed something other than government incompetence. It revealed a population of Americans dependent on government and incapacitated by the destruction of the American family. The victims of Hurricane Katrina we saw huddled at the Superdome were overwhelmingly poor and minority. The hurricane set off a national debate—or, more accurately, a spasm of national finger-pointing—about the reasons for their plight. A lot of the usual suspects immediately cried racism, but that knee-jerk reaction overlooked a few relevant and alarming facts. In a nation in which an astonishing 70 percent of African American babies were being born to single women in 2004, fatherlessness among poor African Americans in New Orleans was estimated at between 60 and 80 percent. In New Orleans, as in so many American cities, this lack of fathers translated into high crime rates (New Orleans’s murder rate was four times the average for similar-sized cities in the year before Katrina), rampant drug abuse, educational failure, and chronic welfare dependency.

  After Katrina there was a lot of shouting that the victims of the hurricane were actually victims of George Bush, racism, or both. I remember when Kanye West declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” during a nationally televised concert for the victims. Although the residents of New Orleans were impacted the most, Americans all along the Gulf Coast were victimized by Hurricane Katrina. And yet those in New Orleans seemed to be the most vulnerable. They all had the same federal government and the same president. What was the difference?

  In many cases, the difference was strong, intact families—the families our Founders deemed essential to the success of our republic. The problems that would ensue when the American family began to break down could have been foreseen, and were foreseen by some discerning critics—some of whom were liberals. But the Washington elite and a pack of liberal journalists demonized anyone who tried to call attention to the problem. Forty-five years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Johnson administration Labor Department official, issued a famous report warning of the impact on African Americans from the rise of out-of-wedlock births. For daring to declare that “the richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life,” Moynihan was savaged by Washington liberals and accused of racism and blaming the victim.

  Standing up for the family wasn’t fashionable then and it is even less fashionable now. Many of us remember one of the early and epic clashes of the American heartland versus Hollywood over the role of the American family.

  It was May 1992, and thirty-eight million Americans watched as a fictional television journalist named Murphy Brown, finding herself over forty, divorced, and pregnant, decided to have the child alone. Without the baby’s father. On prime-time television.

  The day after Murphy Brown’s baby was delivered on television sets across the nation, Vice-President Dan Quayle devoted thirty-eight words in a three-thousand-plus-word speech to criticizing the sit-com. Speaking about moral decay in America, Vice-President Quayle expressed his opinion by saying, “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ”

  It just so happened that 1992 was an election year, and the vice-president’s comments unleashed a torrent of criticism from the Clinton campaign and an avalanche of scorn and ridicule from Hollywood. Hillary Clinton, then the wife of the Democratic presidential contender, panned Quayle as typical of “an administration out of touch with America.” Quayle was savaged by the media, and he became the butt of countless jokes by late-night comics. He was dismissed as an airhead, a bigot, and—worst of all for Hollywood liberals—a prude.

  I remember the Emmy Awards that summer, when Candice Bergen won for her portrayal of Murphy Brown. The show’s producer, Diane English, revealed the sit-com’s partisan agenda when she said, “As Murphy herself said, ‘I couldn’t possibly do a worse job raising my kid alone than the Reagans did with theirs.’ ” Classy.

  The Murphy Brown debacle effectively ended Quayle’s hope of succeeding George H. W. Bush as president. But from the perspective of eighteen years later, his defense of families with fathers looks prophetic. And in fact it was only a few years later that The Atlantic Monthly published a controversial cover story titled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” What we’ve learned since—and what Hollywood is still having trouble accepting—is that families matter and fathers do matter. The left wants us to believe that any grouping we choose to call a family is worthy of the name, that it doesn’t matter if children are raised by two loving parents or are shipped off to virtual full-time day care, and that divorce has no effect on children’s quality of life. But we now know that commonsense objections to these radical ideas are not based on close-minded prejudice. When it comes to raising good citizens, all “lifestyle choices” are not equal.


  A fellow advocate of supporting and strengthening American families sent me an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal by political scientist and author James Q. Wilson. Writing about the time of the tenth anniversary of Quayle’s infamous Murphy Brown speech, Wilson commented on the effects of fatherlessness on children—and the utility of looking backward to human experience rather than forward to grand “progressive” political theory—when it comes to the family:

  In our prosperous nation, there exist communities dominated by gangs, criminality, and drug sales. In every big city, a rising murder rate is usually associated with struggles between gangs and among young men. These neighborhoods are the scene of drive-by shootings that often take innocent victims . . .

  Everyone knows these facts, and many public officials struggle to cope by designing new police strategies, mounting campaigns to improve education or supply jobs, or supporting church and other groups that struggle to cope with the problem. But it is far from clear that better policing and education, or more jobs, will produce any fundamental changes. Many people have argued, rightly, that the core problem is the weakness of families. Two-parent families do some obvious things. They provide more people to watch over and care for children, and they supply male role models for young boys. And these are not mere conservative shibboleths. . . .

  The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if their mother had acquired a stepfather. Fill-in dads do not improve matters any more than do fatter government checks.

  Family disorganization is more important than either race or income in explaining violent crime. . . . The sociologist Robert Sampson has shown that in poor neighborhoods the rate of violent crime is much more strongly correlated with family disorganization than it is with race. William Galston, once an assistant to President Clinton, put the matter simply. To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are twenty years old. Only 8 percent of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79 percent will be poor.

  The central question, then, becomes a search for the reasons that families are weak. In my judgment, they are weak in large measure because of broad, long-lasting cultural changes in Western society, changes that for blacks were made even worse by the legacy of slavery. Westerners have sought personal emancipation, at first from kings and bishops, then from social pressures and customary expectations, and now from familial obligations . . .

  Looking backward makes the importance of families obvious. Looking forward makes families look like an outmoded television sketch—Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet. To many Americans who look backward—conservatives, in the main—maintaining the family, albeit one with some changed human dimensions (such as greater freedom for women), is vitally important. To many who look forward, the family is much less important than female emancipation, personal self-expression, and economic careers. Much the same thing could be said about learning, civility, respect, and patriotism. They constitute reasonable and time-tested barriers within which our desire for self-expression can operate.

  In this country, looking backward at fundamental human affairs has another great advantage: It reminds many of us of the greatness of our country. And for some people, looking forward is a way of showing how unhappy they are with that country.

  What was ridiculed when Dan Quayle said it in 1992 (perhaps because Dan Quayle said it) is now the conventional wisdom. Two-parent families do matter when it comes to raising kids to be happy and productive citizens. Does that mean we turn our backs on girls and women who find themselves pregnant with no man in their lives? Of course not. I would be the last person to advocate that. I know the pain and challenges that accompany your wonderful, smart, “it-could-never-happen-to-her” seventeen-year-old daughter telling you she is pregnant. I stood on the stage of the Republican National Convention in 2008 with the world looking at Bristol’s baby bump under a spotlight that unfortunately created opportunity for critics to try to condemn and embarrass her; I know that feeling. We’ve welcomed Bristol’s son Tripp into our lives with open arms. He is beautiful, and things are working out. But Bristol has paid a price—a high price. Her adolescence ended long before it should have. Her days of carefree hanging out with friends, playing sports, and studying leisurely are over—and she’s making sure other girls know it. That’s why she’s out there, speaking up about her experience and telling other young girls, “Don’t do what I did.”

  Bristol has boldly and publicly acknowledged in ads for the Candie’s Foundation that abstinence is the only surefire way of preventing pregnancy. And for this, she has been accused of being a hypocrite. But to those critics I say this: Which is the more courageous course for a young, single mother: to sit down and shut up and avoid the critics, or to speak out in a painfully honest way about how tough single parenting is? I’m biased, of course, but given a choice of role models between Bristol and Murphy Brown, I choose Bristol.

  As I mentioned, I tend to mark time in terms of my family. In the last couple years, Todd has been busy building his airplane hangar and gaining more miles in his small bush plane so he can upgrade the aircraft to keep up with the size of our family. He built me an office and studio in his shop, so it’s a one-stop shop for us.

  Track took over our commercial fishing operation this summer upon his return from active duty, and helped document the amazing resources and people in Alaska for The Learning Channel’s documentary on the Last Frontier. He is now attending flight school.

  Bristol works full time for a doctor in Anchorage and is also a full-time mom. She travels with an aunt or cousin for an occasional speaking engagement and recently moved from Anchorage back to Wasilla so we could help more with Tripp, and she engaged in an uplifting, family-oriented show called Dancing with the Stars to challenge herself in a new, fun way.

  Willow has been busy traveling with me, practicing for her driver’s test, and babysitting the babies. She spent her Sweet Sixteen birthday party putting up fish in Bristol Bay with her great-grandmother. We had five generations together in Dillingham.

  Piper is still my sidekick. I love traveling with her, but she’s been wanting to stay closer to home these days so she can go to dance camp, basketball camp, and vacation Bible school; be a tutor in math; and conveniently and obsessively ride her bike up and down our newly paved driveway.

  Trig has become an adorable toddler who loves to wrestle and be outside or in Todd’s shop. He likes the echo chamber that is the airplane hangar. He rides with us on the four-wheelers and jogs with me in the baby jogger. He’s most comforted and content when someone’s reading him a book; he can sit for hours looking at his books. He spends a few hours a day at the house of my friend, who has ducks and chickens and cows. He’s healthy, and a very happy baby, rowdy and wild, just the way we like ’em!

  But while my family has been busy growing and developing, America and the American family have been under almost continuous assault. We didn’t want it, couldn’t afford it, and it made no sense, but Washington passed Obamacare anyway, raising our bills and limiting our freedom of choice in dealing with one of our most precious assets: our families’ health.

  Breadwinners are out of work or fearful of losing the work they do have. Washington’s answer is to tax and borrow and spend our way out of our problems. It hasn’t worked, but they just keep proposing big new programs with giant price tags, digging us deeper into debt—and sticking our kids with the bill.

  And as all this has happened, I’ve noticed something: at the same time they are busy downplaying the importance of the traditional family, liberals are busy justifying expanding government
in the name of “the children.” Invoking “the children” is a lot like introducing race into a conversation: it shuts discussion down. Anything and everything is justified in the name of “the children.” It’s quite convenient.

  What’s more, liberals often seek to blur the distinctions between our own and other people’s children. I have heard liberals claim that we “have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t any such thing as someone else’s child.” But this is madness. How can we know what it means to care about any children until we first fulfill our obligations to our own? To be responsible to “all children” is to be responsible for none; instead, it is to call for the creation of a suffocating state that erases all freedom and human attachment in the name of caring for “the children.”

  As a person of faith, I truly believe we have an obligation to the children—all children. But as Reverend Bill Banuchi of the Marriage and Family Savers Institute reminds us, we are given this obligation as free human beings, not as subjects ordered by an all-powerful government.

  Jesus’ teachings called for “healing the sick,” caring for the “least of these,” caring for widows and orphans, and generally, caring for any disadvantaged persons who need help. This is the Biblical imperative. But there is a fundamental truth that cannot be overlooked without missing the whole point of Christ’s message: These instructions were addressed to free people, not to governing bodies. Jesus didn’t say, “Be faithful in your payment of taxes to Caesar so that Caesar can care for the sick.” He always addressed the people, because it was the responsibility of individuals to act out of genuine care and concern for others, not the responsibility of an impersonal government body.