Destroying the Family: Swedish Style
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Destroying the Family: Swedish Style
By Eric Brodin
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This article, published in the Washington Inquirer, was excerpted from Eric Brodin's address given to the Eagle Forum's Annual Conference, Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1985. The article is published here with the gracious permission of Mrs Phyllis Schlafly, lawyer, leader of the Eagle Forum - Pro-Family Movement since 1972. |
Some years ago a British journalist returned from Sweden saying: - I have seen the Future and it doesn't work. Despite many evidences of the truth of that o b s e r v a t i o n many Americans - especially those in sociology and related disciplines - help maintain belief in the myth that Sweden's Welfare State is still a model for us and others to emulate.
The family has become the target because it is the solidifying and most effective element for perpetuating those traditional values that often are the only defence posts against the totalitarianizition of our society.
"Legislation," as one government directive puts it, "is one of the most important instruments available to the state to anticipate the desires of the people or to turn the development into new channels.
In Sweden they have included a veritable barrage of legislation in which internal relations within the family and the role of the family within the society and vis-à-vis the government has undergone a radical change. Some of these plans are the following:
(1) Subject the child to compulsory educational programs in sex education, socialisation, and religion which are consciously and with ideological bias intended to counteract the child's values derived from parents within the family.
(2) Deny the parent the right to insight into or control over curricula and textbooks (which may not be brought home). This is particularly true for material which has proved to be effective in values clarification or similar experiments where secular humanism is a raison d'être.
(3) Deny the parent the right to exercise a choice over the education or the schooling of the child by forbidding private or denominationally run schools, this despite Sweden's being signatory to a UN Declaration which provides the parents with the right to alone determine which schooling best fulfils the ethical and religious requirement the parents wish for their children.
(4) Provide a curricula which intentionally ridicules or attempts to change traditional masculine/feminine, boy-girl gender roles by forcing boys to take sewing and girls to take metalcraft.
(5) Pass taxation legislation which penalizes the woman who wishes to stay home and care for children. Deny her tax deduction for child care; deny combined tax filing. Sweden has already removed deductions for children at home.
(6) Encourage the woman to leave the home although minors may be there by incessant propaganda on state-controlled radio and TV against "parasitic mothers". In the interest of equality in the labor market, give cash bonuses to employers who give traditional female jobs to men and mate jobs to women.
(7) Provide collective care for children between ages of six months to seven years, thus providing an opportunity for the state to assume the parental role and provide a neutral and ethically normless environment.
(8) Radicalize sexual instruction, making it available to increasingly younger age groups. Avoid moralizing, as it preserves prejudices and adheres to impossible prohibitions. Teaching the proper use of contraceptives and methods of sexual acts should be encouraged.
(9) The right of the "woman" to the "fruit of her body,"- even if it is a 14-year old girl, should be maintained even if it means that a school nurse's decision in abortion can be performed without the knowledge of the parents or prospective father.
10) The state is the natural protector of the children's best interests. It has the right to determine social or ethical suitability of real parents to keep the children. It can deprive parents of their children without a court case or warrant. It can grant a "divorce" by a 16-ycar-old girl from her family, for example.
(11) Legislation regarding marriage, divorce, and child custody shall be changed to take into consideration shifting moral values. If a divorce is declared due to the adultery of one partner, this must, under no circumstances, have any effect on the courts' determination of who shall have primary right to the children.
(12) In the case of a father's (or mother's) failure to provide the cost of the child's care, this shall be assumed by the state.
(13) In Sweden the state now arrogates to itself the power to be the primary protector of the child. It can determine whether a single, mild form of corporal punishment, verbal chastisement or temporary restriction of the child's activities, constitutes an infringement of the law, by which the parent becomes subject to a jail sentence.
The case of Sweden then should serve us as a warning: it is a model more to be avoided than emulated. Its function must best be to indicate for us where we in America could be ten, twenty years or less from now unless we learn from Sweden's "Future that does not work."
Lawyer, Mrs Siv Westerberg's London lecture
How to control adults by means of children's rights