Dividing husbands and wives

Something odd happened the other day. Someone came to our front door. The door was open, but the screen door was shut, and my wife was nearby speaking with our granddaughters and our son and his wife. I was sitting nearby, far enough away to be out of sight but near enough to hear the following: “Is Marla home?” I thought he might be a delivery man with a package for her.

My wife replied, “Yes, that’s me.”

He then informed her that he was canvassing for the Democratic Party and its candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in our district.

This was the first thing that seemed a little odd. For one thing, there’s a sign on the front lawn of our house for the Republican candidate. Then there was the fact that he asked for my wife by name, who is a registered Republican. (Seemingly, I was a nonentity.) Things got even stranger after that when she informed him that she was voting for the opponent, but he didn’t take the hint. Instead, he wanted to debate. At this point, I spoke up, and he finally took notice of me. With a few parting words of self-justification, he finally left.

I’d write this encounter off as the artless political advocacy by an inexperienced and blinkered young man if not for two things: He asked specifically for my wife, and former first lady Michelle Obama is reported to have recently said, “To anyone out there thinking about sitting out this election or voting for Donald Trump. … to the women listening, we have every right to demand that the men in our lives do better by us. We have to use our voices to make these choices clear to the men we love. Our lives are worth more than their anger and disappointment.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that men can make the same demand on women, that we have a right that the women in our lives do better by us. The fact that this didn’t seem to enter Obama’s mind says a great deal. But let’s leave that aside for the moment and examine this from another angle.

It would seem a cliché to say that the left inserts itself between family members if it were not true. Anyone with eyes to see knows that progressives consider the traditional family to be a retrograde and oppressive institution. So, rather than support it, the left seeks to either reform it or replace it. Either way, leftist politics seeks power at its expense, dividing children and parents and wives and husbands.

The solidarity of Christian households is embodied in a conjugal union of a husband and wife, as in “The two shall become one flesh.” This is a union of interests as well as bodies. While husbands and wives should long for children to issue from this union, these couples share a common wealth and a common life even in childless unions.

The radical individualism of the modern world eats away at the marital bond like an acid. And while the Republican Party isn’t faultless in this regard, it is the left, and the Democratic Party in particular, that pursues power at the expense of the bonds of marriage and family. The result isn’t liberation but a new and different form of dependency, one that relies on the administrative welfare state and its vast bureaucracy. The result has not only led to the atrophying of the ties that bind us to each other but also cynicism, suspicion, loneliness, childlessness, and, for many, mental illness.

Politicians from both parties should leave it to husbands and wives to work it out between themselves as to who to support in an election. It should be a private matter, a family matter, even if its effects are public. In our scattering time, political unity should begin at home—and that’s especially true for the Christian home.