American historian and social critic, known for his influential works like "The Culture of Narcissism" and "The True and Only Heaven."
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.