While individuals remain the ultimate units within a society, their organization into families is often overlooked, even sacrificed. Human beings are social in nature and depend upon one another for survival. Nowhere else is this more evident than with the upbringing of children. Is it possible that by promoting the rights of some, while sacrificing the right of others, the family unit is suffering?

Journalist Midge Decter thinks so, but that does not mean the end is near. “Because sometimes to tell the truth and we all know it, families can be a royal pain in the neck, but because it is an institution in which the needs of men and women and children are somehow adjudicated and somehow the mode is found in which people can help one another and bring to one another what they need. And in which children know, every child in the family knows that he is vitally important to someone else. And this is something that children really need to know. So, families are absolutely the bedrock of the sense of well-being in this country. So what we have here is a country which is actually very well off. A funny example of this, not so funny, a peculiar example of this is the state of the American economy. It’s booming along and every single day all you can hear are these terrible predictions that any minute now, the country is going to collapse.”

Listen to Decter weave her views through the lenses of feminism, family, and security in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Midge Decter.