Like lots of moms, I have a tendency to mark time in terms of my family. When was I last in Ohio? That was with Piper, when she lost a top tooth. September 2008? That was when Track deployed for Iraq, and I experienced my first month on the campaign trail with John McCain. And the early spring of that same year? That was when we were working in Juneau on the Alaska natural gas pipeline, and our precious son Trig came into our lives.
My family is my true north. Todd; Track; Bristol; Willow; Piper; Trig; my grandson, Tripp; my mom and dad; Todd’s folks—they are what keep me sane, grounded, and focused on the future. They make all the bad stuff worth it and all the good stuff twice as good. I can’t imagine what I would do without them.
For me, the rule is put your family first, because our families are the most loyal friends and greatest blessings we have in life. I was blessed to grow up in a great family that was—and is—a tight-knit group. I’ve always known they have my back, that if I tried and failed, they’d be there to pick me up, and if I tried and succeeded, well, they’d be there to keep me down to earth.
When I was a kid, my family’s idea of a great vacation was to hike the Chilkoot Trail, the rugged thirty-three-mile path between southeast Alaska and British Columbia that the pioneers used to travel to seek their fortune back when we were just a territory. My parents wanted us to sense the history and pioneering work ethic in this part of America’s Last Frontier. We hiked the rugged, rocky terrain to see that history and to experience the rustic rain forest beauty. A sheep hunt nearby would be incorporated into the Southeast Alaska vacation, too.
It was on these trips that I learned about the unique mixture of sacrifice and reward that is family. We were too small to carry our week’s worth of outdoor gear and food on our own backs, so Dad did it all. He so wanted us to concentrate on what surrounded us that he carried literal and figurative burdens on his back, sacrificing his own comfort for his kids’. It occurred to me, while atop the peak of the famous Chilkoot Pass, looking down at the jagged black rocks we’d still need to conquer to get to the other side, that Dad had five sleeping bags on his back, both tents, most of the food, and the emergency gear, all packed in, on, under, and through his backpack. Mom carried most of the rest. We kids had our own backpacks with, no doubt, minimal weight to slow us down. Dad didn’t say a word about carrying the extra weight. All week he and Mom exercised this cumbersome commitment to our comfort, while sacrificing their own. So now, even in little things—such as packing the diaper bag that seems to have been banging against my thigh for more than twenty straight years now without many breaks, or lugging around bulky car seats while exchanging them from one rig to another, or packing the 4,000th peanut butter sandwich in the 4,000th brown paper lunch sack—it helps to picture Mom and Dad with their bulging backpacks, mile after mile on the Chilkoot, carrying a heavy load for their family.
Self-described feminists talk a lot about how family and children hold women back and limit their professional choices. Betty Friedan memorably called the family a “comfortable concentration camp.” And of course there was the famous rallying cry “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
But in my case, precisely the opposite is true. First of all, family isn’t just whom you’re born to. Family is whom you choose. And I lucked out when I met Todd Palin. He has been a partner to me in every conceivable way—in life, in love, and in doing battle with the New York Times. He is a wonderful father, a wise adviser, and the love of my life. Yes, I was fortunate to have met Todd. If you want to get anything done in this life, it’s helpful to have a First Dude.
Secondly, far from holding me back, my family is my main motivation. It’s the source of my energy as well as my optimism about America. During the vice-presidential campaign, people would ask me how I could expect to balance it all if we won the White House. I thought, They really don’t get it. I don’t balance anything. We do it together. And if we’d won, we would have done the White House like we do everything else: as a team. And, by the way, Ms. Reporter, I assume you’re asking all male candidates this same question.
Having a family gives you a gift that you might not recognize at first. It teaches you that the sun doesn’t rise and set around you. It forces you to realize something that will take you far in life, if you let it: It’s not about you. In our house, we pitch in and help each other out. Whether it’s work, or school, or sports, or competing in the Iron Dog snow machine race, it’s a family goal. If it’s important to one of us it’s important to all of us. And if it challenges one of us, it gets support from all of us.
As I travel around the country I see that everyone is battling something. Everyone has challenges and trials, and I can only imagine it is the very bored and unfulfilled person who describes herself as challenge-free. In fact, I find it suspicious to encounter someone who can passively consider him- or herself completely secure and comfortable. Not only do I think that’s not true, but also I think that not facing our challenges limits us. There’s no inspiration, energy, or ambition to grow when your head is in the sand. The Palin family is no different from others. We’ve had our challenges, but we’ve tackled them head-on, together, and we’ve ended up stronger for it.
When my then-seventeen-year-old daughter dropped the bomb on Todd and me with her announcement that her adolescence had been prematurely halted and, in most unfortunate circumstances, she was going to have a baby, our little world stopped spinning momentarily.
Bristol was a “good girl,” and this wasn’t supposed to happen. She was supposed to be playing basketball, chairing the Junior Prom Committee, and getting good grades while working in the local coffee shop. And she was doing all that, thankfully, so she would be too busy for anything else—or so I deluded myself.
I was in Alaska’s capital city, Juneau, during my oldest daughter’s junior year of high school. Preoccupied with the enormous job of being governor of the nation’s largest state, juggling schedules around Todd’s job fifteen hundred miles away in the North Slope oil fields, saluting (and worrying about) our son’s decision to enlist as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, and busy with our younger kids while wrapping my arms around the fact that we’d soon be joined by our newest family member, Trig, I assumed that Bristol was making only wise decisions while staying with my sister in Anchorage. I kick myself to this day for my selfish assumption. I made a mistake.
The night our beautiful, perfect, precious grandson, Tripp Easton Mitchell, came into the world was a cold one, as December nights in Alaska typically are. Because the new father wasn’t there until the end of Bristol’s labor, I helped deliver Tripp. And as I cut the cord between my daughter and her son, I was overwhelmed with warmth and wonder. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, but at the same time I knew it all should have been happening ten years from then. A contradiction? Perhaps. But Tripp is a dream; he’s the most beautiful baby I have ever seen.
It didn’t take long after that magical night, however, for both new parents to realize how much work—and how little fun—teenage parenting is. But my strong, beautiful Bristol reacted in a way that made me proud. She went to college. And worked full time. And took care of a needy, colicky baby through many, many sleepless nights, doctor’s appointments, and lonely, cold car rides to and from babysitters. She worked as hard as any young single mother could possibly work.
Of course we all had to bite our tongues—more than once—as Tripp’s father went on a media tour through Hollywood and New York, spreading untruths and exaggerated rhetoric. It was disgusting to watch as his fifteen minutes of fame were exploited by supposed adults taking advantage of a lost kid. But we knew him well enough to see how confused he was during that time, and our hearts broke for him and the price he would pay.
Along with our sorrow, of course, was some justifiable anger as well. The lies told about our family on national television were outrageous. It was excruciating for Track to read ugly things about his sisters, parents, and baby brother while he was in a war zone unable to do anything about it. There he was, half a world away, protecting everyone’s freedom of speech and securing America’s freedom of the press, while that freedom was being abused to perpetrate lies about his family. At this time I was actually thankful he was in Iraq. If he had been closer to home he would have wanted to clobber his former hockey teammate.
It was disheartening, too, for our young teen Willow to witness what her sister was going through. It broke our hearts to watch some of Piper’s innocence erode away. And I confess that I felt embarrassment, too. We were a “normal” family; this wasn’t supposed to happen to us. I hoped—and prayed—that my family would come through this challenge intact. There were times when I wasn’t sure; when it was everything Todd and I could do not to lash out at the forces threatening our family. More than once, I thought, How could this be worth it? Let’s just go back to Wasilla and stop feeding the media beast. Let’s give ourselves and our family a break.
And then I came across something written by an American who knew a little something about adversity: Helen Keller. She wrote, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
If I didn’t know before what she meant, I know now. The past couple of years have truly revealed character. We’ve all made mistakes. Tripp’s father went through a time of apologizing for his statements, and Bristol, with her characteristic generosity of heart, accepted that assumed-sincere apology. It’s been two years full of struggling to atone, trying to be patient, remembering to love each other, and watching in wonder as little Tripp grows up. I’m not saying I’d want to do absolutely everything again, but in the end, what Helen Keller said was right: we’ve emerged a stronger, more united family.
For others who may be going through challenging times, you may feel like I did when a friend thought it helpful to share the Palin dirt she’d read from anonymous bloggers on the Internet one day. She cheerily encouraged me to “hang in there though . . . surely your reward is in heaven!” I looked at her like she was an idiot, grinning through clenched teeth as I assured her we’d definitely “hang in there.” But at that particular moment, I thought, I’d rather God keep the reward that may await in the hereafter. I’d rather have peace on earth for my daughter than an extra ruby in my crown.
As a matter of fact, if you discount the screaming headlines and lurid magazine covers, ours has been a typical American family story. It may not be because of an unplanned pregnancy that grows on a national stage under a scorching spotlight, but everyone ends up in a foxhole once in a while. It may be a battle for your health, your marriage, your business, your community, or your country, but we all have our battles to fight. And if you’re lucky enough to have found a temporary hilltop upon which to avoid the bloody engagement for a bit, then your duty is to assist and defend someone who’s still caught up in the war. I’m blessed to have a wonderful family with me on my hilltop. They’re my best line of defense as well as my motivation to keep fighting. Otherwise, what’s the point?
It’s a funny thing about being a parent: having a baby is a life-changing event for the couple going through it, but a pretty ho-hum thing for the rest of the world. Your little miracle is just another screaming infant to just about everyone else. The comic geniuses at The Onion captured this paradox hilariously with the faux news article: “Miracle of Birth Occurs for 83 Billionth Time.”
HOPE SPRINGS, AR—The holy and sacrosanct miracle of birth, long revered by human civilization as the most mysterious and magical of all phenomena, took place for what experts are estimating “must be at least the 83 billionth time” Tuesday with the successful delivery of eight-pound, four-ounce baby boy Darryl Brandon Severson at Holy Mary Mother Of God Hospital.
The milestone was achieved by Carla Severson, 32, an unemployed cosmetology-school graduate and homemaker, and her husband of 14 years, Dwayne Severson, also 32, a former screen-door factory worker and freelance lawncare contractor . . .
The miraculous birth is the couple’s fifth.
I love that—“the miraculous birth is the couple’s fifth.” But the truth is, every baby is a miracle, whether he or she is “planned,” and whether he or she is “wanted.” Every baby isn’t easy; quite the opposite is true. And everyone who has a baby isn’t necessarily ready to be a parent. But every child is a gift of life that is capable, if we let her, of working miracles on us.
I don’t make a practice of quoting myself, but I’m making an exception here because I think this is true of most Americans. In my memoir, Going Rogue, I wrote, “On April 20, 1989, my life truly began. I became a mom.”
April 20, 1989, was the day I had my first child, Track, and I truly believe my life began that day. It was the day I began to really realize that it’s not about me. Sometimes this realization only comes to you later, after parenthood has made you a completely different person than you were when you began. That day, I began the process of becoming a better person. I became more vulnerable, because loving someone makes you vulnerable. But my heart grew; and I became more open than I had ever been before to the pain and the joy of loving another human being so intensely.
In his heartachingly beautiful book about losing a child and finally finding peace in his family, Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief recounts a conversation between his wife and his four sons one night at the dinner table. The back-and-forth between the little boys and their wise mother shows how a mom’s (and dad’s) heart can expand to accommodate all the miracles God gives them:
“Mom,” Eli asks Celeste at dinner one evening, “who do you love the best?”
“I love all of you the same.”
“But which one the best?” chimes in Isaac.
Celeste laughs. “You are my best Isaac, and Eli is my best Eli, and Caleb is—”
“No,” says Eli, the logician in the family. “You can’t love us all the same. Who do you love best?”
Perhaps a better husband would intervene at this point in an effort to help his wife extract herself from a jam, but I’m curious to see how she’s going to wiggle her way out of this one. I certainly don’t know how to explain to them how it’s possible to love each of them fiercely, yet for different things. I don’t know what Celeste is about to say, but I hope she can explain it to me, too.
“My heart,” she tells them, “is a house filled with rooms. And each of you has a room all to himself.”
Each boy smiles, perhaps considering what his room in Mom’s heart must look like. Maybe they imagine rooms full of toys, a comfy bed, all their stuffed animals. What a little boy can’t know, until he has children of his own, is that his room cradles every giggle, every sigh, every squawk, all those skinned knees and scuffed shoes, each dream carelessly or cautiously shared, all the hopes we have for them, every prayer we’ve whispered over them in their sleep. The rooms of our hearts are full with everything that is them, and when we think back to the days before we had them, we realize how much smaller our hearts were back then.
For Tony Woodlief, home is a holy place, a place “that makes us better than we could ever be alone. . . . It is in our homes where we . . . make children and try to raise them, where—if we are blessed—we one day are allowed to die. If God is not in such a place, in the muck of our daily existence, in our beginnings and endings, then he is nowhere.”
Tony is touching on something very profound. Having a family—having a home—is at the same time ordinary and sacred; it’s as messy as dirty diapers and as sanctified as holy water. And it’s by slogging through all the mundane things of family life—the spilled grape juice, the adolescent rages, and the interminable games of hide and seek—that we truly give of ourselves and become the people we were meant to be.
More important, it turns out that it’s the quantity of time we spend—not the quality—that is best for our kids. Busy parents like to comfort themselves that they can make up for not being there by occasional bursts of special activities. But you can’t just plan on being a good parent; you have to earn it. Journalist and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes put it well:
Forget quality time. You can’t plan magic moments or bonding with epiphanies in dealing with kids. What matters is quantity time. Judging from my own experience—four kids—children crave prolonged attention, preferably undivided. They want whole days and nights of it. . . . Woody Allen may be a lousy father, but his rule for life applies to being a father. Yep, 90 percent of fatherhood is just showing up.
For those of us lucky enough to be parents, there is no greater proof of the existence of God than to look into the face of your new baby. You are filled with the overwhelming sense that you couldn’t have created this beautiful, perfect thing. Something more powerful and more loving is at work here. This child is proof of His power and His love.
In the end, this is the greatest gift of family: putting the big things, and the little things, into their proper perspective. Family makes us understand that the greatest things in life aren’t our doing, that they’re not tidy or predictable. It humbles us in this understanding at the same time that it astounds us with a love that makes all the messiness and unpredictability only add to the exciting challenge that is family.
I remember a brilliant pro-life educational campaign from the 1990s that made this point very well. It was a commercial that showed smiling, laughing children, with a voice-over that said, “All these children have something in common. All of them were unplanned pregnancies that could have ended in abortion. But their parents toughed it out and discovered that sometimes the best things in life aren’t planned.” And it ended with the simple message: “Life: What a beautiful choice.” There was no call for legal action and no guilt ascribed—just a simple message affirming life and reminding Americans that being open to life and family is beautiful; that it creates something beautiful that can enrich their lives in ways they never dreamed possible.
I think that’s one of the tragedies with our leadership in Washington today. It claims to be about progress and making our lives better. But by asserting more and more government control over us, it actually disrespects our humanity. So many voices in our politics today are trying to convince us that, with enough of the taxpayers’ money and enough bureaucratic control, we can correct all that is wrong with humanity and, as the president so immodestly put it, stop “the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.” But this is politics posing as religion. And the great thing about family is that it has a way of cutting through all this. It’s the love we have for a child that has the potential, more than anything else, to expose all the utopian promises of men for the lies that they are.
I thought about this when I heard President Obama mention what his eleven-year-old daughter, Malia, said to him one morning during the Gulf oil spill. He was shaving when Malia popped her head into the room and asked innocently, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”
Who among us hasn’t had the experience of a simple question from an innocent child bringing our ego crashing back to earth? Of course Malia’s daddy hadn’t “plugged the hole”—because doing so was beyond his capability, even as the most powerful man in the world. The faith of a daughter in her father’s ability to work wonders—from protecting her from things that go bump in the night to fixing a broken bicycle chain—is a part of family life to be cherished and preserved for as long as we possibly can. But as Americans, Malia’s sweet question should also remind us that we’re not children, and President Obama is not our father. Government can’t work wonders—sometimes it can’t do anything at all—and it shouldn’t (unlike real fathers) even try.
By reminding us that we are fallible and fallen, families show us in concrete, everyday terms that which is not. I picked up the book Witness again for the first time in a long time. It is the first-person account of an American, Whittaker Chambers, who was a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Chambers eventually renounced communism and turned in his fellow spy, high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss sued Chambers for libel, and the trial that ensued captured the world’s attention.
The Hiss-Chambers case as told in Witness is a genuinely intriguing cold war spy story. But more important to me is the story of redemption in Witness, and the role family plays in it. For Chambers, communism was once his religion. Witness tells the story of his path away from communism and toward God—and the high price he paid for traveling it. The book opens with a beautiful letter from Chambers to his children. In it, he describes the critical moment he began to break with communism:
I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss’s apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind, but I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
That’s a wonderful way to put it: Our families lay the finger of God on our foreheads. They bring us closer to our Creator, but they also bring us closer to our communities and the wider world. Understanding parenthood brings you out of yourself, not just spiritually but socially as well; it takes you beyond an often isolated, self-focused world and into the wider community. When you’re a parent, a stepparent, or any caretaker of a young life, you have an investment in the world—a child—and you want to make sure that the world is a safe, welcoming, and prosperous place for her.
Unlike about the nature of our freedom and what constitutes good government, America’s Founders didn’t write much about family. You won’t find any mention of family or marriage in the Constitution. Part of the reason should be obvious: family simply wasn’t on the agenda in Philadelphia in 1787. The Founders had gathered to establish a form of government that would honor the principles of the Declaration of Independence and ensure the preservation of the union, not delve into the private lives of Americans.
But from what I’ve read, family life at the time of the founding was a lot like family life for Americans today: full of challenges, sure, but also full of simple pleasures. I came across a wonderful book written just a few years after independence, in 1782, by an emigrant Frenchman turned American farmer with the impressive name of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. The book is a series of letters from Crèvecoeur to a friend in England attempting to answer the question “What, then, is the American, this new man?” In addition to amazing insights about the new world and its inhabitants, Crèvecoeur’s letters are full of truths that all husbands and fathers would recognize, such as the peace and joy that wives (!) and children bring. This passage, in particular, spoke to me:
At home my happiness springs from very different objects; the gradual unfolding of my children’s reason, the study of their dawning tempers attract all my paternal attention. I have to contrive little punishments for their little faults, small encouragements for their good actions, and a variety of other expedients dictated by various occasions.
What father today—or what mother, for that matter—doesn’t recognize the subtle art of guiding and teaching children? The wonderful thing about America is that our Founders didn’t set out to intervene in these intimate details of Americans’ lives. They understood that this was—and should be—beyond the proper scope of government.
The Founders simply took it for granted that a republic relies on informed and virtuous citizens, and that informed and virtuous citizens are created in turn by strong families. Some think this view is no longer relevant today because the men who held it were old white guys who don’t represent the diverse country America has become. And it’s true that the famous Founders were white and male. One important exception to the largely male, largely white perspective of the Founders was that of Abigail Adams, the wife of America’s second president, John Adams. The wonderful letters between Abigail and John, I’ve found, offer the best insights into the role the family was meant to play in the new republic.
During the 2008 vice-presidential campaign I was sent a book of these letters. And the more I read about Abigail, the more she became a hero to me. She had a brilliant, insightful mind that, like so many female minds, played a powerful if indirect role in shaping America. She endured long separations from John, which forced her to run the family farm and raise four children alone. But busy as she was, she took the time to encourage John, who was off at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, to promote independence for women. “Remember the ladies,” she admonished her husband:
Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honours and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of Eminence. . . . Deprived of a voice in Legislation, obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the publick Welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit Instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equal the most Heroick of yours.
You go, girl. Abigail and John also exchanged many letters about the upbringing of their children. These letters echo in the most intimate way the Founders’ understanding of the importance of the family in America. “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families,” John Adams wrote. This was critical because, as he later wrote to a friend, “public virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public interest, Honor, Power and Glory, established in the Mind of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.” John and Abigail Adams agreed that raising small-r republicans meant raising good and decent children. As John wrote to Abigail:
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
The Adamses must have heeded their own advice. Their son John Quincy Adams went on to become the sixth president of the United States.
Still, the Adamses’ wonderful insights on family life were the exception for the time. It sounds strange to us today, given how preoccupied we can be with the problems the family faces, that the men who laid the foundation of our republic said so little about the institution of the family. But this fact is itself a tribute to the system of government they created. The Founders took it for granted that strong families instilled in children the habits and disciplines necessary for those children to govern themselves in adulthood. Being a part of a family teaches us to trust and respect others, to put their needs before our own, and to avoid shortsighted decisions by planning for the future.
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.
As parents, we mark time in terms of our families because kids are the best things in our lives. My friend, the radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, has a great line: “What’s the most promising ingredient in this messed-up world? A child.” Our families embody our hopes and dreams. Our Founders understood that respecting and honoring a family’s love is the key to being free. Today the fight for my family’s future is the fight for all American families’ futures.
Now there’s a cause “for the children” that I can really support.