KAGIN'S COLUMN

ON RESTORING TRADITIONAL FAMILY VALUES

Say you wanted to destroy civilization. Create a mythology whereby all products of human conception must be born. Punish indiscriminate breeding by insuring that every pregnancy produces a baby. Run slick TV ads showing a neurotic woman lamenting an earlier choice to have an abortion, a lament created by the mythmakers. Show tidy, nicely dressed, scrubbed, well fed little children and convince people their unwanted kid will be that way. Base all of this on the will of God, and decree the authority of scripture over absolutely everything, including evidence and common sense. Ban all sex education, contraception and pregnancy interruption. Deny public funds for abortion, but rather give women free state money for every baby produced. This method will insure that the most useless and uneducated will have the most children. Then those little gifts of God, unwanted, unloved and unparented, can grow up to kill and rob you, and make more kids who will, if the Mother Theresas prevail, accumulate to be seen starving or murdering on the nightly news.

One should then, with civilization in chaos, decide that the most Christian nation on earth is in trouble for drifting from the myths that created the problem. Confident that the myth must win no matter what, create a movement to return to "Tradition Family Values," i.e., a comprehensive mythical control system, based on the Bible, a prescientific bronze and iron age document. If a Trojan horse wrecks your civilization, haul in another one to fix the problem. Our restoration of Traditional Family Values won't be the first time religion has destroyed a culture. Just watch the news. Better yet, read a history book. To restore these Traditional Family Values, we should have some notion of what they are. What type values? What kind of family? What is traditional? That kind of thing. "Traditional Family Values" means those beliefs held and customs practiced by a white Anglo-Saxon protestant church going married with children unit in a small American town between 1946 and 1956. If we live exactly as they did, everything will be fine. That's the goal. Any other vision is a highway to Hell. Now that we've defined them, how do we restore them.

Basic to the restoration of Traditional Family Values is the abolition of democracy. Democracy really has no place in Christian thought, is not found anywhere in the Bible, and is a troublesome holdover from pagan systems Christianity destroyed. Democracy permits diversity and invention for individuals and cultures. Expansion of ideas is forbidden by Traditional Family Values, for all we need know is in the Bible. School boards must be controlled so wrong ideas like birth control, evolution, and the solving of problems without supernatural intervention do not get into students heads or text books. Democracy prohibits this control. Democracy encourages independence of thought and seeking of new ways for believing and doing. New ideas and different ways are bad -- democracy must go. Despite attempts by the righteous to establish a government controlled by their religion, our founders gave us a democracy. Democracy has tolerated thoughts and actions that are properly forbidden, and the sooner we get rid of it the faster everyone will get back to right thinking.

In our efforts to restore Traditional Family Values, we should be able to learn from the examples of those who advocate them. Regrettably, some of our finest models are flawed by over-exposure to democracy. His soon to be Most Christian Majesty, King of England, Charles, heir apparent, has separated from his wife and children to sport in adultery with a married woman. Our own Ronald and Nancy Reagan married following divorce and after conceiving their daughter Patti. Patti, appears buff naked in Playboy (July, 1994). She is also on the periodical's cover sky clad with a Negro standing behind her with his arms about her and his black paws cupping her exposed white breasts. If not for that democracy business, she would be in prison for this pornographic display. And this Reagan daughter was raised by parents who practiced astrology and who want everyone to return to Traditional Family Values.

The example of one Rush Limbaugh, an outspoken, if boorish, advocate for the religious right and Traditional Family Values, may help. He was recently united in holy matrimony with a woman by a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas. Perfect? Hardly. Brother Limbaugh had been twice married and divorced before the wedding, as had been his bride. Further, he and the female had cohabited, and, presumably, fornicated (a crime under Traditional Family Values) by engaging in sex before the church said they could. This behavior deserves the Traditional Family Values Hall of Shame, not emulation. And the marrying judge was civil authority, not church certified. The judge was also a Negro. Under proper Traditional Family Values, he would have been known as a nigger. He could not have sat on a jury, much less the Supreme Court. Indeed, he would have been in jail, for he has a white wife. Othello, on the Supreme Court, would have been unthinkable, and Traditional Family Values prohibited interracial marriage. The crime was called miscegenation. So Traditional Family Values are simply not satisfied by persons married to four other people being married civilly by a nigger who couples lustfully with white women. The evolution of constitutional freedoms has changed all that, but we are seeking Traditional Family Values as they are properly, and undemocratically, understood.

Failing to find, among the powerful and outspoken, proper role modeling for Traditional Family Values, let us attempt to construct a composite of what can be, and must be, if we are to restore what was and live by biblical truths. Consider the ideal, in Francis and Felicity Fundangelical. We meet them on their wedding day, in their bridal suite, alone at last, where Francis says, "Felicity, my darling, do you know what we are going to do tonight?" "No, my beloved husband" she says, "what?"

Felicity knew from her Traditional Family Values training that her duty as a woman and wife was to obey her husband Francis as she had obeyed her father. Men had received the right from God the Father to control women, daughters of Eve who had caused the fall of man from the Garden of Eden. She was Mrs. Felicity Fundangelical and it was her wedding night. Her Norman Rockwell world of Traditional Family Values was fulfilled. She had her MRS degree and would devote her life to God, church, husband and children, in that order. It was , in Sperm Bank, Georgia, and all was right with the world.

The marriage of Francis and Felicity Fundangelical had made them one flesh. Divorce was unthinkable--they were mystically joined for life. Neither partner had any idea whatsoever of sexual union, for this nasty little subject was not discussed by anyone, inside or outside of marriage. The couple generally knew that married people had babies (only married people!), but had been told they were gifts of God, and, for all they knew, occurred through spontaneous generation. Francis had heard boys giggling about naughty things in shop class, but had averted his ears, and Felicity had wondered what her Home Economics teacher meant by the remark that a girl on her wedding night was well advised to think of canning apricots.

The Fundangelicals brought their collective life experiences to their wedding night. They knew they lived, and would live, in a relatively secure world, with little crime, most people employed, and everyone doing and believing much the same, so long as they were just like the Fundangelicals. And everyone they knew was. Life would proceed as it presumably always had. We are studying them as a model of Traditional Family Values to better learn how to restore the Traditional Family Values we've lost because of participatory democracy. Prince Charles, Rush Limbaugh, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan all proved wanting as proper role models.

(Here it must be confessed that an error was made earlier in this treatise, wherein the human male standing naked behind the Reagan's naked daughter Patti, and handling her breasts on the cover of the July 1994 Playboy, was incorrectly identified as a Negro. Careful reading of the accompanying text, by Mrs. Lisa Mohnsam, has revealed he was not a Negro but a darkly tanned white dude. However, he does simulate a Negro, mocking the Traditional Family Values we want to restore, mirroring similar pornography offered by Rolling Stone and Janet Jackson).

Our goal is to restore Traditional Family Values and to enjoy, in all its fullness, the world of the Fundangelicals. To this end, Mr. and Mrs. Fundangelical provide a microcosm for explication of an America that tragically recedes before the assaults of godless humanism and democracy. This world was not politically correct; it was religiously correct and grounded on the certainty that everything in contradiction was wrong. There was prayer and Bible reading in schools, and everyone attended religious school plays. There were church camps, pot luck dinners, revivals, patriotic parades and minstrel shows. Everybody smoked, even in hospital rooms and the minister's study. All men wore short hair and hats; women wore long dresses and girdles. Library books were censored for right thought. Divorce was illegal, abortion was illegal, birth control was illegal, strips bars and pornography were illegal. Sex education was not taught in school, and certainly not in the home. The Sears catalogue and National Geographic were the best sources for that information. Science classes Francis attended were taught by the football coach, who knew evolution wasn't true because it didn't fit the Bible stories of God's interactions with Adam and Noah. There were no color televisions and no computers, two more things that have destroyed Traditional Family Values. At least television and movies were moral. Married couples were shown sleeping in separate beds, and while murder was okay, physical love was not. It was no more discussed in polite society than cancer, or Uncle Herman passing out in his turkey and cranberries from alcoholism.

When one is right and good he naturally wants to keep himself and his children from people and ideas that are wrong and bad. Traditional Family Values had erected for Francis and Felicity numerous barriers against wrong thinking and interaction. Negroes (known as niggers) went to different schools, and had their own restaurants, restrooms, drinking fountains, waiting rooms, and places on public transportation. They could go to the Fundangelicals' church, but they sat apart in the balcony, while whites sat on the main level, fanning themselves with funeral home fans. Interracial dating was unthinkable, and interracial marriages unlawful, except perhaps for Moses and Captain John Smith. If we had restored Traditional Family Values in time, O.J. Simpson would not now be in trouble. Of course he wouldn't have played football either, at least not with whites. No decent person interacted with the children of slaves as anything other than master to servant. Some debated whether they possessed souls.

All foreigners, their countries, cultures, languages and histories were seen as vastly inferior to those values taught Francis and Felicity, who believed white Christians had "discovered" America. The savages they discovered led to the maxim that the only good Injun was a dead one. The Fundangelicals had learned cute xenophobic slurs for members of other races and of most foreign nations, and would teach them to their children.

Other religions were wrong, and were studied, if at all, only to refute them. Jews were Christ killers, greedy, and universally damned; no Traditional Family Values person would have anything to do with this hated race unless absolutely necessary, like borrowing money to finance war. The modern idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition was unknown. Jews were bad people who refused to accept Christ's offer of salvation and were to be shunned. Catholics were little better. They were Papist pawns and idol worshipers. Francis and Felicity's ancestors had killed many of them in holy wars. A fish sandwich was known as a Catholic hamburger, and Catholics were called mackerel snappers. Such religions as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam were understood as heathen beliefs having something to do with flying carpets. All that was known of them was that they needed missionaries, or better yet, the killing of their followers.

Dirty minded readers probably think that when Felicity asked Francis what they were going to do on their wedding night that something sexual was afoot. Repent! We'll get to it. First, we must consider how to restore the Traditional Family Values of the Fundagelicals and destroy civilization and democracy.

If you want a taste of what those good old days were like, turn off the air conditioner

Those committed to an early and full restoration of Traditional Family Values should be heartened by recent events. In Florida a religious crazy, named Paul Hill, shot and killed two gentlemen, a retired doctor who performed abortions and a retired U.S. Air Force Officer volunteering to help women exercise civilized democratic rights. The Colonel's wife, a retired nurse, was wounded.

In Rome, another religious crazy, his Holiness the Pope, John Paul II (J2P2) denounced a United Nations attempt to control the horror of humans destroying their species by overbreeding. J2P2 said abortion and artificial contraception deny couples the right to determine the size of their families. And they could, if they didn't want to populate, restrict sex to those days the female is not fertile. This game is called Vatican Roulette and the players are called parents. J2P2 believes limiting population any other way is unethical and immoral.

So we are well on our way to restoring the world of Francis and Felicity Fundangelical, the glorious world of Traditional Family Values. Some who may find murder a bit extreme so early in the restoration process cannot argue with the results. If civilization and democracy are to be destroyed by too many people overrunning a planet under dogmatic religious authority, no means of accomplishment is too extreme.

Prudence, however, dictates a more moderate approach. We should simply repeal the Bill of Rights, and pass an Amendment making the Fundangelical's mythical system the law of the land. Religious repression would then be fully constitutional and God, negligently left out of the constitution by the humanists who wrote it, would be back in control. After all, God's on the money. There will be some resistance from Jews, blacks, liberated women, secular humanists, homosexuals, and probably the nation of Islam whose followers think they should be in control.

That's the problem with democracy -- too many different people thinking they're right. God's on the side with the heaviest artillery. Take away the guns of those who disagree with you. Kill (maybe just jail) their lawyers, professors and judges. Burn their books and write your own. Outlaw computers. If a manual typewriter was good enough for Harry Truman it's good enough for us. Ban color televisions. The world should be seen in black and white. Democracy will be gone and civilization will soon follow. There will be arguments and tribal warfare over how best to enforce Traditional Family Values and just whose values are required by our Reformed Constitution. But there are ways of handling these disagreements, assuming you are in power and have authority from God.

But let us return to studying our model of Traditional Family Values, Francis and Felicity Fundangelical on their Traditional Family Values wedding night. The Fundangelicals actually believed their God had invented moral law. To them, Socrates, Buddha, Cato, Euripedes, and other pre-christian heathens had nothing to do with the awareness than an honorable life is to be preferred to a dishonorable one. The moral law of Traditional Family Values would have seemed odd to those ancients whose works Christianity destroyed. Particularly tonight.

Francis and Felicity's first night as one flesh shows us, in beautiful simplicity, the needless religiogenic conflict between nature and nurture. F. & F. suffered from a very real mind / body problem. Their glands had been programmed by nature and "nature’s god." Their minds had been programmed by Traditional Family Values. They knew that, now married, they were permitted to do some spiritually physical something with each other, something beyond petting. They knew they had God's okay to go all the way. There was much embarrassment and blushing, much fear, guilt, and fumbling.

To tell just what happened would be a gross violation of the Traditional Family Values we are trying to restore. A description of that night could not lawfully be printed then, and certainly not in the world we will have when Traditional Family Values are restored, the Constitution is changed, and democracy is replaced by dogma. From the later circumstantial evidence of babies, one might conclude they eventually got it right, but it was never discussed. And there is precedent for exceptions. We cannot, therefore, know what happened. Before too long we will forget there was ever a time we could.

When Felicity told Francis she did not know what they were going to do on this night of nights, he took her soft hand. He knew, without God, he and the wife he was to lead (sic) were incompetent to do anything. He knew they needed guidance from a ready source of all answers. He knew Earth was but a pilgrimage and Heaven was their home. His world had not evolved beyond Traditional Family Values. And it never would. Francis looked at his wife Felicity with the fixed smile and thousand yard stare that characterized his heritage and said, "Let us pray."

And the Fundangelicals turned off the light.

Edwin Kagin
June-August 1994

Last updated: 9 January 2005