Traditional family virtue signaling

Yet another action in service of political pandering

Some Idaho lawmakers did a little research and discovered that the United States is exhibiting several hallmarks of a society in decline: half of marriages ending in divorce, 40% of children being born to unwed women verses 5% two generations ago, young people avoiding marriage altogether, a sliver of the population (about 18%) being in a traditional nuclear family, and so on.

How did these legislators respond to this alarming bit of intel? They rolled up their sleeves and mustered every bit of raw courage necessary to .. *pause for dramatic effect* … pass a resolution declaring the period between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to be Traditional Family Values Month.

Photo by Patricia Prudente on Unsplash

Ya, that will defiantly solve that problem. Legislators from Kootenai County who supported the resolution emphasized this accomplishment at a recent townhall meeting, and the announcement was met with the expected response from the conservative crowd, i.e., Sen. Ben Toews said Idaho was the first state in the country to make the traditional family month designation {cue applause}.

I don’t know whether that is true, and honestly, I couldn’t care less. Because it’s kind of a lame accomplishment, honestly. Passing a resolution affirming the Legislature’s support of traditional family values is interesting, and the designation of a 4-week period that might get observed by the public if only they knew about it (which most people don’t) is also interesting, I guess.

But it generally doesn’t accomplish anything except give legislators something to campaign on in 2026. “Voted in support of traditional family values,” some re-election campaign literature will almost certainly read. It’s political pandering, the Right’s version of virtue signaling.

Ordinarily, on a typical day in a typical American city, half of the houses are not spontaneously combusting. If they were, and the stats confirmed that historically, houses did not spontaneous combust but now they are, one would hope that the city’s next step would not be to designate some some portion of the calendar to be Traditional Non-Spontaneously Combusting Houses Awareness Month.

Rather, you’d expect that the city might want to wonder what’s going and, importantly, if government policies were contributing to the disaster in some kind of way. For example, a city might explore whether something in its building codes was increasing the likelihood of buildings catching fire. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to consider.

Similarly, the state Legislature notes that the statistics seems to point to society’s breakdown sometime after 1960. What happened after 1960? Well, policies were implemented that had significant impact on livability, such as Johnson’s Great Society, Nixon’s currency debasement, and Carter’s nationalization of education policy, just to name a few big things that are prominent matters for state governments like Idaho.

State polices also have an impact on stability of the home, including education programs that encourage parents to drop their kids off at the government-sponsored daycare centers we call “schools”; tax and childcare polices that incentivize dual income households so that the state can collect double the tax revenue; programs that encourage kids to get a college degree (especially from a state-run college) leaving graduates with useless degrees and a mountain of debt; and medical welfare programs that encourage people to enroll so that they can medicate their way out of depression and anxiety. All of these things are probably having a real impact on the health of a society, weigh heavily on moms, dads, and kids, and strain or destroy healthy familial relationships and bonds.

In other words, state and national governments are contributing to the demise of the traditional family as lawmakers rigorously pat themselves on the back for the passage of a resolution celebrating the traditional families they’re destroying.

Further, the proper role of government is not to create new holidays and celebrations. It’s to go about the mundane business of collecting just enough money to supply just enough government necessary to protect life, liberty, and property.

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