A news outlet backed by financier George Soros in the United Kingdom is using people’s increased sensitivity during the coronavirus pandemic to push an anti-family agenda and call for families to be abolished.
The news outlet openDemocracy published an article entitled “The coronavirus crisis shows it’s time to abolish the family” on its website where the author, Sophie Lewis, argues against the nuclear family’s perceived shortcomings, which supposedly the crisis has only exacerbated.
Writing for openDemocracy, she says that the crisis is the right time for people to “liberate” themselves from “the nuclear household.”
The article claims that homes are unsafe environments and the coronavirus will lead to a rise in abuse, making strong claims that private households feature “child rape” and “queer bashing”.
The author asserts that “queer and feminized” people are not safe inside homes.
“Queer and feminized people, especially very old and very young ones, are definitionally not safe there: their flourishing in the capitalist home is the exception, not the rule.”
The article goes on to claim families are fraught with patriarchal parenting and family environments are unsafe due to “the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticisation of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property.”
The article mostly calls for a number socialist proposals, which should take precedence over the family. At the same time, the article also offers no real solution for what would replace the nuclear family unit.
In the piece, Lewis makes a number of other calls to action:
“Free all prisoners and detainees now, remake the care facilities [for the elderly] as spacious self-led villages, and dismiss all the workers with full pay so they can leave their bunks forever, move in with their friends, and pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”
There is no doubt that family lockdowns can lead to increased cases of stress and in some cases also abuse, however, despite the dark vision of families offered by openDemocracy’s writer, research is showing that the crisis is, in most cases, is actually bringing families together.
A poll conducted by Gallup shows that nearly 9 out of 10 children (89 percent) report feeling “happiness” and “empowerment” staying home with their parents during the coronavirus crisis.
Furthermore, substantial research shows that families with even one parent missing have a substantially negative impact on the outcomes of children. Raised in one-parent households, children are more likely to fail to make progress in school and less likely to graduate high school. They also show higher rates of depression than children with two parents.
Any claims that the abolishment of the nuclear family will be good for children seem to be challenged by research that shows even the loss of one parent has a dramatically negative effect on children.
According to data from the openDemocracy website, Soros’ Open Society Foundation is one of the top donors to the news organization, which publishes a range of “progressive” material.
