What is a Family? (According to the Republican Party)

How would you define family similarly and differently from the Republican Party?

One of our biggest values on Relationship 101 is defining our terms. While we’ve written in the past about the importance of defining new, highly politicized terms (I’m looking at you, decolonize), it’s also imperative that we define terms that we assume have some sort of common understanding.

Today, we’ll talk about a term that is allegedly central to the agenda of one of the American political parties: Family.

From Hocking Hills State Park, in Ohio

As we wrote Friday, a collection of conservative think tanks compiled a 950 document a few weeks ago, The Conservative Promise, that lays out what the first 180 days of a Trump presidency would involve. The first of the document’s four goals is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”.

Each of the 30+ chapters describe the restructuring and reenvisioning of a particular function of the Executive branch of government. As I mentioned, voters have a responsibility to read this document and understand what you’re voting for, even if you just pick chapters that are most relevant to you.

On Friday, we wrote about the prologue and the chapter on the Department of Education. In today’s article, we’ll reflect on the policies and underlying themes of:

1. Department of Health and Human Services

2. Department of Labor

We’ll pay special attention to ways that conservative think tanks define family. However, as we’ve learned, definitions in the conservative dictionary often sound different from the ways that folks who actually study and research family (or any other topic) might use.

For instance, in 2016, Wiley Blackwell published an Encyclopedia of Family Studies, which includes 550 definitions from family and relationship scholars of terms and relational processes. To be fair, there are some terms, such as “arranged marriage” and “elopement” that have clear cut definitions. However, many more terms have different understandings that are dependent on culture, ethnicity, and social class. Lisa Miller, a professor of sociology at Eckerd College, captures that in her article “Definition of Family”.

Rather than providing a firm definition of family, she identifies three principles by which people tend to explore family (with a nod to Ascan Koerner and Mary Anne Fitzpatrick:

1. Structural: The presence of specific people who live together (i.e. parents, siblings, grandparents)

2. Functional: The societal functions of the family, such as the process of getting children (procreation or otherwise), rearing children, and supporting each of the family members as they individually and collectively age and develop.

3. Transactional: The sense of a family identity, including communication patterns, shared history, and vision for its future.

At the end of her article, Miller describes a continuum of how people conceptualize families, with exclusionists having narrow, often heteronormative views of family, and inclusionists having broader views of family, including multi-generational homes, fictive kin (friends and community who engage with children and may be referred to as “Auntie” or “Uncle), and chosen families.

It’s safe to make an assumption that Republicans have an exclusionist view of family, given both their commitment to the performance of heteronormative gender roles (men are strong, assertive, and work outside the home, and women are passive, caregivers, and work inside the home), and the amount of restrictions that conservative lawmakers have placed on trans folks, queer relationships, and women and fetuses. However, the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services gives us some insight on what this looks like in real time.