Russian communication geniuses gave the world the “protection of the family”. Pardon, The Family.

Image: duggarfamily.com

As a rule of political communication whenever people feel frustrated, it must be channeled into hating a scapegoat. And when they finally feel the urge to see harm coming to the scapegoats – provide them with an excuse why the desired violence is:

1. Self-defence, and
2. Even noble

And this is why hating or attacking everything is always reframed as “protecting” something else. “Just” protecting it, to be precise.

The phrase “protecting the family” immediately implies that something or someone is attacking it. Even if it’s just the unhappy people stuck inside it, who want out. That is because to traditionalists The Family is more important than anyone actually living in it. A Family can somehow be happy, even when everyone in it is miserable. What matters is that they stick together forever, unchanging and bitter. This way they spend their time an energies taking bites out of each other – and have no energy left looking higher than their home misery. Suppressed and bitter people easily turn into authoritarian voters, happy to support whatever righteous and violent ideology is spreading that day. Like “protecting the family”. (And eventually, they go into a war – rather than enduring the family bliss.)

Under the disguise of protecting the family, one can attack (in no particular order):

• Gays
• Singles
• Women
• Women who need healthcare
• Mothers
• Fathers
• Divorcees
• People with not enough children
• Adult children
• Pensioners,
• …and even banks

This is probably also the curriculum of the new “Family studies” MA degree to be launched by our party and government – in a reaction to a gender studies program starting at a leading university. First world problems are making their way into Hungary – it could even be a good sign. But it is rather a Russian communication staple making its way right into the mouth of a member of government, the Minister of Human Resources. (Really.)

“Protecting the family” is also a code word for demographic panic. Sitting on the man-made disaster of welfare Ponzi schemes, governments try everything in their power to breed their subjects.* (Just no immigration, please.) More thought-through family planning choices and a more stable middle class would be good news for a free society – but an oversized regime cannot afford it. They want quantity, and they want it now. Even if it comes at the cost of impoverishing families sliding out of middle class.

Primitivists, such as said minister of human resources have a field day acting like gender studies were aiming at forcibly swapping the gender of each baby.

“But we think that our children must have at least that security in the uncertainties of the 21st century that they are born boys and girls.”

Someone is insecure in the 21st century, alright.

I, for one, hope that someone turns him into a woman – so that he would shun himself to the kitchen where he can do less harm.

And I hereby start punching at “family studies” as well as “gender studies” when I need to make fun of useless university degrees.

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* Although the Hungarian government always runs into the problem of unwanted gypsies. They may push for children indiscriminately when it comes to whether the parents can afford them, but they definitely do not want to accidentally promote the birth of more gypsies. Hence the mind-bending lists of conditions to any kind of social services in Hungary. Must not encourage the wrong kind to breed.