Family-Friendly

The American Family Association is a Right-Wing hate group, disguising itself as a moral vanguard. It is politically powerful in the Republican Party. As a gay man acknowledging the effects of this kind of family-centric thinking on my life, I see the words "family-friendly" in any establishment as code that my business is not wanted. I spend my money elsewhere.

Family is touted as the keystone of civilization by conservatives. Those of us who have been forced to devise our own concepts of intimacy and commitment in groups due to overt hostility and prejudice from family-friendly heterosexuals learn quickly that we have to shed the trauma of the nuclear family to open ourselves to love and joy in our more creative relationships. This benefits our mental health and strength as human beings. 

The patriarchal-matriarchal paradigm is slowly crumbling. This explains the vicious desperation of those who feel they must defend it. The deterioration of genetic family's sway on social relationships is necessary for racial and ethnic mingling. Individual identity is trumping family identification in an age of individual communication and information, delivered by computers and phones. Even the undereducated are becoming subliminally more informed by technology through exposure to current affairs and social trends via their personal devices. Information is power. It tends to liberate the individual mind from blind submission to any one ethos, whether that is based in family or ethnicity.

How about a world that is human-being-friendly? How about a world which is difference-friendly within the context of love and peace? How about a world that is unfriendly to greed, domination and elitism?