At
the very moment the UN Commission on Human Rights is meeting
in Geneva considering whether to make faith-based criticism
of the homosexual lifestyle a human rights abuse, 2,500 delegates
from more than 60 nations--among them many Latter-day Saints--have
converged in Mexico City for the World Congress of Families
III to rally for the family.
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Delegates gather at the impressive Bandamex
Convention Center in Mexico City |
The
two meetings symbolize two radically different worldviews
that have been coming head to head and will largely determine
the future of humanity. Though most people will know little
of either gathering or may have only the slightest awareness
that a war is raging with high stakes, the ideas that will
eventually carry the day will profoundly affect all of us.
The
World Congress has been convened by the Howard Center for
Family, Religion and Society, Mexico’s Family Network and
Family and Society. Supporting organizations include Brigham
Young University’s World Family Policy Center, United Families,
Focus on the Family, Real Women of Canada, the Catholic Family
and Human Rights Institute and many others.
The
scholars, politicians, clergy, and pro-family activists at
the World Congress of Families III see the family as the bedrock
of society and the only hope for peace and freedom. They
have come together in this 10th anniversary of
the International Year of the Family to network and propose
a common agenda to counter-act the anti-family agenda that
is sweeping the world and devouring moral structures at a
pace few could have foreseen just a few years ago.
This
is a kick-off event for a series of international meetings
to mark the year and an opportunity for the family effort
to go global. Earlier conferences in 1997 and 1999 were held
in Prague, Czech Republic and Geneva, Switzerland from which
many new pro-family groups were spawned or revitalized.
The
delegates will consider such meaty questions as: what are
the possibilities for a common agenda? How can the family
perspective be incorporated into legislation, public and private
policy, program design, mass media, economy and human rights?
Can there be personal and social development without the family?
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Mrs. Martha Fox, First Lady of Mexico |
At
this conference a rabbi shares the platform with the Secretary
General of Qatar. The former president of the Southern Baptist
Convention addresses Catholic pro-family leaders from Uruguay
and Costa Rica. Mexico’s First Lady, Martha Fox, in a beautiful
pink suit, tells the crowd that the future of mankind will
be forged in the nucleus of the family.
President
George Bush sent his personal greetings to the Congress:
“Around the world, families are the source of help, hope,
and stability for individuals and nations. As one of the
pillars of civilization, families must remain strong and we
must defend them during this time of great change. To ensure
that America’s future generations are prepared to face new
opportunities and challenges, my Administration has taken
important steps to promote strong families, preserve the sanctity
of marriage, and protect the well-being of children.”
The
threat to the ongoing existence of the family has forged new
international bonds, but none too soon. Those who would unravel
the family in the name of feminism, environmentalism, socialism
or the sexual revolution are decades ahead in their planning
and funding.
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Jésus Hernández, president of the Family
Network, addresses the conference. |
“We
have gathered here to demonstrate our confidence in mankind,”
said Jésus Hernández, president of the Family Network. “What
is it that joins us who are people of different nations, cultures
and religions? It is our faith in the family with all its
wealth, both material and spiritual, human and transcendent.
The 21st century is endowed with great technological
development, but the accomplishment of peace is the great
aspiration of mankind. We have to speak of the solidarity
of the family, for it is the well being of all people as well
as the harmony of society.”
The
sense is that this gathering is not just about family, but
about the well-being of nations, and those who are gathered
for these three days of meetings are hoping to be the catalyst
to awaken others to join in the most important dialogue of
our time. The health and welfare of the family, said one
speaker, will reflect the health and welfare of each nation.
Bonnie
Parkin, General Relief Society president, said, “Everyone
can make a difference in standing up for family. You have
to look around and start where you are. Become educated.
Alert your neighbors and friends to what’s happening.”
Why Are We Here?
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Dr. Allan Carlson is one of the great
defenders of the family in all the world. |
Dr.
Allan Carlson, of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and
Society, noted that forty years ago, asserting that family
is the fundamental unit of society entitled to the protection
of the state would have been considered a routine comment,
so obvious as to be banal. The spirit of the family was alive
and well in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in the United Nations which was filled with family affirmations
such as “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special
care and assistance” or “Men and women of full age… have the
right to marry and found a family.”
“Today,”
Dr. Carlson said, “every one of these principles is deeply
controversial, under assault, in many individual states and
at the United Nations. It is fair to conclude, I believe,
that the very basis of social order is now at risk.”
He
told conferees they were gathered “to acknowledge that the
natural family is established by the Creator and inscribed
in human nature. To live in families is to be in harmony
with this Divine intent and with the order of the Creation.
“We
are here,” he said, “to affirm the marriage of man to woman
as the first and necessary social bond, the foundation of
civil society. Marriage holds such distinction for it is
natural and self-renewing, rooted in the mutual attraction
of man to woman, beings who feel their incompleteness when
existing alone…
“In
this civic sense, marriage is also the true reservoir of liberty.
It exists prior to other human bonds, be they village, city,
state, or nation, and it has the endless capacity for renewal,
even in periods of persecution or social and moral decline.
In the modern age, as ever before, each new marriage is an
affirmation of life, love, and human continuity over against
the darkness. Every new marriage of man and woman is also
an act of defiance against ambitious political and ideological
powers that reduce human activity to their purposes…
“More
broadly, marriage is the solution to human society’s universal
dependency problem. Every community must resolve the same
issues: who will care for the very young, the very old, the
weak , and the infirm?...
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More than 2,500 delegates have gathered
here in Mexico City to praise and defend the family. |
“Marriage
is also a covenant between the couple and the broader community.
The bearing of children within marriage offers the best promise
of new community members who will be supported and trained
by parents without becoming a charge on others and who will
grow into responsible adults able to contribute to the community’s
well being.
“Predictably,
children reared within natural marriage will be healthier,
brighter, harder working, and more honest, dutiful, and cooperative
than those raised in other ways. They will be less likely
to slide into violent, abusive, or self-destructive behaviours.
As such, each marriage represents the renewal of a community
through the promise of responsible new citizens to come.
When the marital institution weakens before hostile policies
or ideologies, then the social pathologies of suicide, ignorance,
crime, abuse, poor health, and crippling dependency surely
grow.
“We
are here,” Dr. Carlson said, “to affirm the proper role of
government as a servant of families.” The structure of the
state may vary from place to place, he said, but “the guiding
principle is the limitation of the central power.” When families
fail, then individuals “tend to become wards of the Leviathan
state” for all the functions that had been filled by family
become absorbed by the state. Undermined families lead to
big, over-reaching government which fills the vacuum left
behind.
Two Ways
Pat
Fagan, of the Heritage Foundation, presented a ream of slides
which illustrate the devastation failed or absent families
leave in their wake. “Social sciences well done cannot but
illustrate divine, natural order,” he said. The statistics
in favor of supporting intact, natural families as the healthiest
and best place to raise children are staggering.
Drawing
on scores of studies he demonstrated that intact, natural
families have a higher chance of being spared from poverty,
have higher incomes and a higher net worth.
“Divorce
in a family has a bigger impact on them than the great Depression,”
he said. “Any government that doesn’t pay attention to the
health of its marriages and children, will also find it is
destroying its capacity for capital formation.”
Children
from intact, natural families also have higher grade point
averages, less depression, less juvenile delinquency, less
sexual activity, less likely chance for incarceration and
fewer suicides.
Statistics
become even brighter when that intact, natural family also
worships together. Belief in God and family are essential
components for all around physical and mental well-being.
Fagan
said that our society has a choice between two ways. We can
choose the way of belonging or the way of rejection. The
more we belong to our family, to our marriage, to our God,
the more we thrive. The other is the way of rejection—because,
he notes in every other family style, rejection lies at the
heart of it—a refusal to be committed, a refusal to get married,
a refusal to stay married.
Message to World Leaders
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Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo of the Vatican spoke
clearly and succinctly to the leaders of the world. |
Cardinal
Alfonso Lopez Trujillo of The Family Pontific Council issued
a call to the leaders of the world. He said that they had
a heavy responsibility on their shoulders and the possibility
of making mankind a garden or a ruin based on how they support
and strengthen the family. “If no special attention is given
to families, we’ll be denying to mankind something as important
as the air he breathes and the blood in his veins. Those
who are constantly hostile to the cause of families are perpetuating
a kind of historical suicide. They are killing themselves
and not laying a better foundation for the world.
“The
best investment in an economic sphere is the investment around
the truth of the family. It deserves the attention of all
the parliaments of all the lands. There is no more poverty,
nor pain than not having a family, nor riches than to be loved
and held with tenderness and know that you are made in the
image of God.
“We
must tell the leaders of the world that you don’t have to
be religious to believe in family. We do not accept that
the human family is only the property of religion. It is
only through the family that a human may grow as a person.
A family cannot be replaced by any state or ideology. It
is only through the family based on marriage that humanity
has a safe hope.”
On
day one of the Congress, delegates listened through head phones
to speeches in Spanish and Arabic. They attended sessions
on bioethics, homeschooling or the implications of a unisex
world, but mostly they become energized.
Joy
Lundberg, of the World Family Policy Center said, “You can
feel the swelling of confidence and the surging of power here
among the people who believe in families as they connect with
each other. As she and her husband have passed out free CDs
in four languages of a new song by Janice Kapp Perry called
“Save the Family,” one man said to her, “Until now, I thought
I was alone, and I always thought that people from the United
States didn’t care about families.”
This
man got a new look at things as United Families’ Sharon Slater
was working on a petition for the UN, Professor Richard Wilkins
was choreographing a press conference calling for a family
meeting in Qatar, Reach the Children’s Kevin Clawson was chatting
with a friend about building schools in Africa and Family
Action Council International’s Tanya Skeen was talking about
the latest meeting at the school board in her home town where
they were voting on including sexual orientation in the curriculum.
In
conferences like this, leaders are grown.
