The Attack on the Family — They Said It Out Loud

A national leader called the family a birthright and warned of those who would abolish it. He was right about the threat, and the Proclamation named it thirty years earlier. What he left out is the reason it matters.

In September 2026 a national leader stood before a national political convention with a young family at home and asked out loud what his newest child’s birthright was. His answer: the country had been handed down by parents and grandparents. He wanted his children to fall in love and find someone worth building a life with. And to the radicals who wish to abolish the family, the message was simple. Stay away from our kids.

You know who said it. That is not the point of this page.

Every one of those claims is TRUE, and not one of them was explained. What is a birthright? Why does marriage matter beyond sentiment? Who wants to abolish the family, and where did they say so? A speech cannot answer that. The scriptures can, and the Proclamation did, thirty-one years earlier.

What a Birthright Actually Is

A birthright in scripture is not a country and it is not a standard of living. It is the covenant inheritance that passes from father to child, and the Bible’s most famous scene about it is a warning about how cheaply it can be thrown away.

Genesis 25:32–34

“And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?… and he sold his birthright unto Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.”

What profit shall this birthright do to me? That is the question of every generation that trades the covenant for something it can eat today. The Epistle to the Hebrews repeats the lesson and does not soften it: “Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright” (Hebrews 12:16). Notice the company Esau keeps in that verse. Fornication and profanity, the very sins that dissolve a family. And what was in the birthright he sold? The promises made to Abraham: priesthood, covenant, and a posterity to bless every nation. They passed through Jacob to Joseph to Ephraim, and the Lord calls the Saints of the last days their “lawful heirs, according to the flesh” (D&C 86:8–11). A birthright is a family thing. No father to hand it down and no child to receive it, and there is no such object. Anyone who wants to end the inheritance need only end the family.

And how is a whole people talked out of its birthright? Not at swordpoint. Nephi says the devil will “pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion… and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell” (2 Nephi 28:21). Carefully. Esau did not lose his inheritance in a battle. He lost it because he was hungry and somebody made it sound reasonable, and that is the ONLY way a birthright is ever lost.

“Abolish the Family” Is a Program, Not a Slogan

The reflexive reply is that nobody actually wants to abolish the family and the phrase is a caricature. Is it? Nope. It was not coined at a convention. It has a paper trail running one hundred and seventy-eight years, and the people on it are proud of it.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter II (1848)

“Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain… The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

Marx’s word was Aufhebung, and his defenders say it means “transcend” rather than “abolish.” The same paragraph says the family “will vanish.” The translation does not need rescuing. The same chapter sneers at “the bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child.” They mocked it, in print, in 1848.

Engels made it a theory of history in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “the first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.” Marriage is the ORIGINAL oppression in that sentence. Engels expected a purified monogamy to survive the revolution, but he was explicit about what would not: “the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society,” and “the care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike.”

The Soviets tried it. Alexandra Kollontai, in Communism and the Family (1920), announced that “society will feed, bring up and educate the child,” that “the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective,” and that “the family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole.” In 1970 Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex declared that “the biological family is an inherently unequal power distribution,” that natural childbearing “would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction,” and that the goal was “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” In October 2022 Verso published Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. The publisher’s own description traces the demand from Fourier through the Manifesto, Kollontai, and Firestone into the present. Lewis states the thesis on page four: “The family is the reason we are supposed to want to go to work, the reason we have to go to work, and the reason we can go to work.”

The Paper Trail, in Their Own Words

  • 1848 — The Communist Manifesto: “Abolition of the family!”
  • 1884 — Engels: marriage is “the first class oppression”; child-rearing “becomes a public affair”
  • 1920 — Kollontai: “Society will feed, bring up and educate the child”
  • 1970 — Firestone: end “the sex distinction itself”; replace childbearing with technology
  • 1995 — The Family: A Proclamation to the World — the answer
  • 2022 — Lewis, Abolish the Family, Verso: the title is the thesis

So no, it is not a caricature. It is a bibliography. The people advancing it wrote the books, chose the titles, and traced their own lineage so nobody would have to do it for them. When a leader says there are those who wish to abolish the family, he is quoting a BOOK COVER.

The Proclamation Answered It in 1995

Look at where the Proclamation sits on that list. Twenty-five years after Firestone, twenty-seven before Lewis. Same-sex marriage was legal nowhere on earth; a single Hawaii court had only begun to consider it. The phrase “gender ideology” did not exist in ordinary speech. And the First Presidency and the Twelve put their names to this:

The Family: A Proclamation to the World (1995)

“…marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children… Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose… The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential for parenthood as husband and wife… Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.”

Set the two documents side by side. Marriage ordained of God, against Engels calling it the first oppression. Gender essential and eternal, against Firestone’s demand to eliminate “the sex distinction itself.” Parenthood as the FIRST commandment, against replacing it with a laboratory. Children entitled to a father and a mother, against Kollontai’s collective that will “feed, bring up and educate the child.” The Proclamation is a point-by-point refusal of a program already in print. It closes with a warning, which is the part people skip:

The Family: A Proclamation to the World (1995)

“We warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.”

Officers of government everywhere. The Proclamation did not treat the family as a private preference to be kept out of public life. It called on governments to defend it and said what happens to nations that do not. Was that prophetic? In October 2025 Elder Ronald A. Rasband told the whole Church what to make of the document: “The proclamation has a divine origin, so we must treat it with the reverence deserving words from God.”

The Empty Cradle Was Not an Accident

While one bookshelf was teaching that the family is an oppression, another was teaching that children are a catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich opened The Population Bomb (1968) with this: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Governments believed him. By 1974 a classified United States security study, NSSM 200, directed that “assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and strategic interest,” and named thirteen of them. A one-child regime was imposed on a fifth of humanity from 1980 until 2016. Two generations were taught that the most responsible thing they could do for the planet was not to have a baby.

The starvation never came. What came instead is on the United Nations’ own ledger. The 2024 World Population Prospects reports that “the global fertility rate stands at 2.25 live births per woman,” that “two thirds of the global population live in a country or area where average fertility is below 2.1,” and that the world will reach “a peak of around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s” and then decline. Did anyone predict that? Nope. Not the demographers, and not the man who wrote the bomb. The Lord did, and He said the opposite:

D&C 104:17 · D&C 49:16–17

“For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things.” … “They twain shall be one flesh, and all this that the earth might answer the end of its creation; and that it might be filled with the measure of man.”

Enough and to spare. The earth was MADE to be filled with the children of God, and the first commandment given to the first couple was to fill it (Moses 2:28). Now put the two bookshelves together. One movement teaches that marriage is oppression and the child belongs to the collective. Another teaches that the child is a burden on the planet. They arrived in the same century and aimed at the same cradle, and the cradle is now EMPTY across most of the developed world. Is that a coincidence? No. Two bookshelves, one century, one target. Moroni would call that a signature.

Awake to a Sense of Your Awful Situation

Moroni stops the Jaredite record cold to speak to us about movements that work to overthrow societies from within, and he tells us what to do when we recognize one.

Ether 8:22–25

“And whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations, to get power and gain, until they shall spread over the nation, behold, they shall be destroyed… suffer not that these murderous combinations shall get above you… when ye shall see these things come among you that ye shall awake to a sense of your awful situation… For it cometh to pass that whoso buildeth it up seeketh to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries; and it bringeth to pass the destruction of all people, for it is built up by the devil.”

The objection writes itself: these people published, they did not swear oaths in the dark. Grant it. Moroni’s test in verse 25 is not the method but the AIM: “to overthrow the freedom of all lands.” The secrecy came later, from the regimes that carried the program out. The claim is a narrow one. The Manifesto was international from its first page, the family was first on its list of what had to go, and the command attached to recognizing such a thing is not to debate it politely. It is to AWAKE.

Paul saw the same end from the other side. His portrait of the last days lists men “disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection” (2 Timothy 3:1–5), and in Romans he adds that such a society will “not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (Romans 1:30–32). The Greek behind without natural affection is astorgos, the absence of the instinctive love between parent and child. Paul wrote it in the mid-60s as a prophecy. Verso published it in 2022 as a manifesto.

Why It Matters More Than Politics Can Say

Is the family the building block of a good society? Yes, and that is the smallest thing that is true of it. It is the structure of ETERNITY, and the Restoration exists to make it permanent.

D&C 131:1–4

“In the celestial glory there are three heavens or degrees; and in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if he does not, he cannot obtain it.”

An order of the priesthood. That is what marriage is in the mind of God, and it is why Engels had it backwards. Marriage between a man and a woman is not the first oppression; it is the first PRIESTHOOD, given to Adam and Eve before there was a temple or a tribe of Levi. The order carries a duty and a penalty in one verse. Parents who do not teach their children faith, repentance, and baptism: “the sin be upon the heads of the parents” (D&C 68:25–28). So stay away from our kids is only half a sentence. God assigned the children to their parents, and He will ask the parents what they taught. Whoever wants the collective to raise the child is claiming an assignment heaven gave to someone else.

The oldest revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants, given the night Moroni first came, is about exactly this:

D&C 2:2–3

“And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming.”

Utterly wasted. That is the stake. The Manifesto wants the “hallowed co-relation of parents and child” dissolved. Elijah was sent to weld it across every generation that ever lived, and if the welding fails the whole earth was for nothing. President Dallin H. Oaks said it plainly in October 2025: “The doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints centers on the family. Essential to our doctrine on the family is the temple.” And: “Our relationship to God and the purpose of our mortal life are explained in terms of the family.” Abolish the family and you have abolished the explanation of why any of us is here.

A Word About Sides

This page names no party and no person. The Church does not, and the argument does not need it. The family had enemies before any modern party existed and will have them after. Governments “were instituted of God for the benefit of man,” and He “holds men accountable for their acts in relation to them, both in making laws and administering them, for the good and safety of society” (D&C 134:1). That accountability falls on every officer of every party. Within living memory, saying a child does best with a mother and a father was not a controversy in any of them. It is one now. What changed was not the family. So judge any leader by one measure. Does he strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society, or weaken it? A man who says children belong with their parents has said something true, whatever else he has said. A movement that prints “abolish the family” on its book covers has told you what it is, whatever else it calls itself.

The Verdict

Is the family under attack? The attackers say so themselves, in print, since 1848, and the most recent of them chose it as a book title. That question is settled by their OWN bibliography.

Was the Proclamation prophetic? It was issued in the middle of that bibliography, before the culture had caught up to the theory, and it refused every plank clause by clause. It said the earth had enough and to spare while the world was being told the opposite. The empty cradles of 2026 have settled which voice was telling the truth.

And what is a birthright? Not a nation. It is the covenant handed from father to child. Esau sold it for a bowl of lentils. Elijah restored it so hearts could turn to fathers, and it is made permanent in an order of the priesthood called marriage. Jesus taught it: what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. Paul wrote it when he warned of a generation without natural affection, and Moroni commanded it when he told us to AWAKE. Reject all that and you have rejected the reason the earth was made.

Sources

Primary Sources — Every Quotation Verified Against the Linked Text

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