It’s a cheap shot to go after someone for being happy. Strictly speaking, that disposition is called “envy” — and it’s what prevents Democratic progress on the pro-family front.
Since Sean Duffy‘s nomination and eventual confirmation as secretary of transportation, details of his large family and Christian background have been easy targets. For the Duffy-opposed, such details betray an essentially prejudiced outlook, especially toward women. What’s more, his capacity represents an administration that prefers one family model to any other. A way to counter it is to do what the New York Times has done and show how hollow Duffy’s values are.
Except, they’re not. Yet the outlet has put a lot into that effort, nonetheless: Recently, Caroline Kitchener, the outlet’s “American family” reporter, charted Duffy’s course from MTV show The Real World to his current role in the Trump administration. More than anything else, she presents the now-flourishing Duffy family as theatrical, rather than redemptive. Special emphasis is on Duffy’s proclivity for reality television and his youthful promiscuity, along with his wife’s similar MTV history.
The outlet gave Kitchener the leeway (she “watched 15 hours of MTV reality TV”) and the resources (“located all of the nearly 50 archival episodes featuring Mr. Duffy”) to work on her Duffy hit-piece.
Its plain premise is to expose hypocrisy in socially conservative spheres, especially within the pro-fertility faction that threatens to drown out dominant anti-child messaging. As a former abortion reporter for the Washington Post, Kitchener knows this well. Her problem isn’t his old ways, but his new ones.
Kitchener’s opening line tells as much: “Sean Duffy would like you to watch his family making pancakes.”
The comment is in reference to a Fox News segment showing the Duffy family cooking breakfast together. It’s a common activity, and one which some might even call cute.
At the same time, the segment is an overt step toward normalizing their family style. A traditional family platformed in this manner is one regression too far. So, Kitchener zeroes in on Duffy’s knack for knowing “what makes people tune in,” on TV and elsewhere.
In a society where liberals tend to do art better, it’s difficult to imagine that serious conservatives might be good at media, too. So Kitchener tries to square those impressions, and lands on the consistently confusing reality that a devout Catholic might take many forms. The church has clear moral guidelines, but everything else ranges from the media-savvy Duffys to the entirely offline no-name family. In that, it’s unfathomable that one such family might have an effective platform.
More prominent, and deeper, is the disbelief that anyone actually converts from libertinism to conservatism. The Left’s concept of volition extends only as far as its prescribed lifestyle, in which sexual freedom is the defining characteristic. Conversion away from it, into something like the Duffy family, is always and everywhere inauthentic.
It isn’t just disbelief, however, but willful deplatforming. For Kitchener, the Duffys can have no media presence without being boastful or oppressive.
“They present their way of life — marriage, pancakes and many children — as a far more fulfilling alternative,” she said.
In fact, it is: Ideology and family model are consistent predictors of happiness.
Her posture aligns with modern sentiments, if it brushes against the Democratic Party’s hopes to take over pro-family political messaging with items such as in vitro fertilization and universal childcare. What no leg of the party will admit, though — media, philanthropist, or political — is that its hope for “the American family” requires normalizing the one that works best and is most common. It requires an admission that we can rank such things, a no-go area for the social liberal.
BRINGING ‘RESISTANCE’ TO THE FERTILITY DEBATE
With all this evidence in tow, Kitchener does an excellent job of revealing how much of a threat the traditional family is to its alternatives. This is true not only in Duffy’s own life but also in the outlet’s aversion to giving the traditional family any platform at all. In the end, Kitchener winds up criticizing the concept that a policy might be family-centric, generally.
The Left, here coalescing in the New York Times, will back the piece despite its being a simple personal attack and one that explicitly advocates against the family. Inasmuch as it is clear their preferences are unchanged, their priorities will never be the family unit because they don’t intend it to succeed in the first place.