The anti-family Right

Conservatives for decades have carried the pro-family mantle against a Left that is sometimes radical in its antipathy to marriage and parenthood.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the preeminent elected official on the Left, has suggested that it’s immoral to have children because of climate, and that the parent-child relationship is itself “carceral” (because of timeouts).

Prestige left-wing publications tell us that divorce is freedom, and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose as her closing argument the idea that heterosexual wives are all oppressed.

Throw in the “polyamory” lobbying, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the American Left today is home to the anti-family sentiment that will further suppress our birth rate.

But then you get on X, and you have to wonder if the men of the online Right have placed big bets on Kalshi that marriage and birth rates will fall another 25% in the next couple of years.

In reaction to deranged feminists on TikTok defending child-killer Lindsay Clancy, a bunch of conservative commentators decided to attack new mothers suffering postpartum depression.

“Much of the ‘depression’ that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake,” Matt Walsh posted. “The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.”

In the X eruption that followed, a bunch of right-wing dudes demonstrated a pretty broad disdain for women, especially the pregnant and recently pregnant types.

Catholic, conservative writer and mother Emily Zanotti responded to all this dreck by pointing out that Christians, of all people, ought to revere pregnancy as a noble sacrifice. “‘This is my body, given up for you,’ has never resonated, spiritually, more to me than in the pregnancy and newborn stages,” she posted.

Trumpist commentator Jack Posobiec scoffed, “The feminists are comparing themselves to Jesus’ sacrifice now.”

A conservatism that denigrates pregnancy and motherly sacrifice is basically the conservatism of left-wing feminists’ caricature.

AOC’S LONELY ROAD

Of course, a party that nominates and appoints known philanderers Ken Paxton, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump is the party that makes the left-wing feminists’ case against marriage.

Throw in the vaguely pagan and clearly misogynistic tone of the “manosphere,” and old-fashioned ideas like love, marriage, and babies are feeling alien in more and more places along the ideological spectrum.