Global Power Grab

The Cultural Marxists’ Strategic Assault on Religion, Life & Family
by Patrick F. Fagan & William L. Saunders

Two years ago, in an article titled “How U.N. Conventions on Women’s and Children’s Rights Undermine Family, Religion, and Sovereignty,” we considered the difficulties inherent in two United Nations conventions: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).¹ In particular, we called attention to the fact that the committees entrusted to review implementation reports by state parties are acting far beyond their actual powers in what can only be described as an “ideological” manner.

Here we intend to show that the activism of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women are part of a worldwide effort to undermine the family, life, and religion. CEDAW and CRC are simply two pieces used by cultural Marxists to further their cause in the international clash of civilizations. The two sides in this clash have opposing views as to how sexuality and reproduction are structured, one seeing them as linked to, and the other as decoupled from, a sense of creation, or of the Creator. There is no reconciling these views. They clash.

Engels’s Attack on the Family

Influential intellectual roots of anti-family and anti-religious efforts can be found in the writings of Karl Marx’s collaborator, the German philosopher Friedrich Engels. Engels, in his vision of state ownership of the means of production, and of the ultimate triumph of the proletariat, was keenly aware that two institutions would stand in the way of his communist vision: the family, and organized religion. He understood that in order for the international communist vision to come to fruition, the natural primacy of family and religion in society must be undermined.

Engels saw the establishment of the family as an aberration of the proper order of history, and its collapse as a necessary element for the coming communist world order. As he wrote in his preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “The old society, built on groups based on ties of sex, bursts asunder in the collision of the newly-developed social classes.”

Engels’s rationale for the collapse of the family can be found in his materialistic view of man, in whom he understands all interactions to be products of class struggle, a struggle in which marriage plays a central role. He makes clear why monogamous marriage must be eliminated:

Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times.

And,

The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian (marriage), and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.²

Thus, the most fundamental of all “class struggles” (Engels’s overriding preoccupation) is that between male and female, in which marriage effects the subordination of woman by man.

Patrick F. Fagan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council.

William L. Saunders is Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life.

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