I really like the idea of practical short meme statements.
Strengthen the Family: support your local homeless shelter.
Strengthen the Family: stand against domestic violence.
Strengthen the Family: keep parents from abandoning gay children.
Strengthen the Family: make every family welcome at church.
Strengthen the Family: spend more time with yours.
I’ve borrowed the ideas and concept. And really like it.
Any others?
Wheat & Tares 
Strengthen the Family: Support livable wage legislation.
Strengthen the Family: Bail out homeowners, not just banks.
Strengthen the Family: Regulate banks, hedge funds, venture capitalism, etc. Tax short investment sales.
Strengthen the Family: Pass Universal Healthcare.
Strengthen the Family: Tax extreme wealth.
Strengthen the family: Tax corporations.
Strengthen the Family: Become anti racist.
Strengthen the Family: Strengthen voting rights.
Strengthen the Family: Prosecute companies that price gouge (particularly when they p post record profits during times of inflation).
Strengthen the Family: Welcome immigrants.
Strengthen the Family: Strengthen public schools.
Strengthen the Family: Provide free college.
Strengthen the Family: Close tax loopholes.
Strengthen the Family: Universal free school breakfast and lunch.
Strengthen the Family – make rent/home ownership affordable
Strengthen the Family: Support access to affordable, effective birth control.
Strengthen the Family: Insist on comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education in K-12.
Strengthen the Family: Support paid family leave policies.
Strengthen the Family: Expand access to quality childcare and support fair compensation for childcare workers.
Strengthen the Family: Listen to your kids.
Well most (not all) of what I read above represents Democrat talking points. Not saying I agree or disagree but come on guys.
The way I have protected my family is to put them BEFORE the Church, not as after.
Strengthen the Family: love your children for who they are, not just if they become who you think they should be.
Strengthen the family: make them an offer they can’t refuse.
Wait… maybe that is the wrong family.
Okay, I actually love this. Well done Stephen.
Josh h is right that many of these represent democratic talking points, especially in the comments (so far) and not quite as much in the OP. But when I think of Republican ideas to strengthen the family I can’t help but get a little sarcastic. I’m sure there *are* some Republican points that could fit, but I’m not the right person to come up with them. I’m sorry to say I think it you try to be non partisan on this topic (accept gay family members! Support your homeless shelter) you’re going to look like you’re leaning left.
Rockwell: It’s very tricky these days. Folks on the right are really into parental rights when it comes to schools, books, control over their kids’ choices until they are adults. But these same folks don’t trust parents who desire to help their LGBTQ kids. An 8-year old is old enough to “choose” to be baptized but a 15-year old is not old enough to transition, even if his or her parents agree. So I’m certainly not going to defend the right either.
josh h is right. All those points are Democrat talking points. It’s like Democrats want to support the family! Weird. Everyone knows the Republicans are the ones who are really devoted to the family. Here are some Republican leaning pro-family memes, to even things out.
Support the family: pass legislation letting parents see everything their kids say on social media.
Support the family: make it easy to ban books that make parents uncomfortable about topics like race and sexual issues.
Support the family: Cut taxes for the rich and then holler in panic about the cost of forgiving $20,000 of student debt for normal people.
Support the family: Separate immigrant families at the border to teach immigrants to stay in their own countries if they want to keep their family together.
Support the family: Send Child Protective Services to take custody of the children if the parents are supportive of a trans child.
Support the family: Actively oppose any attempt to limit fossil fuel use so the world is in even worse shape for your grandkids.
Support the family: Make an expectant mother wait until she’s dying before allowing an abortion.
Support the family: oppose livable wages because people who work food service and retail jobs shouldn’t be marrying and having kids anyway.
Support the family: stop woke ideas like making up for past inequality and treating people who are different than you like they’re human beings.
There. That evens things out.
Okay, that was snarky of me. I spent about 10 minutes pondering why the Republican agenda to protect the family seems so bizarre in my opinion, and I concluded it’s because their agenda is based on fear and misdirection.
Misdirection: the Republicans have convinced their voting base that the country’s economic woes will have to be paid for by ordinary taxpayers. Republicans are appalled at things like the $20,000 student loan forgiveness because they’re insisting that loan forgiveness is stealing from ordinary voters. Yet the Republicans also routinely pass huge tax cuts that puts hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of rich people and rich corporations. The economic policies of Republicans hurt middle income and lower income people, but they’ve managed to convince those same people that the real threat to their economics is the government trying to help middle and lower income people. Student tax loan forgiveness and social safety net programs don’t have to be paid for out of ordinary taxpayer taxes (meaning people earning less than $500,000 income/year) if the Republicans would raise the highest margin tax rates back to pre-Reagan levels, and beef up the wealth tax.
The Republican’s agenda on gender and sexual orientation is based entirely on fear. Oh no!! LGBTQ individuals are coming for your children!! Aaaaghhh!! They make stuff up, and exaggerate actual incidents to make it sounds like there’s a constant and looming threat and only the Republicans will protect you. LGBTQ+ people are not a threat to the family and the legislation is ludicrous and hurtful. I’d go thru this in more detail, but I don’t want to entirely derail this entertaining post.
Back to the memes.
Strengthen the Family: add the family pet to your employer-sponsored health insurance.
Strengthen the Family: Empower parents to “lead” their households in authority regardless of gender in completing their “joint” responsibilities of “Nurturing”, “Presiding” and “Providing/Protecting” Period. Full stop.
Parents spend a fair amount of time shaming themselves (mostly non-verbally) for being a “non-nurturing but providing” mother or a “nurturing, empathetic but non-leading/presiding” father.
Janey,
I think fear is part of the policies pushed by Republican politicians, but I think the motive is at least 2-fold:
Raise money. These topics bring in a lot of campaign donations
To make policies that make the rich richer
To pass tax cuts
To distract attention from their base
Make their base feel like they’re better than others in their base
To privatize things that benefit the general public, like education
p.s. I did not arrive at my conclusions overnight. My parents cancelled each other’s votes. I read a lot and listened a lot. Good sources matter. Republicans know that, which is why they vilify mainstream media, academia, helping professions, government, any Democrat that is showing promise.
I’m sadly surprised sometimes by the people who are unable to recognize the logic fallacies they employ.
Many people are far too concerned with defining what a family is and what a family is not.
Strengthen the family; however you define it and whoever you consider to be family.
Strengthen the family; don’t try to tear other families down, however they define it.
A slight modification: Strengthen YOUR Family; but stay the hell away from mine!
More memes:
If these are partisan, it is because Republicans chose to politicize them. They benefit all of us.
Strengthen the family: Regulate train safety, especially those carrying toxic cargo (and people, of course)
Strengthen the Family: Hold corporations 100% accountable for damage they create. Quintuple damages if they fought against regulation
Strengthen the family: Insist on clean air
Strengthen the family: Insist on clean water
Strengthen the family: Believe what people know about themselves
Strengthen the Family: Allow a woman, in consultation with her primary healthcare provider, to make the decisions that are best for her
(Same with other pregnant people)
Strengthen the family: Take actions that slow and halt climate change
Strengthen the family: Promote a healthy gun culture, and hold bad actors accountable
Strengthen the family: Fully fund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Strengthen the family: Fully fund the I.R.S.
Strengthen the Family: Healthcare politicians and CEOs get is the least one can purchase on the ACA website
An aside: who else remembers how much Republican politicians fought against the FMLA? I now know so many people, of all political persuasions, who *love” it. They speak up about their rights.
I love that
Strengthen the Family: Overturn a Republican-appointed federal judge’s decision in Texas today that some Affordable Care Act mandates cannot be enforced nationwide, including those that require insurers to provide a wide array of preventive care services.
Some of you guys are hilarious: “strengthen the family…regulate train safety”.
I bet all of us here are pro-family but i guess some of you are going to let us know all about your politics too.
“Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else.”
–Strengthen the Family–
I just want to be clear that in my experiences homeless shelters do not support the family. This winter a family I know lost their housing. It was super cold dead winter. The homeless shelters in our area are not for families. They have a women’s shelter and a men’s shelter. Children are taken away from their parents and scent to foster care.
I brought my friends sleeping bags and they slept in their car to avoid being split up. The transitional bishop in our area would only give them 2 nights which really made me regret my tithing. Eventually my friends moved to CA. There’s no affordable housing there either but at least it isn’t so cold.
Our country needs to incentivize the building of lots of affordable housing, and all churches should be doing more for the homeless. In my opinion that is the main ay to strengthen the family today
Sasso – I agree with your comments about political motivations.
About train regulations supporting the family — sure! I’ve read news stories about the people who lived near the Palestine, Ohio disaster, and they’re struggling with health problems and huge amounts of stress. Plus their homes probably lost a lot of resale value. That’s stress on families. The train that derailed today in Minnesota is causing stress on families.
But let’s expand our concern beyond families. I spent more than a decade as an unmarried, childless, single adult and always felt a bit sidelined by the focus on the family. Sure, the Church would then say that I was a family all by myself, but that was just dumb newspeak, on par with “all women are mothers!”. I was not a family. I was a single, childless adult. And I still mattered. I should matter to policy makers then and now.
Strengthen Any Human Being: improve train safety regulations.
Janey
Very well said. I totally agree. Thank you, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more inclusive.
Josh H: That’s because one party (Democrats) believes it takes a village to raise a child, and the other party (GOP) only wants to “own the libs.” I would love to return to the days when the right actually gave a crap about these discussions enough to participate in good faith. Mitt Romney is among a shrinking cohort of conservatives who want to talk about how to actually make things better for families. Even Joe Manchin refused (largely due to his perception of his conservative state’s voters) to support subsidies for chid care.
josh h
I invite you to examine the policies I listed that I think matter to the family (and PEOPLE).
Let me know what policies you agree with, what you disagree with. Mixed? Do they matter to people who depend on a paycheck to live? Do they help, or harm the US? How do they impact the economy? How do they affect kids’ development?
I’m happy to have a real discussion with you.
(Thanks to the regular commenters who give us perspectives from other countries – I really enjoy other perspectives.)
Protect the family: Allow children to live through the school day.
Protect the family: Allow women to decide whether and when to have their children.
@josh h, honestly and truly, what are the pro-family republican policies — other than those that impose one family’s set of morality onto everyone in the state (book bans, anti-racism curriculum bans, etc.)? The only thing I can think of is lowering tax burdens but those seem to make very little difference for actual middle class people. As others have said, this seems partisan because of the nature of what republicans are doing, not because of the political orientation of the blogger.
Sorry not sorry. Here come more “Democratic talking points:”
Strengthen the family: support labor unions
Strengthen the family: pass universal income
Strengthen the family: expand Medicaid and mandate employer health insurance
Strengthen the family: reduce air pollution.
Oh, wait. Those were all policies proposed by one Richard Nixon. Well, except for the first one. Tricky Dick was no friend of Labor. But it just goes to show how far to the right the democratic party has gone and how completely off the rails the GOP has fallen.
Strengthen the family by having sex with porn stars while married, and calling being called out for illegal payments to cover it up persecution.
Strengthen the family by giving each child an assault rifle.
Strengthen your family by persecuting gay families.
Strengthen poor families by making rich families richer.