HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Hills are alive with the great right-wing illusion
Whenever I hear someone invoking "family values" to build a political argument, alarm bells ring. In the US in particular, assertions about the family have long been dog-whistle calls to bigots operating under the guise of so-called conservative Christianity. Organisations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family delivered millions of votes to Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, senior and junior) and they laid the foundations for the perverse fanaticism of the US’s religious right in supporting President Donald Trump. You can be sure that when these voices celebrate "the American family", they are actually asserting patriarchal misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and often anti-black racism. Their voices are echoed by like-minded (or similarly mindless) "family" advocates around the world, from India’s Hindu nationalist governing party, the BJP, to Family First in Australasia. The rise of neo-fascists in Europe has been similarly m...
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