Robert Ripley (1890-1949) was a one-of-a-kind impresario with a fascination for the far-out. He built an empire reporting the weird, exotic and grotesque through his columns, broadcasts and the “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” museums, called Odditoriums. People the world over goggled at Ripley’s accounts of the flaky and freakish. Germany’s new family policy fits the bill. Were Ripley around today he would jump on it in a heartbeat.

The basics about the family 

First, some honest-to-goodness eternal truths, aka facts: 

• The family is society’s basic social unit. Everywhere. One way or another, we’re all born into a family. A nuclear family is a husband, wife and hopefully children.
• The character and conduct of families drive demography.
• When enough families are broken or dysfunctional, society suffers. As goes the family, so goes civilization.

Surely everyone knows that. Or do they? In the oh-so-modern West, we’ve educated common sense out of people. Folks are thoroughly conditioned to spend, consume, wallow in guilt and respond to situations (stimuli) in ways that don’t make sense -- think of Pavlov’s dog. That is nowhere more evident than among the “highly educated.”

Higher education is a government-subsidized racket industry; diploma mills thrive. That’s unfortunate, because those highly educated, hubris-heavy, ultra-modern moral relativists who make up the managerial elite running and ruining today’s West are dangerous. Is that alarmist? Is yours truly drifting into tin foil hat territory? Look no further than Germany.

‘Der Untergang’

Germany was once a great nation. In 9 AD Hermann, known to the Romans as Arminius, annihilated the Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest. That helped nurture a nascent collective consciousness among the Germanic tribes. Fast forward some 1800 years and the German Confederation was formed.

In history’s bloodiest century, Germany bore the brunt of two world wars, losing millions of young military men without issue plus millions more civilians, a demographic catastrophe. Germany was divided, lost a quarter of its territory and has since been ruled from without. To be a patriotic German these days puts you on the radar of the Bundeskriminalamt, the rough equivalent of America’s FBI.

Geopolitically, Germany is a vassal state of the American empire, occupied under the guise of the NATO alliance. NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, said the alliance’s raison d’être was to “Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” And boy, are those Germans kept down! But that is just fine with the current German leadership. They go the extra mile demoralizing their people with non-stop shaming via WWII guilt. Political correctness demands that the totality of Germany’s glorious history is reductio ad Hitlerum.

Since NATO sanctions were imposed on Russian oil and gas, Germany’s energy costs have gone through the roof and a drastic deindustrialization has ensued. When the Nord Stream pipelines (part German-owned) were destroyed, depriving Germany of a major potential source of cheap energy, there was nary a peep from the government.Two centuries ago one of Germany’s most famous sons, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote something quite applicable to the German situation today: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Believe it or not

Family and marriage are constitutionally protected under Germany’s longstanding “Basic Law.” However, fully a third of the country’s children are born outside of wedlock, a 65 percent increase in 25 years with no end in sight. The divorce rate is 40 percent. This is problematic because children from single-parent households are more vulnerable to social pathologies. 

Not to worry. Rather than address these challenges and support German families, a too-clever-by-half German government simply redefines them. Bureaucrats have devised a novel legal framework, a "Community of Responsibility" (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft) where “groups of between two and six people will be able to take legal responsibility for one another.”

This is being peddled to the public as a way to help the elderly. A third of Germans aged 65 and over live alone. Thus the “Community of Responsibility” would confer up to six people with legal familial status, enabling acquaintances to intervene with medical and financial matters. Many are dubious. You don’t need to fabricate a legal “family” to do that. In the US a power of attorney serves the purpose.

But it is not the elderly who are clamoring for this scheme; rather it is woke politicos and their “counter-cultural” constituency. This is yet another example of political elites pandering to their pet minorities (in PC-speak, “marginalized communities”).

Polygamous marriages are legally recognized in Germany, provided all were “married” outside Germany. While that is eminently illogical, the “Community of Responsibility” scheme would fix that by allowing polygamy (no more than five wives, mind you), polyandry (five husbands max) and polyamory (up to six). Oppressive. Is restricting a harem to five wives a human rights violation?

Apparently, polyamory is the new thing. Last week the Gray Lady, aka the New York Times, ran a warm and fuzzy piece “Lessons from a 20-Person Polycule.” Huh?

The word “polycule” is a synthesis of polyamory — engaging in multiple romantic relationships — and molecule. It’s not clear when the word was coined, but it seems to have started catching on around 15 years ago to suggest an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic.

Add “polycule” to your expanding PC vocabulary. NYT says the word “started catching on around 15 years ago.” Have we been in the dark or what? “Polycule” members can be cisgender, binary, non-binary, or even weird. No discrimination here.

Sadly, the loving “polycule” so glowingly profiled in NYT would not make the cut for Germany’s new ersatz family. Twenty is too many. Limit it to six, and presto, you’d be legally a “family.” The “community” of mom, pop and young’uns is old hat but would thankfully cling to life as legally equivalent to a “polycule” in Germany.

This is moral relativism on steroids. The secularized political class, entirely untethered from faith, folk and common sense, has lost its moral compass. 

According to Deutsche Welle

Here's the maliciously misleading Deutsche Welle (DW) headline: “German society seeks alternatives to family.” False. It is not German society seeking “alternatives to family.” Rather it is German-in-name-only political elites that have concocted, promoted and are foisting this on the German public. DW:

[T]he German government plans to introduce a new legal mechanism to help people in non-romantic relationships to take responsibility for one another.

The way that people in Germany live, love, parent and age is changing. But the question of who and how to take care of one another, be it childcare or caring for the elderly, still looms large in a society where one in four people say they are lonely.

Described by Justice Minister Marco Buschmann as "probably the biggest family law reform in decades," the cornerstones of one potentially radical proposal have now been agreed by Germany's coalition government of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP).

"The community of responsibility also has an added symbolic value," Buschmann said. "Anyone who enters into it gives a social bond, a structure, a positive name."

Yes, dear reader, I also find Justice Minister Buschmann’s statement confusing. Don’t know what he means by “social bond, a structure, a positive name.” Maybe the DW translators messed up, or maybe, like so many other Atlanticist panjandrums, the guy just doesn’t make sense anyway. Hope I don’t get put on the Bundeskriminalamt hate list for saying that.

Sociologist

Leave it to DW to trot out a sociologist to explain the government’s new familial paradigm. They turned to Ms Andrea Newerla, “who has conducted research on intimacy and relationship patterns:”

Newerla points to the example of "chosen families" created by queer people as a result of being rejected by their biological families after coming out, and that our daily lives would perhaps be better structured more around friendships as opposed to one romantic partner.

In an aging society, Newerla says the question of how we want to live together and the types of support networks that people rely upon needs to be completely rethought. That includes the decentralization of the dominant relationship model of romantic love between two people.

Don’t you just love PC-speak? Traditional marriage is the “dominant relationship model” that should be “decentralized.” That’s an ominous rebranding. Is this phase I in the marginalization of traditional marriage? Ms. Newerla:

The truth is there is no security in modern romantic relationships and people often learn that the hard way …

We have to be creative and we also need incentives from the state to enable us to try out these different forms. The community of responsibility could actually be a free space to experiment, because it would actually be possible for groups of people to experiment with new forms of community in a way that is recognized by the state and legally protected [as marriage is]."

I know that right-wing populists don't want these new living concepts. It makes it hard for those who want to live in diversity, not only in romantic relationships, but all other forms of diversity.

The idea of the small family is very useful for both the state and for capitalism, because that's where most of this unpaid care work, largely by women, that is really foundational to a functioning society and [market economy], takes place.

Traditional family in the crosshairs

Listen to that! The sociologist’s opining would be hilarious were it not so nefarious. The premise “there is no security in modern romantic relationships” leads me to believe that somehow, somewhere, somebody’s feelings got hurt, and we need to get even. Perhaps government monitoring of romantic relationships is on the horizon. State intervention could be just the tonic for hurt feelings.

How about “The community of responsibility could actually be a free space to experiment.” “Polycule,” anyone? The people are such great guinea pigs for the politicians. Democracy? Go ahead and fund yet another colossal social experiment. Maybe it will work as well as the importation of 1.5 million unemployed mostly male “refugees” a few years back. Rev up the social engineering wrecking ball and focus on the family.

Then there’s saying the attitude of “right-wing populists… makes it hard for those who want to live in diversity.” Pure PC virtue signaling. A requisite swipe at the “right” is de rigueur for proclaiming your establishment cred. Weaponize family policy to root out the oppressors! Down with patriarchy!

Finally, "The idea of the small family is very useful for both the state and for capitalism.” Like their Soviet predecessors, these petty PC potentates view all in subservience to the state. Saying the family should have utility for the state and capitalism is upside down. The state and the capitalist system should serve the family. But that makes sense, so don’t hold your breath for something so family-friendly to come about.

Dissent

Not everyone is on board with this weirdness. Opposition parliamentarian Gunter Krings says:

[I]t remains unclear whether there is any need at all for such a completely new legal institution… If a 'marriage light' is to be invented here, one risks not only a tangible conflict with Article 6 of the Constitution, which particularly protects marriage but above all must create a highly complex new regulatory system.

The guy talks like a politician: “unclear,” my foot. It falls to the intrepid Gefira, a European think tank, to tell it like it is and warn Germans about the consequences of such malign meddling. From “Alternative to family or the downward spiral of the Western world:”

To make it manifestly clear: we are going to have remnants of the normal family, single mothers by the millions, polygamy (recognized by German law in the case of such marriages having been concluded abroad!), chosen families formed by homosexuals, cohabitation, patchwork families and finally(?) communities of responsibilities… What do the authorities and the ideologues do to handle this existential question? They chart a new social course, a course towards a society of atomized individuals loosely recombined in communities… [T]hey seem to be treating the society that they manage like disposable and replaceable chattel, like farm animals… The powers that be obviously tend to think that they can tweak the human nature… and rather than cultivate the family, they experiment on it, trying to replace it with a number of knock-offs.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Wonder how long it will be until people are locked up for saying “family values” or “family picnic?” It’s Community of Responsibility, Comrade! Our very own Verantwortungsgemeinschaft! Heil Diversität! Long live diversity!

You can’t make this stuff up, Mr Ripley. Believe it or not!  

Will Germany be a better place if it legalises polyamory? Tell what you think in the comments below.

Louis T. March has a background in government, business, and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author, and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

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