If Youth Knew, If Age Could 17 — Family: The United Nations and Conservatism

By Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019), and Short Reflections on American Secularism’s History and Philosophy (2020).

Here we talk about family.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Conservatives take the family as the fundamental unit of societies, the building block. It becomes a divine mandate in many theologies and religious social commentaries.

The United Nations is fundamentally allied with this vision in its foundational and associated documents with the description of the family as the fundamental group unit in the society.