I posted a thread on Ask Metafilter but within the hour it was closed for new comments. Basically the family is under a lot of pressure, no? And it's been going on for some time. One helpful comment I had before the ban was "Accepting your premise as basically true for the sake of argument, because the concept of the nuclear family didn't serve enormous swaths of the population very well; now there is pushback to include groups who were previously marginalized in a useful concept of family." I think that's a good point to hear. A pushback against the constricting definition of what family is. That is, something like that 50's teddybear image or the hippy who isn't going to settle down. Can that really explain all of the macro pattern though: The moderator at Metafilter seemed to assume I was saying that all of these achievements should be taken back in the interest of protecting the family. I was trying to make great pains to say that my interest is not in debating whether it's good or bad, but to establish whether someone is pulling the strings because it looks quite strongly to be the case... though it could just be coincidence... but I rarely believe in coincidence, a sliding scale depending on how much I believe in it. ** Someone pulling the strings isn't necessarily bad ** It's nonsense. The 'Attack on the family' is just rhetoric used by right wingers opposed to the first two things