Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Poster

“Today the family is being attacked and defended with equal vehemence” captures a culture war in a single, elegant squeeze. Mark Poster isn’t describing a calm policy debate; he’s diagnosing a symbolic battlefield where “the family” operates less as a lived arrangement and more as a political brand. The genius of the line is its symmetry. Attacked and defended: two verbs that imply urgency, moral panic, and a sense that something essential is at stake. Equal vehemence: not equal evidence, not equal stakes, but equal intensity. Poster is pointing at heat, not light.

The subtext is that “family” has become a proxy for deeper anxieties: about gender roles, sexuality, economic precarity, and the erosion of stable identities in modern life. When defenders invoke “family values,” they’re often defending an idealized template (heteronormative, patriarchal, self-sufficient) as much as actual households. When critics “attack the family,” they may be attacking the way that template has been used to discipline people, exclude nonconforming lives, or mask unequal labor and power.

Context matters: Poster’s work sits in conversations about postmodernity, media, and shifting social formations. As institutions like church, workplace, and neighborhood loosen their grip, the family gets asked to carry more meaning than it can bear. That’s why rhetoric spikes. The family becomes a screen onto which societies project their fear of change and their longing for order, and both sides shout because neither is only talking about domestic life. They’re talking about what kind of future gets to feel “normal.”