June is widely recognized as Pride Month, but a handful of Republican governors have bestowed alternative titles that both supporters and opponents view as counterprogramming.
Without directly saying the idea was to replace Pride, the governors of Indiana and Tennessee rebranded June as Nuclear Family Month to celebrate units made up of “one husband, one wife and any biological, adopted or fostered children.”
In Alabama, it’s Strong Families Month, intended to coincide with Father’s Day. Gov. Kay Ivey’s proclamation says fathers are “the head of the household” and “homes led by a father and mother provide children with the structure and discipline necessary to succeed throughout life.”
I fully thought that “nuclear family” was just a way of describing the most closely-related members of a family that all lived together, and that going further outwards (like in the nuclear electron shells I learned in high school chemistry), was a way of conceptualizing where more distant cousins would fall in relation to that core.
Now I’m hearing that it’s some fucking prescriptivist, cis- and heteronormative term that is meant to exclude some types of families, and that is fucking bullshit. I’m not inclined to let the worst shitheads in the country steal the very concept of family like they’ve tried to do with tiki torches, Hawaiian shirts, and patriotism. Fuck that, and fuck them
I’m pretty sure the nuclear part references the 1950s, which is the time period they want to return to.
It always was