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I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College (Pennsylvania), about his most recent book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (WND Books, 2015). The book brings to light “how radical leftists, for close to two centuries, have worked to undermine and fundamentally change—or even destroy—marriage, family life, and traditional social structures and relationships.

“Takedown exposes how gay marriage is serving as a Trojan horse for the far left to secure the final takedown of marriage that it has long wanted, and countless everyday Americans are oblivious to the deeper forces at work. Takedown takes no prisoners and bluntly shows the reader that even Karl Marx and his more anti-marriage comrade Engels would be dumbfounded at the mere thought that modern Americans would gladly join them in their rejection of God’s design for natural marriage and the family.”

SM: What led you to write this book?

PK: Many people are asking me that. Friends or people generally who have read my books or who agree with me politically, including those in the culture wars who deal with the gay-marriage issue, are asking me, “Why are you getting involved in this? You don’t want to wade into this, it’s a very uncomfortable area. You’re going to get viscously attacked.”

The reason I wrote this is because of my background in the Cold War, communism, dealing with radical ideologies. I lecture on The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, cultural Marxism, the 1960s New Left.

Every semester, I teach my students about The Communist Manifesto. My students actually read it. We don’t just say, “Oh, The Communist Manifesto is a really good book if you just pause and take a look at it. You’ll see it talks about all kinds of good things.” I hear that all the time from people. It’s nonsense. No, we actually read the book, and there’s a passage where Marx and Engels write about the “abolition of the family.” You don’t just kind of let that one go and move on to the next thing. Hands go up in the air, “Professor what does this mean?” So, I then talk about Marx’s and Engels’ views on marriage and Marx’s family life and Engels’ family life. Then I note that when they wrote about this in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, they were already calling it “an infamous proposal of the communists.” So, this notion of an “abolition of marriage” must have been around for a while.

Then I note people like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier and some of the early American socialist utopians who were talking about redefining marriage and family. So really, Shaun, what’s going on here, and why I’ve written this book, is that I know there has been this far-left attack trying to redefine and reshape and take down natural, traditional, biblical marriage and family for at least 200 years.

For me, I come at this issue today of redefining marriage through same-sex marriage as something that has much longer, much older roots. Even if typical modern same-sex-marriage advocates have no idea of those roots (and they don’t); even if they’re certainly not communist or radical socialists (and they’re not); even if they’ve never read Marx and Engels (and most of them haven’t); even if they’ve never heard of these radical socialist utopians (and I know they haven’t heard of them); even if they’ve never heard of cultural Marxism (which they haven’t); whether they realize it or not, they’re kind of at the end of this long march of two centuries of trying to redefine and reshape and take down natural, traditional, biblical family and marriage.

SM: You know as I was reading through the book something came to mind that I read awhile back, “The best thing that happened to the Left was the downfall of communism.” To me it seems in line with what your book is talking about; that we have a lot of people who definitely aren’t communist, but are supporting one of the central features of communism to abolish the family.

PK: That’s precisely correct. It’s a crucial point and I can’t emphasize it enough. I’ll say it again and again to these progressive folks who support same-sex marriage: “Now let me be clear: I’m not saying that you’re a communist or you’re part of a communist plot. Don’t caricature my argument, don’t misrepresent this.” They do that all the time. They’ll do it to belittle and mock an argument that they don’t like.

What I’m saying to them is that their advocacy of same-sex marriage fits and fuels this much more radical, much more sinister extreme Left agenda against the family and marriage that they don’t even realize. Let me also add that there are some people in today’s same-sex-marriage movement who are from this very far Left, who are on the communist Left and who realize precisely how this fits that long-term agenda and in fact do support same-sex marriage for that reason.

But either way, the vast majority of same-sex marriage supporters simply think they’re advancing a positive thing. They’re forwarding “marriage equality,” they’re pushing for “marriage rights,” they’re trying to help people, not hurt people. What I’m saying is that they don’t realize that they’re part of a hurtful process. I’m saying that they’re aiding and abetting that process whether they know it or not.

SM: Tell me, if you would, why is abolition of the family so central to communism?

PK: Well, for reasons that, ironically, communists and conservatives would agree upon: That is, there is nothing more fundamental to Western society and culture than the family. That’s why a conservative wants to conserve and preserve the nuclear family, the Judeo-Christian family. Conversely, that’s why the communist wants to take down the natural, traditional, biblical, nuclear Judeo-Christian family. The communists are all about–as Marx and Engels said it themselves–the “most radical rupture in traditional relations.” To really remake the world, they’ve got to start with the family. They’ve also got to start with religion and God. So, these absolute most fundamental things must be attacked, revised, redefined, and reshaped in their own image.