The American family is not a relic.

Marriages are delayed or abandoned. Birth rates are at historic lows. The young couple that wants a yard, a garage, kids and a good life can't afford the down payment. The young man who should be starting a family is on his phone in his mother's basement, or buried in a county morgue with fentanyl in his blood. The young woman who wants children is told by everything around her that wanting them is a small, unserious life.

Half the country has stopped having kids. The other half is told its values are an embarrassment. The institutions that used to hold a family up, our churches, our schools, our neighborhoods, the honest job that once supported a home, are strained, underfunded, or pushed to the margins of American life.

For 250 years, the American family has been the foundation of what it means to be American.

It was fathers and sons who left home to win our independence, and just a generation later, to end slavery. It was mothers who held the line at home, then took up long days on the factory floor when an evil reached across two oceans to threaten the world. It was families who pushed west, who built our churches and the schoolhouses, who buried their dead in country soil and passed down a nation worth inheriting.

Family is where we build our first relationships, and our longest. It is where character is formed before any classroom gets its hands on a child. It is where faith is taught, where work is modeled, where love is learned by watching it live, imperfectly, daily, for decades on end.

America's best and brightest don't come from nowhere. They come from strong family units that set their children up for success, and their children's children after them. The strong family raises the faithful citizen. The faithful citizen builds a just nation. That is the chain that made America the greatest country on earth.

In Washington, "family" has become a word politicians say in commercials and forget by Monday morning. The tax code penalizes married couples and rewards households built on government dependency. Schools tell parents their values are an obstacle to their own children’s "real" identity. The cultural machine churns out sneering portrayals of fathers, of faith, of the small towns and suburbs where most Americans actually live and raise their kids.

The economy that should reward a parent's hard work has been engineered to make a single income impossible to live on. Housing has been priced out of reach of the young couple that wants a yard, a garage, children and a good life. Groceries and gas keep climbing while wages don't. The fentanyl pouring across an open border is killing young Americans at rates we'd treat as an act of war if it came from a foreign army — and every one of those young Americans is somebody's son or daughter.

A pro-family agenda is not complicated. It is a tax code that rewards marriage and children instead of punishing them. It is schools that answer to parents — not to bureaucracies, not to activists, not to anyone with an agenda about somebody else's child. It is religious liberty for the churches and the schools and the charities that have always done the actual work of holding communities together. It is a secure border that protects the working-class neighborhoods where the fentanyl actually arrives. It is an economy where one good job can support a household the way it did for our parents, and theirs before them.

The Founders did not write the Constitution for a nation of isolated individuals. They wrote it for a nation of families, households that prayed together, worked together, sacrificed together, and had the ability to pass something on for the next group to do the same.

That was the bet they made on us: that free people, raising free children, in homes anchored by faith and discipline and love, would govern themselves better than any king ever could.

Two hundred and fifty years later, that bet still holds. The American family is not a relic. It is this country's last, best, most durable institution — older than the Republic, stronger than any party, more powerful than any program out of Washington.