First and foremost, communitarians propose that parents should stay together and care for their children. The state should encourage this by providing better family benefits. Society should take marriage more seriously. Professor Amitai Etzioni, author of The Parenting Deficit, wants prospective spouses to attend 'counselling sessions and to learn the secrets of joint decision-making, mutual respect and budget-making'. Couples who want children should promise, if their partnership runs into trouble, to delay divorce. Schools should prepare children for parenthood.
Communitarians also advocate national schemes of community service for young people (like the US Peace Corps) and an obligation on all citizens, apart from conscientious objectors, to bequeath their organs for transplant as an 'act of obligation to the community'. Above all, they want a moratorium on the creation of new rights so that civic duty can be emphasised.
In the US, Etzioni and his associates are defenders of state road blocks to catch drunken drivers; alcohol and drug tests for pilots; and proposals that people should be compelled to tell their partners if they are HIV positive. These issues are explosive in America because they involve potential breaches of human rights. But communitarian ideas in practice in America can be punitive. In Wisconsin mothers on benefits have their welfare payments docked if their children miss school. Parents in Arkansas can be fined $50 for missing a parent-teacher meeting. Across America, there are proposals to make welfare dependant on single mothers training for and limiting the size of their families.
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