Strengthening Marriage and the Family
Strong families create strong communities. They teach faith, responsibility, sacrifice, discipline, forgiveness, and respect long before any government program or public institution enters a person’s life.
Cris Dosev believes marriage and family aren’t outdated social arrangements. They are God-given institutions that provide children with stability, give adults a lifelong responsibility to one another, and form the foundation of a healthy society.
His position is grounded in Catholic teaching and a conservative belief that government should support families, respect parental authority, and avoid replacing responsibilities that properly belong in the home.
“They are no longer two, but one flesh. What God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Matthew 19:6
Marriage Is a Lifelong Covenant
The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is a covenant in which one man and one woman establish a partnership for the whole of life. It is ordered toward the good of the husband and wife and toward the birth and education of children. Among baptized Christians, Christ raises this covenant to the dignity of a sacrament.
Cris believes marriage should be understood as more than a contract based on temporary feelings or personal convenience. It is a public promise of fidelity, responsibility, and permanence.
A husband and wife give themselves fully to one another. They accept the obligation to remain faithful, to care for each other through prosperity and hardship, and to create a home in which children can be welcomed, protected, and formed.
Catholic teaching describes marital love as exclusive and enduring. It calls husbands and wives to a daily fidelity that reflects God’s own faithfulness to His people.
Marriage is never guaranteed to be easy. It requires patience, humility, forgiveness, self-control, and sacrifice. Those demands are precisely what give the marriage covenant its strength.
Cris believes society should honor couples who keep their promises and support husbands and wives who are working to preserve their marriages.
Marriage Unites Mothers, Fathers, and Children
Men and women are equal in dignity, but they aren’t interchangeable. Mothers and fathers bring distinct and complementary gifts to marriage and parenthood.
Cris believes public policy should recognize the importance of joining children, whenever possible, to the mother and father who gave them life. Children aren’t possessions or lifestyle accessories. They are human beings whose needs must come before adult convenience.
The Catholic Church teaches that a man and woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family. It describes this institution as preceding government recognition and possessing responsibilities and rights that public authority has a duty to respect.
This understanding doesn’t deny that many families face abandonment, widowhood, divorce, infertility, financial hardship, or other painful circumstances. It calls communities to support people facing those realities while continuing to uphold the permanent ideal of faithful marriage.
Single parents, grandparents, adoptive parents, guardians, and relatives often make extraordinary sacrifices for children. They deserve respect and practical assistance. Supporting them doesn’t require society to abandon the truth that stable marriage between a mother and father gives children a powerful foundation.
The Family Is the First School of Character
Children first learn how to love, trust, forgive, work, share, pray, and accept responsibility within the family.
The Catechism calls the family the “original cell of social life.” It teaches that the authority, stability, and relationships found in family life help create the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity throughout society.
Government can provide services, enforce laws, and respond to emergencies. It cannot replace the daily presence of committed parents.
Schools cannot replace a mother and father who teach by example. Social programs cannot reproduce the security of a loving home. Courts cannot manufacture the loyalty and responsibility that grow from family bonds.
Cris believes many of the nation’s deepest problems become harder to solve when marriage weakens and family responsibilities are ignored. Crime, addiction, poverty, educational failure, loneliness, and social isolation don’t have a single cause, but stable families remain one of society’s strongest defenses against them.
Strengthening the family is both a moral responsibility and a practical investment in the future.
Parents Are the Primary Educators
Parents have the first responsibility for the upbringing of their children. They aren’t temporary caretakers acting on behalf of the government.
Catholic teaching describes the right and duty of parents to educate their children as primordial and inalienable. Parents are responsible for forming their children intellectually, morally, spiritually, and socially. They also possess the right to select educational environments consistent with their convictions.
American constitutional law has also long recognized the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their care.
Cris believes parents must remain informed and involved in what their children are taught. Schools should communicate openly, provide access to instructional materials, and respect parents’ authority over major moral, medical, and religious decisions.
Parents should be free to choose public schools, Catholic and Christian schools, private schools, charter schools, or homeschooling according to the needs of their children and the convictions of their family.
Education works best when schools treat parents as partners rather than obstacles.
Families Must Be Free to Practice Their Faith
For Catholic families, the home is a domestic church. It is where children first learn to pray, encounter Scripture, understand the sacraments, and discover what it means to follow Christ.
The Church teaches that Christian parents are the first heralds of the faith to their children. Family prayer, participation in Mass, moral instruction, and the example set by parents form a child’s earliest understanding of God.
Cris believes parents must remain free to raise their children according to Christian teaching. Government institutions shouldn’t interfere with a family’s religious formation or pressure children to reject the beliefs taught in their home and church.
The state has a legitimate role in protecting children from genuine abuse and neglect. It doesn’t have the right to displace responsible parents simply because officials disagree with their Catholic or conservative convictions.
Responsible Fatherhood Matters
Fatherhood is more than biology. It is a lifelong duty to provide, protect, teach, discipline, encourage, and remain present.
Cris believes men should be expected to accept responsibility for the children they help bring into the world. A culture that excuses abandonment harms mothers, children, and communities.
Good fathers model strength without cruelty, authority without selfishness, and leadership through service. They teach sons how to become responsible men and show daughters how women should be treated.
Mothers shouldn’t be left to carry the responsibilities of parenthood alone. Public policy should enforce child-support obligations, encourage paternal involvement, and stop treating fathers as unnecessary figures in family life.
Communities, churches, coaches, veterans, mentors, and extended families can help young men understand that fatherhood is an honor requiring sacrifice and discipline.
Families Should Be Able to Build a Stable Life
Family policy should make it easier for parents to marry, raise children, work, save, own a home, care for relatives, and pass something meaningful to the next generation.
Cris supports policies that respect the work and financial pressures carried by families. That includes reducing unnecessary taxes and regulations, supporting family-owned businesses, expanding educational choice, protecting the ability to save, and opposing government policies that penalize marriage.
Families should also have greater flexibility when caring for newborn children, relatives with disabilities, wounded veterans, and aging parents.
Catholic social teaching recognizes that society should assist families when they cannot meet serious needs on their own. It also warns larger institutions against taking over responsibilities and authority that properly belong to the family.
This principle is called subsidiarity: help should strengthen families, not make them dependent or push parents aside.
Adoption and Service to Children
A society that values family must care for children who cannot safely remain with their biological parents.
Cris believes adoption should be encouraged, respected, and made more accessible for qualified families. Foster-care systems should prioritize the safety, stability, and long-term welfare of children rather than allowing them to remain trapped in uncertainty.
Faith-based adoption and foster-care organizations should be permitted to serve children according to their religious missions without being forced to abandon Catholic or Christian convictions.
Families who adopt, foster, or assume guardianship often accept difficult responsibilities with little recognition. They deserve support from churches, communities, and public institutions.
Every child deserves to know that he or she is wanted, protected, and loved.
Where Cris Stands
Cris believes America should:
- Recognize marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman
- Promote fidelity, permanence, and responsibility within marriage
- Support the unique and complementary roles of mothers and fathers
- Protect parents’ authority over the upbringing and education of their children
- Expand school choice, including access to Catholic, Christian, private, charter, and home education
- Defend the right of families to raise children according to Christian beliefs
- Encourage responsible fatherhood and enforce parental obligations
- Remove government policies that financially penalize marriage
- Support adoption, foster families, and faith-based child-placement organizations
- Help families care for children, people with disabilities, veterans, and aging relatives
- Apply the principle of subsidiarity by helping families without replacing their proper authority
Cris’s commitment to marriage and family is rooted in a simple truth: the family is where society begins.
It is where children first encounter love and authority. It is where adults learn sacrifice and fidelity. It is where faith is handed down, character is formed, and one generation accepts responsibility for the next.
Government cannot create strong families, but it can respect them, protect them, and stop making their work more difficult.
Cris will continue to stand for faithful marriages, responsible parents, protected children, and family homes centered on faith, love, duty, and service.