Protection of the Family in the Family Policy of the State: Legal, Social and Economic Aspects
Protection of the Family in the Family Policy of the State: Legal, Social and Economic Aspects

Summary/Abstract: The article concerns the subject matter of contemporary family policy in Poland, analysed in the context of Art. 9 of the Charter of the Rights of the Family. It contains a synthetic analysis of legal regulations, the subject of which is the broadly understood protection of the family, as well as indicates other measures through which the state will achieve the assumed objectives of this policy. It demonstrates that although prima facie it would appear that the family policy in Poland accomplishes standards specified in the quoted standard of the Charter of the Rights of the Family, there are significant differences between these matters. According to the Charter of the Rights of the Family, the subject of the family policy should be the family as a whole. However, it is not treated in this way by the Polish state. The family is not a subject on a legal plane, and subjectivity of the family can hardly be found either in the assumptions or in specific normative regulations of the Polish family policy. The existing state of affairs leads to certain “blurring” of the traditional, culturally and historically conditioned concept of the family, introducing, implicitly, its “mental redefinition”. Behind the facade of providing support for the family, various forms of common coexistence have started to enjoy increasingly more open protection, including — pursuant to the gender perspective of LGBT movement — same-sex relationships. This publication advances the thesis that the current family policy is not a policy that perceives the family in a comprehensive perspective or could be used for full protection of the entire family life. Consequently, one must explicitly opt for treating a family as an autonomous community, stressing at the same time its unique nature, based on the marriage between a woman and a man, which cannot be replaced by any other interpersonal relationships. The central point of the contemporary axiology of law — and consequently, family policy — should be the protection of individual goods: the protection of individual goods of any given person, accompanied by the protection of a family as a subject with its own, autonomous rights, which are not only a sum of rights of individual persons making up a family.

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