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free-love
The right wing has a pejorative conception of "free-love" Communists. This is probably based in two different roots. The first is a conflation of American anarchist feminists, like Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman, with communists. There is a natural leftist alliance between red and black flags. But the theory is different. Anarchists read about attentat from Johann Most and mutual aid from Mikhail Bakunin. This alliance was formally scuttled with the collapse of the First International (1864-76). The Second International was for communists and explicitly excluded the black flag.
No one claims Goldman was anything but a free-love advocate with many famous lovers and transgressive lifestyle. But she wasn't a communist. The most baffling parts of hippiedom: guerrilla theater, love-ins, "dropping out" are inspired by anarchism. The New Left was an attempt to bridge the gap between red labor and black youth that was swallowed by Yuppies, The Corporation and The Bomb.
Parsons lived in a liminal space between races and used her gender for effect during her public appearances. These anarchist women provided a radical model for liberal politics. Emmeline Pankhurst, Alice Paul and Dorothy Day moderated their radical message to dismember the patriarchy. The use of radical anarchism by liberal suffragettes resulted in democratic gains.
This is an unfair conflation because, to the Communists, Anarchism is not theoretically sound. Anarchists, on the other hand, hold Marx as a minor deity. They need to be responsible for two theoretical trajectories in order to participate in leftist spaces. Without this, the anarcho-socialist alternative is an alliance with anarcho-capital or syndicalist gangsters. The result of that alliance has been predicted by Trotsky and Parenti as a suicidal road to fascism.
Engels' Origins of the Family is probably the other main artery feeding the pejorative right wing conception of Communism as a "free-love" ideology. This book does undermine the nuclear family as a mechanism of paternal genetic surveillance. In "primitive" societies the matriarchy rules and children are communal. This has social advantages--its easy to find aunties to babysit. The disadvantage comes with inheritance. Inheritance is only an issue after the commons has been privatized--as occurred (in Engels' example) with the German's first encounter with Rome.
Paternity plays another role that Engels didn't dwell on: genetics. Mendel did his pea experiments between 1856-63. Engels wrote Origins... in 1884. The idea of dominant/recessive traits--and their impact on evolution--was known. In the case of genetically transmitted diseases (like sickle-cell) parentage is a method of mitigation. People with an essential tremor, Huntington's disease, dwarfism or baldness have Zager and Evans style questions about "picking their babies from a long glass tube" that are as legitimate as any pillow-talk regarding offspring phenotypes or viability. This is also known as eugenics--made possible by tracing lineages--practiced in fertility clinics across the country.
That paradigm has changed again now that the human genome has been decoded. A child today can be tested for disease in utero. The grandfather's scalp is only an anecdote compared to testing multiple alleles for the hair gene. The patriarchy, with unexplained incongruities and red-headed postmen, is less reliable than DNA.
But then there is the economic function of the family: inheritance. This is now totally disentangled from genetics. Few question an adopted inheritance in capitalist America (unlike feudal Europe). The result makes wealth less a part of the domestic family (whatever that is) and more of the social economy. This is one step closer to eradicating accumulated wealth as social factor.