TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/083192/08319922.000

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                                                                                THE U.S. CAMPAIGN, Page 22

Family Values


The Republican pitch seems cynical, but it goes to the soul
of what kind of country Americans want

By LANCE MORROW -- With reporting by Tom Curry/New York, Martha
Smilgis/Los Angeles and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh



    There is a road that runs from the land of the Ik to the
dog track in Idaho.

    The Ik were the mountain people the anthropologist Colin
Turnbull found in northern Uganda some years ago. They were
going hungry and mistreating one another in horrible ways.

    The Ik were as hideous as family values can get. Adults
would sit around the fire and think it was uproarious when a
baby toddled toward the flames. Children would excavate food
from the mouths of weakened grandparents and run away laughing.
A wife would die by the roadside, and her husband would walk on
without looking back, relieved to be rid of the burden.

    The anxiety behind the phrase "family values" may derive
from an intimation of such breakdown, a flicker of the instant
when the moral slippery slope may swivel like a trapdoor to
right angles. Americans see the inner Ik all the time these
days. They glimpsed it out of the corner of the eye for a moment
when an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease was abandoned
at the dog track in Post Falls, Idaho, last March. A cautionary
scene -- and it turned into a morning talk-show joke: "It's
dog-track time for you, doofus!" the host with hyena cackle,
whooping and snorting, tells someone. The sense of the Ik
within American society, an uncaring, a messy, stupid license
gone out of control, gives some plausibility to Republican
rhetoric on the subject.

    Some people detected a heavy dose last week in the tabloid
drama involving Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's adopted daughter.

    Anyway, the motif of family values kept recurring along
the Ik-Idaho Road. The Republicans conjured it up and turned it
to powerful political effect. Their show in Houston was gaudy
and complex -- a hellfire tent meeting dissolving to a '50s
television sitcom with flags and confetti and sometimes tinny
modulations.

    The family-values part of the Republican production was,
as they kept saying of Bill Clinton, relentlessly slick. It
depended on a sort of grieving, part-nostalgic assumption that
Americans live amid unwholesome aliens (homosexual teachers who
want to proselytize, condom distributors, abortion-mongers,
she-devil lawyers named Hillary) in a postlapsarian age, after
some immense moral fall (whenever or whatever that may have
been), something that has gone hugely wrong in American life.

    It is far from a new theme in U.S. history. In 1971 a
young White House speechwriter, Patrick J. Buchanan, wrote a
memo to President Richard Nixon suggesting that the theme be
used as a weapon. His campaign strategy: cut the country and
Democratic Party in half, and pick off "far the larger half."
The Republicans told America that George McGovern meant "acid,
abortion and amnesty." Nixon's "half" in the 1972 election was
a landslide.

    Now, 21 years later, Pat Buchanan rose before the
delegates in Houston to declare what he called "a cultural war"
(nothing like a war to obscure the economic issue) and try to
help tear off a fat half of America for George Bush. A '50s kind
of week in several ways: Buchanan eerily reproduced the
punitive, menacing quality of his boyhood hero, Senator Joseph
R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. The role of threat to the American
essence used to be played by communism. But moral squalor at
home would do as well. Buchanan pounded at "the agenda that
Clinton & Clinton [meaning Bill and Hillary] would impose on
America -- abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme
Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious
schools, women in combat units . . ."

    Buchanan glared like a Jesuit prefect of discipline and
stabbed the air. His rendition was family values in the bully's
mode -- an appeal to visceral prejudices, not to American
ideals. Barbara Bush and the tableau of Bush children and
grandchildren transmitted a softer version, a kind of Pepperidge
Farm, white-bread appeal in handsome plenty.

    To approach the family-values question, it may be
necessary to remember the formula of F. Scott Fitzgerald: he
said the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to
retain two mutually contradictory ideas in the mind at the same
time and still be able to function. The two mutually
contradictory but simultaneously valid ideas involved here are
these:

    1) The issue of family values is the last refuge of a
scoundrel -- or of a threatened Republican incumbent. The issue
is almost by definition a smokescreen, and a manipulation of
voters' closeted fears and prejudices. The Republicans are wary
about emphasizing race this year. They are sensitive about
criticism of the way they used Willie Horton in 1988. And they
have been making progress in attracting black middle-class
supporters. So they have switched their emphasis to family
values with a sexual subtext -- Murphy Brown, out-of-the-closet
gay militance, condom distribution in the schools, sexual
flamboyance in publicly funded art projects, and so on. Dan
Quayle and others working the values circuit like to encourage
the feeling that the American id is dangerously seeping up
through the floorboards: Clamp down the superego.

    Further, family values, a flashy issue of opportunity, has
about it a certain eloquent irrelevance -- something like the
old waving of the bloody shirt, or the snake-oil vending that
has always gone on in American politics. North Carolina Senator
Robert Rice Reynolds, a baroque declaimer of the Southern
school of rural demagogy in the '30s and '40s, was a genius of
flavorsome insinuation. "Do y'all know what [my opponent's]
favorite dish is?" he would ask slowly of his "God-fearin',
'tater-raisin', baby-havin' " constituents. Then in a burst of
disgusted indignation: "Caviar!" The word came out caw-vee-yah.
"You know what caviar is? It's little black fish eggs, and it
comes from Red Russia!" A certain amount of family-values
rhetoric is mere caviar denunciation.

    Another suspect side of family-values mongering: Why are
so many conservatives, champions of individual freedom, so
hell-bent on coercing people to march in lockstep? Why does the
authoritarian impulse win out over the libertarian?

    And yet:

    2) The subject on another level is profoundly relevant. It
addresses cultural divides in American life that must be sorted
out if the nation is to proceed coherently. Although raised by
opportunists seeking votes, the issue of family values goes to
the soul of what kind of country Americans want and what kind
of lives they live. The issue in this campaign represents more
than mere partisan struggle. It is part of the nation's effort
to assimilate -- in the deepest sense, to domesticate, to
understand, to control -- changes in American society over the
past two generations: to deal with the consequences of sexual
revolution, of women's liberation, of huge multicultural
immigration from non-European sources, with the devastation
caused by the drug trade, with the loss of America's long
absolute postwar pre-eminence, with the fragmentation of the
family. It is even a reflection of the baby boom generation's
coming of age, having families and changing their moral
perspective from individual self-gratification to a somewhat
sobered emphasis on family.

    In other words, it is not enough to dismiss the
family-values issue as a political ploy in a tough Republican
year.

    A question is whether George Bush, or Dan Quayle, or Pat
Buchanan, or any politician or government, can have much to do
with improving a society's values -- family or otherwise. Surely
the values, if worth anything, must be more deeply embedded in
the culture than the slogans of transient politicians. A Memphis
construction company owner named J.D. Walker Jr. watched the
Republican Convention last week and said in some disgust: "We
want President Bush to know the American citizenry is not dumb.
Don't keep telling us things will get better if we let you
dictate how to run our personal lives. In my list of important
things about this campaign, family values is fourth. Just ahead
of that at No. 3 is counting all the sand on all the beaches in
the world. Get the idea?"

    A second question is why family values would be any
different or any better under a Bush Administration than under
a Clinton Administration. And third, if government or politics
can make American family values better, why have not the Re
publicans under nearly 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush
improved the moral tone of the country?

    The family-values issue could conceivably become awkward
for the Republicans this year: it invites questions about their
responsibility and stewardship, and tempts a backlash. But do
Americans accept the idea that Republican values are superior to
those of Democrats? Perhaps. A TIME-CNN poll last week found
that only 3% of voters consider family values to be the major
issue in the campaign. More than one-third said the economy was
the major issue, and 19% said unemployment. Only 1% believe
abortion should be the main issue.

    All this does not necessarily mean the Republicans are
riding a weak horse. The fundamentalist family agenda has
energy, even if the economy is the voters' first concern.
Family-values questions play. In the poll, 71% agree that "there
is something morally wrong with the country at this time."
Almost as many agree with the idea that "television and other
media . . . reflect a permissive and immoral set of values,
which are bad for the country."

    The gay issue has a strange prominence and civic
complexity in this campaign. When he was interviewed two weeks
ago by NBC's Stone Phillips, President Bush talked about
homosexual marriage: " a life-style that in my view is not
normal. I don't, I'm not, I don't favor that." The heterosexual
public seems disposed to tolerate homosexuality but less
inclined to grant gays civil rights pro tection. Nearly half of
those polled consider it "very important that homosexuals be
prevented from adopting children," and 67% answered no when
asked, "Do you think marriages between homosexual men or between
homosexual women should be recognized as legal by the law?"

    "If we're talking about family values, we're talking about
sticking by those we care for," responds Donald Suggs, a
spokesman for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
"The way gay couples and their close friends have dealt with the
AIDS epidemic is something that most so-called traditional
families could learn a lot from."

    Says Craig Dean, a Washington lawyer who has led the
campaign for legal recognition of gay marriages: "We hold the
same values of love, commitment, honesty and respect as
heterosexual families do. [The Republican position] is an
insult to millions of people in this country. They are saying,
`My family is better than yours.' "

    Consider the case of Karen Grant of Goldsboro, North
Carolina. She took her three sons, ages 13, 10 and 6, to the
local library, and while she was helping the older boys find
books, the six-year-old began browsing through a children's
picture book called Daddy's Roommate, a book by Michael
Willhoite written in the voice of a young boy whose parents
divorce and whose father subsequently sets up housekeeping with
his gay lover. The incident has created a storm and divided
Goldsboro. The Grants call the book "anti family" and claim
among other things that it trivializes divorce and implicitly
condones a homosexual life-style. What so upsets the Grants and
others, including the editorial writer for Goldsboro's
News-Argus, is that the mother in the book explains to her son,
"Being gay is just one more kind of love and love is the best
kind of happiness."

    Says the father, Joseph Grant, an orthopedic surgeon:
"This type of book is inappropriate in a public library. I don't
want my tax dollars paying for it. This is all about character
and developing that character and sense of family values in
young children." He adds, "After all, 99% of parents across the
country would not tell their five- or six-year-old child that
it's O.K. to grow up and think it's a positive thing to get
divorced, live a homosexual life-style, take drugs, whatever.
The values that my wife and I hold are those of a majority of
this community." But one Goldsboro woman responds, "Such
arrogance! Some people don't want to believe that things like
homosexuality and nasty divorces exist in a nice, quiet
community like Goldsboro. They do." She tells the story of a
couple who divorced some years ago. The pair had three sons. It
turned out the father was a homosexual. One of the sons, a young
man now, spoke before the library board after the Grants started
their protest. "He said he wished he'd had access to a book like
this when his family was going through that trauma," the woman
says. "He said it would have helped him tremendously and would
have told him it was O.K. to keep loving his daddy. There was
nothing to help him understand the reality of what was
happening." On Friday in Goldsboro, the library's board of
trustees voted by a count of 7 to 2 to keep the book on its
shelves.

    What are family values?

    The phrase sounds like the name of a discount center in
the suburbs. In a sense, that is what it means -- the concept
is an American warehouse of moral images, of inherited
assumptions and brand-name ideals, of traditional wisdom, of
pseudo memories of a golden age, of old class habits: here some
of the culture's finest aspirations are on display, its
handcrafted, polished virtues and a few handsome, valuable
antiques. But also a lot of shoulder pads, Tic Tacs and
mouthwash.

    The term family values is inherently subjective. The use
of the issue in this year's politics blends a yearning idealism
with a breathtaking cynicism. On another level, that mix
reflects the tendency of entertainment and politics -- and their
values -- to merge confusingly with one another. The season's
first episode of the television sitcom Murphy Brown next month
will have Murphy's reply to the moral criticism leveled last
spring by Vice President Dan Quayle -- continuing the argument
over Murphy's single motherhood that showed Republican
strategists just how powerful the family-values issue might be
in this campaign. At an even farther remove from reality, the
cartoon character Bart Simpson last week responded on television
to President Bush's remark that he hoped the country's family
values would be "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like
the Simpsons." Bart's response: "We're just like the Waltons.
We're praying for the end of the Depression too."

    Americans live in a culture of such bizarre electronic
spin and reality-unreality interchange that even a yearning for
the fictions of heartening Americana like The Waltons vanishes
down a hall of mirrors.

    It is a telling peculiarity of the family-values issue
that it is so often framed in visual memories of television
shows. Many Americans conjuring images of an earlier family
ideal think of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or The
Donna Reed Show. They may even think that family values are
something enacted in black and white -- the home returned to
after school, the milk and cookies, a rustling of Mother in full
stiff skirts. Americans almost never cite books as aide-memoire
or illustrations of family values, perhaps because the TV
sitcoms of American childhoods tended toward the sunny, whereas
the novelists (think of John O'Hara, Philip Roth, John Cheever),
if read at all, made their money by prying open American private
lives and showing dirty secrets.

    Republicans and Democrats often mean something quite
different when they talk about family values.

    The Republican meaning of family values tends to point
toward a cultural ideal (two-parent heterosexual households,
hard work, no pornography, a minimal tolerance of the aberrant).
Says David Blan kenhorn, president of the Institute for American
Values: "Republicans really do want to argue about the culture.
They want to argue about morality, what's right and wrong,
standards of private behavior. They really do want to argue
about sexuality, procreation and marriage."

    Conservatives tend to say, Change the culture. Democrats
tend to think of family values as matters that might be
addressed by government policy -- which is precisely Dan
Quayle's complaint. Conservatives uphold the private realm,
Democrats the public realm. Conservatives tend to stress
individual responsibility and changing behavior to correct the
problem; liberals are inclined to think first of programs to
mitigate the bad effects of trends such as unwed motherhood.

    During the Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton and Al Gore
staged a sort of pre-emptive celebration of family values,
claiming the issue for themselves. How well they succeeded
remains to be seen. They know the danger of Democrats' seeming
promiscuously tolerant of all bizarreness in some aging '60s,
Phil Donahue fashion. Clinton has often sounded virtually
Republican in his insistence on personal responsibility.

    "Bill Clinton accepts that there is a moral decline," says
his campaign pollster, Stan Greenberg. "That the values of
mainstream America have not been respected and supported. But
George Bush is part of the problem." The Clinton strategy is
summarized in the slogan that top strategist James Carville has
posted in the campaign war room at the Little Rock, Arkansas,
headquarters: "It's the economy, stupid." The Clinton approach,
says Greenberg, is that "family values is about fifth on the
list of what voters want addressed by their President."

    Much Republican rhetoric posits a model of the family that
is becoming rarer in reality. Almost all family values have to
do with children, with how to make them happy and give them
safe, decent lives. The real debate Americans should be having,
says social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, concerns "what
all adults would give up to secure a childhood of innocence and
freedom." Every expert and practically every citizen agree that
children are better off being raised in a family with two
parents. For various reasons, that is less and less the model of
American child rearing.

    Dan Quayle has a powerful point when he encourages
individual responsibility and morality. His argument runs
aground here and there on free-market paradoxes: the unfettered
market is unerring, but the free market in television produces
two gay men in bed together in prime time (thirtysomething back
in 1989). Anthony Muir, a lawyer in Allentown, Pennsylvania,
thinks the chief enemies of the family are television and
consumerism: "The national drug policy says, Just Say No, and
the beer commercials say, Say Yes to Alcohol, which is saying
yes to drugs -- and the collateral kick is you can have sex
too."

    Often the targets and emphases of the Republicans'
family-values campaigns seem a bit off. What worries parents
most is a sense that they have little control over the world in
which their children are growing up, over its temptations, its
drugs, its overheated sex, its atmosphere of astonishing casual
violence. Last week on the family-values dais in Houston, after
Bush's acceptance speech, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a
conspicuous honored guest. In the first few minutes of
Terminator 2, parents do not fail to notice, Schwarzenegger, in
order to steal someone's motorcycle and clothes, drives a
long-bladed knife through a man's shoulder, pinning him to a
pool table, and fries another man's hands and face on the
griddle of a restaurant. Ten-year-olds watch Schwarzenegger's
disgusting violence and absorb it as if it were normal,
acceptable and heroic behavior.

    Family values is a peculiar ingredient in this year's
campaign. California pollster Mervin Field says, "The public has
a limited amount of problem space in their heads . . . If you're
at a rally and you're worried about losing your job, you don't
care to hear about family values." But the historian
Christopher Lasch remarks, "To see the modern world from the
point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible
light." The deeper energy in the values argument arises from
that parent's perspective upon the future. It makes them angry.
It makes them unpredictable voters.