Consider the following from Vice President Gore, during recent remarks in Los Angeles on school safety: "Of course, none of our [government's] efforts will work if parents do not take more responsibility. We need to teach children...why the right values transcend a moment's cheap sensation. And we need to spend time passing on those values.... [We] must all change our lives to protect and strengthen our families."

"None of our [government's] efforts will work if parents do not take more responsibility." Sounds uncontroversial. But what accounts for parental non-responsibility? Could it be that so many families have been forced to rely on two incomes by the highest-ever peacetime federal tax burden?  And the idea of cutting taxes so parents have more time with their children is surely not without controversy.

"We need to spend time passing on [right] values." Who could argue with that? But unlike morals, which provide an objective standard of behavior, "values" are by definition subjective.  Whose "values" should be passed on? The "values" corresponding with traditional morality, which teaches the virtue of self-restraint, and that sex should be confined to marriage? Or the "values" hatched in the 1960s, by which self-expression trumps self-restraint and any sex is okay as long as it's "safe"? Nothing uncontroversial here.

"We must...protect and strengthen our families." Isn't this goal self-evidently good? But the self-evidence of any statement requires our understanding its terms. For instance, a few decades ago, Americans were agreed on the self-evident truth that all humans have a "right to life."  But no more, because we disagree on the term "human": some think an unborn baby qualifies, some do not.

Likewise with "protecting and strengthening our families": 
In the 1800s, government did so by enforcing laws against polygamy, on the grounds that polygamy violated the natural order of the family. Today, under an ideology that rejects the idea of nature for the competing claim that a family is whatever one or more consenting adults might say it is, polygamy is enjoying a resurgence, and the causes of homosexual marriage and adoption are front and center in the liberal agenda. Perhaps no question is more deeply controversial--or important--than what kind of families government should protect and strengthen.

For most of our history, government steered clear of families (understood in the traditional sense) in terms of taxes and regulations, and supported the kind of moral environment in which families could prosper. More recently, government seeks a "partnership" with families, supported by taxes and operating through regulations.  And it pollutes the moral environment by such means as protecting pornographers and facilitating promiscuity and promoting "alternative lifestyles" in public schools.

All Americans, including presidential candidates, may claim to "support the family." But let us not be deluded into thinking they mean the same thing.

Sincerely,
Larry P. Arnn
President, The Claremont Institute
The Claremont Institute--PRECEPTS| July 14, 1999|| No. 179
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