Family Values Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Although family values can, in theory, apply to any of the world’s many cultures—entailing an endorsement of traditional families as the building blocks of strong societies—the term has special importance for students of American politics and the American culture wars, which characterized the political landscape during the 1980s and 1990s. While never a strictly partisan term, family values played an important role in the Republican Party’s efforts to gain and keep the support of social conservatives during those years and into the twenty-first century. Vice President Dan Quayle’s address to the Commonwealth Club of California in the spring of 1992—in which he criticized television character Murphy Brown for bearing a child out of wedlock, connecting a post-1960s “poverty of values” with the hopelessness of urban poverty that fed the Los Angeles riots of that year—represents perhaps the most noted example of the rhetoric of family values.

Family values is an umbrella term referring to issue positions that combine a rejection of the many changes in post-1960s sexual morality with a defense of traditional family structures. It emerged out of opposition to the rise of modern feminism, Roe v. Wade, and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, each of which was presented as part of a wider assault—pursued by a countercultural elite—on traditional values. (The Family Research Council, the American Family Association, and Focus on the Family—three of the most prominent groups promoting a family values agenda—were formed between 1977 and 1983.) Just how closely such family values resemble actually existing families in the nation’s pre-1960s past remains a contested question, as Stephanie Coontz argues in The Way We Never Were (1992). The positions generally subsumed under the category of family values include a defense of traditional heterosexual marriage and support for legislation or a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman; opposition to abortion and support for adoption alternatives; support for public policies that encourage intact, two-parent families and discourage divorce; and opposition to media violence and pornography. Somewhat more broadly, family values evokes such character traits as deference toward authority, self-discipline, sexual restraint, and respect for one’s elders.

Although, as mentioned above, the politics of family values in the United States does not divide evenly along partisan lines, it is undeniable that the Republican Party has been far more adept than the Democratic Party at building alliances based on such an agenda, and strong Christian right support for Republican candidates throughout the 1980s and 1990s provides evidence of this Republican success in speaking the language of family values. (More generally, Bill Clinton’s critics often cited his admission of marital infidelity as evidence of his lack of commitment to traditional family values.)

Democrats speak of family values as well, but with far less attention to sexual behavior and far more attention to economics, often stressing a commitment to such issues as a living wage for working families threatened by poverty, universal health care to enable families to pay skyrocketing bills, and support for government services that aid families in balancing work and home life. Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village (1996), published while she was First Lady, places special emphasis on the many important factors outside the family that influence children’s prospects for safe and happy lives. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, fired back in his acceptance speech, “It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” And in 2005, then senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) authored It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, an overt demurral from Clinton’s earlier work.

Debates about family values often evoke the culture wars thesis about American politics during the 1980s and 1990s. James Davison Hunter (1992) sketches out an American cultural political landscape populated by two competing moral visions. On one hand, Americans holding orthodox views tend to see truth and morality in fixed terms and occupy tightly bounded communities that locate the sources of moral authority in an unchanging trans historical or transcendent essence. Such a position views moral obligations as fairly concrete, personalized, unchanging, inflexible, and unaffected by the passage of time or with scientific or technological progress. On the other side of the cultural battleground, Hunter locates progressives who understand moral obligation and commitment as requiring a sensibility to historical or situational context and who view ethical obligations as unfolding and evolutionary in nature.

Bibliography:

Bennett,William J., ed. The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Clinton, Hillary Rodham. It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Our Children Teach Us. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Dole, Robert, “Acceptance Speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention,” 1996, www.4president.org/speeches/ dolekemp1996convention.htm.
Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Medved, Michael. Hollywood vs. America. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Reed, Ralph. Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics. Dallas,Tex.:Word, 1994.
Santorum, Rick. It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 2005.