From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: Family Values B.S.
Date: 7 Nov 92 19:50:03 GMT
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences

joltman@doctor-pepper.ai.mit.edu (T. Andy Frakes) writes:

>What is the GOVERNMENT going to do about family values?!?  Was Bush
>going to come into everyone's house and teach parents how to raise
>their kids?  I can see why he 86'ed that idea, although I don't know
>what took him so long.  Can ANYONE tell me what Bush's plan was to
>create better family values in the US?

What's the problem supposed to be?  The government can't promote family
values very directly, but on the other hand the government can't
promote prosperity very directly either, and everyone seems to think
the government should have an economic policy.

Apart from the government role in education (in which the public
schools inevitably teach the values that the people in charge think
will be to the advantage of society), the most government can do is to
avoid undermining family values.  After all, the point of family values
is that it is better for people to rely as much as possible on small
traditional or informal institutions that they are immediately part of
than on big bureaucracies that it's hard to feel much attachment to.

I don't know what specific plan Bush had if any -- he was never big on
the vision thing.  Here are a few things that come to mind, though:

1.  As I understand the welfare rules, a teenage girl who wants to
establish herself in the world can get enough government support to
live on in her own apartment if she has an illegitimate child.  The
effect of such rules is to undermine family values.  That effect would
be change if the rules changed.

2.  The radical feminist view that sex role differences as such are
unjust and should be eliminated is opposed to family values, but has
been influential in setting government policy and in the law.  If that
view were abandoned, government policy and law would have to change. 
To pick a couple of random examples, statistical sex disparities would
no longer persuade courts that something wrong was going on and the
stories of princesses and knights that you run into in schoolbooks
would no longer feature exclusively can-do princesses and bumbling
knights.

3.  The gay liberationist view that the male-female bond for mutual
support, establishment of a household and rearing of children should
have no special status is opposed to family values.  Accordingly, a
government that wanted to promote family values would not institute
measures intended to promote equal respect for other sorts of
arrangements (for example, antidisrimination laws or "education for
diversity" in the public schools).

4.  Under the law in many places it is much easier to get rid of a wife
you're tired of than a tenant or an employee you don't like.  If family
values ruled, those laws would change.

Maybe I should clarify what I mean by family values.  By "family
values" I mean the attitudes and institutions that promote the
existence and success of families.  By "family" I mean primarily a
socially-recognized union of a man, a woman and their children of the
sort I alluded to in 3. above.  I myself favor family values because I
don't think the family as so defined is replaceable as an institution
for raising children and for connecting individuals to society.
-- 
Jim Kalb 		"Not drunk is he who from the floor
(jk@panix.com)		 can rise alone and still drink more.
			 But drunk is he who prostrate lies
			 Without the power to drink or rise." (Clough)
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