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In 1988, the Republicans seized the flag; this time
around, the GOP apparently wants a monopoly on family
values.
Or maybe it's traditional values,
except that Ben
Campbell credited his traditional values
for victory
in the primary Tuesday.
The last time I checked, Campbell was a Democrat. However, it is necessary to check often because most Colorado Democrats, after they hold office a few years, are indistinguishable from Republicans in their zeal to subsidize large corporations in the name of economic development.
At any rate, Dan Quayle was stumping the Midwest last week, complaining that we just don't have family values any more. In these decadent times, he pointed out, some schools hand out condoms rather than Bibles.
Just whose fault is it that we're short on family values? Wasn't that dashing divorcee and Hollywood habitue Ronald Reagan president for eight years? Hasn't George Bush been busy vetoing family-leave legislation for the past 44 months?
If family values could be imposed on America by hypocrites in the White House, the Republicans should have managed by now. If they couldn't do it during the past 12 years, how are they going to do it in the next four?
Perhaps some answers will emerge from the GOP convention
this week in Houston. Marilyn Quayle might explain how most
writers wouldn't have any hope of publishing Embrace the
Serpent,
a tedious melange of predictable predicaments
and cardboard characters, let alone garnering acres of
reviews and publicity. So it's certainly of some family
value
to have a husband who's the vice-president of the
United States.
Absent that, we can speculate as to just how distributing Bibles, as Dan suggests, might improve family values.
We can start with fratricide -- Cain murdering Abel. There's incest -- Lot and his daughters in the cave after they were spared from Sodom's doom. And lying to parents -- Jacob claiming to be Esau in order to get Isaac's blessing.
Not to mention adultery, as with David and Bathsheba, the public nudity and drunkenness of Noah after he got off the ark, and all that polygamy: Abraham with Sarai and Hagar, Jacob with four wives, Solomon and his harem which numbered in the hundreds.
Could it be that family life in Washington is of such a
debauched nature that these Biblical family values
would represent an improvement over the way our rulers live
now?
I hope not, but what other conclusion could a reasonable person draw from Dan Quayle's opportunistic effort to make the Bible into a Republican campaign prop?
As for condoms at school, right-thinkers appear to be worried that students will learn to use them for something besides water balloons.
But American children are exposed daily to explicit instruction concerning relative pronouns, the Civil War, European geography and so forth.
Yet survey after survey demonstrates that millions of our graduates can't write a sentence, read a map or make change. Why would anybody worry that, even if there were a condom class, kids would learn anything in it?
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