Quayle says it right
Carlin, David R. Jr.
David R. Carlin, Jr. QUAYLE SAYS IT RIGHT BUT DOES IT WRONG wo things need to be said about Vice-president Dan ("Mr. Potatoe Head") Quayle and his crusade in favor of "family values" and...
...Sex is a private affair—even when this "private" activity produces such high levels of out-of-wedlock birth that entire neighborhoods and cities are devastated as a result...
...The people in the top 20 percent of American society are doing okay, but the lower 80 percent are not doing very well anymore, and the bottom 20 percent are living in a state of downright misery...
...These people are well-educated and well-heeled...
...Thus the public has no right to object to nonmarital or nonconventional sex...
...But it's no straw man...
...These are the proponents of what, for want of a better term, may be called yuppie liberalism...
...2) decent and affordable housing, preferably a home owned by the family...
...There really is a cultural or social elite which, for the past generation, has been waging a relentless war of attrition on traditional beliefs and values...
...The sexual revolution has been the preferred instrument for advancing yuppie liberalism's broader cultural agenda...
...Sex is a private affair— even when this "private" activity produces escalating rates of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, which overburden publicly supported health-care systems...
...And no matter how little sympathy I may have for Quayle personally or for the silly grin he has on his face when he makes these attacks, I have to admit that he has hit the nail on the head...
...But now for the flip side of the coin— Dan Quayle the hypocrite...
...Now, if you have been living on the moon for the last twenty-five years or so, you may have missed many of these developments, and you may think Dan Quayle is attacking a straw man...
...And if anyone objects on religious grounds, then the objector is homophobic and his or her religious beliefs are, on this point at least, no better than bigotry...
...For the past twelve years, this regime has been all talk and no action...
...First, Quayle is right...
...They attend church or synagogue infrequently or not at all...
...It follows from this dogma that the right to abortion must be protected...
...They belong to the professional and managerial classes (the classes, incidentally, whose material lot has improved under Reagan-Bush-Quayle, while the material condition of the rest of the population has deteriorated...
...They are agnostic or quasi-agnostic...
...But the social conditions for successful family life have also deteriorated, and people who shout loudest about family values—Quayle and Bush—have a lousy record on family conditions...
...And if the Democrats are dumb enough to let him get away with it—that is, if they refuse to seize the family values issue themselves—then they can count on losing yet one more presidential election...
...The social theory of yuppie liberalism makes a sharp distinction between the private and public realms...
...And if anyone objects to this on the grounds that the fetus is human, the objector must be instructed that this is a moral or religious judgment and therefore inappropriate in the public realm...
...and so is the out-of-wedlock single-parent family...
...The married two-parent family may be a good thing...
...And if anyone objects on moral grounds, the objector will be told that this is a health issue, not a moral issue...
...Second, Quayle is a hypocrite...
...Their influence on American cultural life is greatly disproportionate to their numbers, since they dominate many cultural command posts, especially the media, the arts, and (to a lesser degree) the academy...
...It's all a matter of personal choice, of cultural diversity...
...Simply to draw up this catalog is to point out how poor a record the ReaganBush-Quayle team has...
...One of its principal dogmas is that sex and everything connected with sex are purely private matters...
...and so is the gay or lesbian family...
...On religious matters, they are strongly secularist...
...4) neighborhoods for kids to grow up in that are free of crime, drugs, and premature sex...
...In the mouth of Dan Quayle, the "family values" theme is, I'm afraid, intended to be the opium of the middle classes...
...Hey, look (as President George Bush likes to say, in his regular-guy style of eloquence): if you believe in family values, then you ought to do something to promote the conditions that support and encourage those values...
...What he says is true...
...and so is the divorced single-parent family...
...3) good schools...
...But so, says yuppie liberalism, is the unmarried two-parent family...
...There are five social conditions a family needs if it is to be successful in its fundamental task of raising children: (1) good jobs and income...
...On moral matters, they are relativists or subjectivists...
...Condoms must be distributed in urban high schools...
...12:17 July 1992 Commonweal...
...Potatoe Head") Quayle and his crusade in favor of "family values" and against the "cultural elite...
...No one can say which is better or which worse...
...The public realm must remain rigorously neutral regarding religion and morality— except that it must promote those values which preserve and protect the sanctity of the private realm, namely, freedom, cultural equality, and tolerance...
...Religion and morality must be confined to the private realm, but within that realm individuals must be guaranteed absolute freedom...
...The gay rights agenda must be advanced...
...Family values have deteriorated, yes...
...But the Reagan-Bush-Quayle regime, while talking a good game about family values, has done little or nothing to protect them in the practical order...
...It's a reality—to my mind a very pernicious reality, which I have been writing about in this column for years...
...They see all values and forms of life, apart from downright criminal values and careers, as basically equal...
...They generally regard values as matters of pure personal choice...
...and (5) adequate health insurance...
Vol. 119 • July 1992 • No. 13
