Family Values

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Says the father, Joseph Grant, an orthopedic surgeon: "This type of book is inappropriate in a public library. I don't want my tax dollars paying for it. This is all about character and developing that character and sense of family values in young children." He adds, "After all, 99% of parents across the country would not tell their five- or six-year-old child that it's O.K. to grow up and think it's a positive thing to get divorced, live a homosexual life-style, take drugs, whatever. The values that my wife and I hold are those of a majority of this community." But one Goldsboro woman responds, "Such arrogance! Some people don't want to believe that things like homosexuality and nasty divorces exist in a nice, quiet community like Goldsboro. They do." She tells the story of a couple who divorced some years ago. The pair had three sons. It turned out the father was a homosexual. One of the sons, a young man now, spoke before the library board after the Grants started their protest. "He said he wished he'd had access to a book like this when his family was going through that trauma," the woman says. "He said it would have helped him tremendously and would have told him it was O.K. to keep loving his daddy. There was nothing to help him understand the reality of what was happening." On Friday in Goldsboro, the library's board of trustees voted by a count of 7 to 2 to keep the book on its shelves.

What are family values?

The phrase sounds like the name of a discount center in the suburbs. In a sense, that is what it means -- the concept is an American warehouse of moral images, of inherited assumptions and brand-name ideals, of traditional wisdom, of pseudo memories of a golden age, of old class habits: here some of the culture's finest aspirations are on display, its handcrafted, polished virtues and a few handsome, valuable antiques. But also a lot of shoulder pads, Tic Tacs and mouthwash.

The term family values is inherently subjective. The use of the issue in this year's politics blends a yearning idealism with a breathtaking cynicism. On another level, that mix reflects the tendency of entertainment and politics -- and their values -- to merge confusingly with one another. The season's first episode of the television sitcom Murphy Brown next month will have Murphy's reply to the moral criticism leveled last spring by Vice President Dan Quayle -- continuing the argument over Murphy's single motherhood that showed Republican strategists just how powerful the family-values issue might be in this campaign. At an even farther remove from reality, the cartoon character Bart Simpson last week responded on television to President Bush's remark that he hoped the country's family values would be "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." Bart's response: "We're just like the Waltons. We're praying for the end of the Depression too."

Americans live in a culture of such bizarre electronic spin and reality- unreality interchange that even a yearning for the fictions of heartening Americana like The Waltons vanishes down a hall of mirrors.