Family Values

(7 of 7)

Dan Quayle has a powerful point when he encourages individual responsibility and morality. His argument runs aground here and there on free-market paradoxes: the unfettered market is unerring, but the free market in television produces two gay men in bed together in prime time (thirtysomething back in 1989). Anthony Muir, a lawyer in Allentown, Pennsylvania, thinks the chief enemies of the family are television and consumerism: "The national drug policy says, Just Say No, and the beer commercials say, Say Yes to Alcohol, which is saying yes to drugs -- and the collateral kick is you can have sex too."

Often the targets and emphases of the Republicans' family-values campaigns seem a bit off. What worries parents most is a sense that they have little control over the world in which their children are growing up, over its temptations, its drugs, its overheated sex, its atmosphere of astonishing casual violence. Last week on the family-values dais in Houston, after Bush's acceptance speech, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a conspicuous honored guest. In the first few minutes of Terminator 2, parents do not fail to notice, Schwarzenegger, in order to steal someone's motorcycle and clothes, drives a long-bladed knife through a man's shoulder, pinning him to a pool table, and fries another man's hands and face on the griddle of a restaurant. Ten-year- olds watch Schwarzenegger's disgusting violence and absorb it as if it were normal, acceptable and heroic behavior.

Family values is a peculiar ingredient in this year's campaign. California pollster Mervin Field says, "The public has a limited amount of problem space in their heads . . . If you're at a rally and you're worried about losing your job, you don't care to hear about family values." But the historian Christopher Lasch remarks, "To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light." The deeper energy in the values argument arises from that parent's perspective upon the future. It makes them angry. It makes them unpredictable voters.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,250 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on Aug. 19-20 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%

CAPTION: Which of the following are very important to promote family values?

Which candidate would do the best job promoting finally values?

(Asked of 958 registered voters)

Which position best represents your views about abortion?

Should school health clinics provide students with condoms?

Should laws that protect civil rights of racial or religious minorities be used to protect homosexuals?