"Family Values" and the Page Scandal

By Brigitte L. Nacos

House Speaker Dennis Hastert continues to deny early warnings of Representative Mark Foley’s unusual attention to male House pages even in the face of contrary revelations by former and present Republican staffers in the House as the Washington Post reports. Instead, Mr. Hastert and his supporters blame their usual villains—the liberal media and partisan Democrats. It is strange that nobody seems to recall how the media exploited the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison and how Republicans were determined and nearly successful to force the President out of office. The behavior of both Mark Foley and Bill Clinton was despicable but whereas Foley’s interest concerned high school students under 18-years old, Clinton’s involved an adult woman. The uproar over Hastert’s and the Republican power-holders’ prolonged do-nothing stance vis-à-vis Foley proves ones again that many public officials in the self-proclaimed party of family values (see E.J. Dionne Jr.) are tireless in proclaiming such values and far less eager to live by them.

Dionne writes that liberals have been reluctant to embrace “family values” because “they wrongly accepted it as a conservative-only slogan. And many liberals who lead thoroughly old-fashioned, child-centered, family-oriented lives have not been willing to integrate that fact into the way they talk about politics.” I am sure that there are people of all ideological bends and of all partisan preferences who live according to the best family values and others who do not.

But why proclaim your family values, if you try to live them day-in and day-out?

Why proclaim your family values if you support policies that benefit the young and the old and those in-between?

Why proclaim your family values, unless you ride this slogan to distract the mass of voters from recognizing that your policies are in fact hostile to families?

Family values. It is an effective sound bite. And it is perhaps the most hypocritical slogan in the arsenal of conservative rhetoric that relates to the growing influence of the religious right in the Republican Party. It would be ironic, if the many Christians fundamentalists, who do live their kinds of family values, turned their backs on conservative Republicans in November by simply staying home on Election Day and punished Washington’s guardians of “family values” for their hypocritical ways.

One way or the other, Democrats and liberals should not embrace the “family values” slogan that is dishonest and tainted.