On Traditional Family Values

"Anothing issue," said Congressman Henry Hyde in Detroit last week, dismissing Senator Charles Percy's outrage over the Republican platform plank that urges the appointment of judges "who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of human life." To the approving cheers and laughter of the Illinois delegation, Hyde wondered: "Who could be against traditional family values?"

Hyde then provided some elaboration of what the Republican Convention understood by the platform's reiteration of "traditional family values." Opposition, for example, to palimony, "rewarding a woman with money for living with a man outside of marriage." Opposition to pornography, which "would sicken a gynecologist." But opposition also to school busing for desegregation--"a form of conscription." Opposition to federal housing projects--"but none where you live, Senator Percy."

Though Reagan made "family" the first on the list of "shared values that he considers fundamental, he and his chief aides did their best to dismiss the controversy over family issues as relatively insignificant when compared with economic problems and foreign policy. That attempt may not succeed. Not only did pro-ERA demonstrators protest noisily outside the convention hall, but conservatives inside also indicated that these issues will not go away.

The conservative delegates and the party platform reflect a belief in an embattled unit, the traditional family, with a working father and a mother at home teaching values to the children. "Traditional family values," said Independent Hawaiian Delegate John Leopold, "is a term they use to describe a wish that we go back to simpler times, when the roles of men and women were different."

The ERA, which the Republican platform no longer supports, impressed many delegates as symbolic, an opening for Government intrusion into family life and a denial of the biblical description of the family. Paul Glover from Alaska, an evangelical minister and organizer for the Fundamentalist political group Moral Majority, said, "It's all in Genesis: God created Adam, whose rib provided the spare parts for the first loudspeaker (i.e., Eve)." Glover's wife Carolyn, a first-time delegate and a member of the national platform committee, chuckled. Glover earnestly went on: "The ERA as it is written is a blank check for homosexual rights"--even though the amendment does not mention homosexuality.

The American educational system also threatens the family, according to a number of delegates. They denounced bureaucracies, and "amoral indoctrination," and they demanded tax credits for parents who wish to choose private schools that "best correspond to their own moral values." Neal Stafford from Wyoming said of the schools: "You have to do what Washington mandates. That's the way Communism operates, with controlling education of the kids."

The legislation most favored by these traditionalists is the Family Protection Act, introduced in the Senate in 1979 by Paul Laxalt of Nevada, Reagan's campaign chairman and one of his closest friends. This measure would eliminate the "marriage tax" (a married couple now pays higher taxes than an unmarried couple with the same income). It would provide assistance for at-home care of the elderly, prohibit intermingling of the sexes in school sports and encourage voluntary prayer in public schools.

Like the family planks of the Republican platform, the Family Protection Act claims to protect an institution in a form that hardly exists any more. The number of Americans who live in the traditional household with working father, domestic mother and dependent children amount to a mere 15% of the population today. But to defend that institution represents a passion for people who, as Drew Arena, a Denver Republican leader, put it, "sense that events are out of an individual's control."

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