Opinion: Blurry focus on the family

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The Republican Party has warned the mainstream media -- and bloggers as well -- to lay off vice presidential nominee Governor Sarah Palin, lest they be self-convicted of sexism and prurience. But it’s hard to resist one irony in the adulation Palin has received from cultural conservatives. The subtext -- and sometimes the text -- of conservative carping about a decline in family values is that feminists have seduced women into spurning divinely ordained differences between the sexes in order to chase after vain self-fulfillment and redundant salaries. Yet Palin, the ultimate working mother, is getting a free pass from conservatives like James Dobson of Focus on the Family. (Dobson said of the Palin pick that ‘she’s strong on marriage. . . this is a strong woman, and I’m delighted to have her on the ticket.’)

Conservative culture warriors have a coherent case to make -- though it’s not one I accept --that, given differences between the sexes, mothers will almost always be better child-rearers than fathers, and that middle-class women who work hurt children because most husbands aren’t interested in role reversal. The result is that kids who should be with their mother in the formative years are farmed out to dodgy day-care centers or entrusted to child-minders so unreliable that they have spawned the ‘nannycam’ business. Yet cultural conservatives in the political arena often shrink from the implications of this position for sex roles.

In 2005 then-Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania published a book called ‘It Takes a Family,’ a response to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ‘It Takes a Village.’ Santorum was assailed for supposedly suggesting in his book “that working women should give up their jobs and stay home to raise their children. Santorum protested that he had said no such thing , and strictly speaking he was right: The offending passage was gender-neutral: “In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them don’t need to, or at least may not need to work as much as they do.”

Yet when Santorum in his book offers anecdotes to bolster his point, he mentions the “many women” who told him that they find it more professionally gratifying to work outside the home. Elsewhere in the book he salutes the “traditional family” and assails feminists for their “misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect.” But Santorum, who unsuccessfully sought re-election the year after the book was published, tiptoed away from the obvious implication of his position, which is that it takes not a family, but a stay-at-home mother, to raise a child.

Santorum photo courtesy of AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar; Palin photo courtesy of Robyn Dixon/AFP/Getty Images