QUARRELING OVER FAMILY VALUES : Travels in the Post-Nuclear Age

I MAY WELL SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE TRYING TO understand the language and motives of the Republican Party. I cannot fathom what possible electoral goal could be achieved by bashing voters like me for having no “family values.” But then, according to speakers at the Houston convention, this isn’t an election we’re having. It’s a civil war.

“There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Pat Buchanan thundered from the podium. The perceived enemies trying to destroy the traditional family, he claimed, include feminists, supporters of lesbian and gay rights, single moms, abortion rights activists and working women as well as environmentalists, non-Christians, labor activists, civil libertarians . . . just about everyone I know. Republican Chairman Richard Bond declared, “We are America. These other people are not America.”

When I first heard myself denounced in Houston, I thought I was hallucinating. It was 112 degrees in Tempe, Ariz., and I had been on the road for two days. I had just left Connecticut with my older son, connected with his father in Michigan and flown to Arizona to settle him into his first year of college. Our family was restructuring itself again--at one time or another both of my sons have lived with me, with their dad, with and without each other--and though we are veterans of change after nearly two decades, these domestic transitions are never without their electrifying moments of truth.

“The purpose of the adversary culture is to separate parents from their children,” I heard Buchanan warn the delegates over the car radio. That’s exactly what I was up to the week the Republicans were bashing my post-nuclear family. Preparing children for independence, equipping them with habits of self-discipline and self-reliance, is the ultimate goal of parenthood, no? Perhaps because I have been a working mother for the whole of my son’s childhood, regarded by right-wingers as a less-committed and somehow dangerous mom, I now felt compelled to double-check for critical gaps in his socialization before dropping him off in the middle of the desert. Until the end of our trip, I kept offering him final tips about how to pass for civilized: Baseball caps should be removed at the dinner table. Wet towels should not be left to sour on the bathroom floor. It’s a good idea to switch from MTV to the news once in a while, especially for anyone casting his first vote in a presidential election this year.

Every parent worries during these delicate separations about whether children have sufficiently mastered survival skills: Will my son live within his means, balance his checking account, eat properly, pick up after himself? When he experiences failure, as everyone must, will he hold himself responsible and try to change--or will he blame me, his dad, perhaps his representatives in Congress? I had to wonder, too, if the most important legacy of his childhood, our values, would weather the transition. Will he vigilantly resist prejudices about gender, race, religion, sexual orientation? Will he remember with humility that nobody, ever, can possess all of the truth--that as long as we are human, there will always be more thinking and striving to do?

These values are completely at odds with the idea of a government that would force women through unwanted pregnancies, forbid certain citizens from marrying the ones they love, disqualify the same group from positions in education and the military, prohibit certain of us from adopting children and pressure our children to pray, in unison, in public schools. If the Republican platform drafted at the convention were to become law, it would be “The Handmaid’s Tale” come true. Under its terms, my family and most of my friends would all have to become outlaws.

The blatant hostility of some right-wing Republicans was, in an odd way, almost reassuring. Since the enemies list names almost everyone living outside the traditional family model of breadwinning dad, full-time mom and two or more children--that is, all but about 1.4% of us--who will be left to support the Republican candidates? What kind of party leaders would deliberately insult the voting majority in an election year? And what planet has Marilyn Quayle been on for the past 20 years? In her “teeny tiny little talk” in Houston, she looked straight into the cameras and announced that it’s a woman’s “essential nature” to want to be a wife and mother. She reminded us that not all baby boomers “dropped out, took drugs, joined the sexual revolution or dodged the draft.” You have to wonder: Maybe she should have. Perhaps a teeny tiny bit of Prozac would relieve her overwhelming need to control the personal decisions of others.

“Dominance makes a ruling group stupid,” columnist Sydney Harris once wrote. A singular emphasis on authority and almost military discipline of children is clearly central to the Republican Party’s definition of family values. The whole concept of parental consent for birth control or abortion is based on the notion that a child’s confidence and love can be guaranteed through legislation; Hillary Clinton was roundly thrashed for suggesting that children have civil rights. John Stanwix, a delegate from Rochester, N.Y., defined family values as “those things that unite and keep a family together . . . the laws and regulations that allow parents to have authority and discipline over their children.” Over dinner, the evening before my son began his new life in Arizona, he expressed his outrage over the fact that the right of parents to hit their children supersedes children’s rights to protect themselves.

It was such an alien concept to him, he asked if he had ever been spanked. His father and I acknowledged that when he was very small, before there was much public awareness about the cycles of domestic violence, spanking was rarely questioned. It wasn’t until he was almost 2 that we finally decided to find some other way to win his cooperation and respect.

We had rules of behavior, certainly, plenty of rules. Relinquishing the Big Stick required imagination and patience, because comprehension comes much more slowly through negotiation than through a whack. But we operated on the theory that children who understand why they have to take out the garbage, do their homework and respect other people can eventually discipline themselves. That’s undoubtedly why I’m on the enemies list. If I were in charge of national policy, I wouldn’t be applying military values to families. I’d be looking at it the other way around. Instead of “America First!” which reminds me of the playground bully’s “Me first!” or “Boys are best!” I would bring a mother’s plea to the warring parties: “Now, now, there’s enough for everyone.”

AFTER LEAVING OUR SON IN THE DESERT, HIS FATHER AND I WENT OUR SEPArate ways again. Though we’ve been divorced now longer than we were married, we have sufficiently evolved since our dream of “happily ever after” collapsed to recognize that lifetime friendship means continually forgiving old emotional debts. We’ve endured some fractious years as one unwelcome statistic after another dropped into our lives, requiring us to confront the crushing realities of unemployment, single parenthood, unequal pay and the absence of health care. But a mutual passion for our sons has forced us to become a more generous and tolerant couple than we might have been had we stayed married.

I then drove to the West Coast to visit some friends--feminists and lesbians and environmentalists--enemies of the state, all. Even for a hardened outlaw like myself, it’s hard to drive along the Pacific Coast Highway in California without a reverence for this splendid, finite planet. Protecting the environment is another one of my family’s useless values, according to Daniel O. Graham, a retired Army general and former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, who told a reporter at the Aug. 22-23 convention of the religious right in Dallas that “atheists and agnostics and their trained-seal scientists” have invented the greenhouse effect and ozone hole to promote “world government.”

The God and Country Rally in Houston made it perfectly clear that although neither cars nor factories pollute the environment, lesbians and gays do. Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett tried to wrap his mind around “lifestyles. . . . Heaven knows, there are a lot of them.” Acknowledging that “this is a free country,” Bennett nevertheless decided “some ways of living are better than others--better because they bring more meaning to our lives.”

Certainly that would describe my longtime friend Marge, a family-law attorney in Santa Rosa who spends her days mediating divorce and securing financial support for Sonoma County’s poorer children, and her lover, Diane, the mother of two bright, sociable young women. Marge and Diane were celebrating their seventh anniversary when I walked into their warm kitchen that brimmed with good food and cheer. I copied the note tacked to the mirror in the downstairs bathroom that quoted Howard Thurmon, an African-American preacher in San Francisco: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

The Republicans are so terrified of this aliveness in the gay community that one member of the Christian coalition, in the company of his young son, shouted to an ACT UP demonstrator at the convention: “I’ll crush you, faggot!” A letter to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner fairly smoked with acidic contempt, accusing homosexuals of “weakening the morale of the military, deterioration of the military’s strong moral fiber and promoting perverted sex in barracks.” Was the writer perhaps confusing the facts about the Tailhook scandal, where as many as 26 women were allegedly assaulted by drunken, presumably heterosexual, naval officers? The President’s wager, running on this intolerant party platform, is this: Since the majority of us are not lesbian or gay, most of us see no harm in bashing those who are. Is Mr. Bush so numb to our feelings that he can’t see the contempt for our character such a position reveals? Because it’s not just clearly identifiable enemies like me--a godless-feminist-single-mom-working woman--who care about Marge. Her devout Mennonite parents in Indiana love her, too, and greet her lover’s daughters with all the warmth of grandparents. My friend Susan’s Catholic parents in Chicago have adjusted their thinking to include her lesbian partner in their family’s embrace. And my New York friend Florence looks forward to a phone call from her gay son every day. Rather than breaking down family values, homosexuals who have come out to their families and friends have strengthened family ties. Whatever the pollsters and spin handlers and image consultants are telling Mr. Bush, he’s betting we won’t mind the humiliations from Houston. We do.

I tuned into Pacifica radio for reports on the civil war as I drove to Berkeley, where I was meeting another old friend, a veteran from the front who’d served with me as an escort at a Ft. Wayne abortion clinic when we were both living in the Midwest. I suppose Mr. Bush wants us to be grateful because he recently admitted that he would not reject a granddaughter who might exercise this right. Say what he will, by standing on his rigid platform and appointing committed anti-abortion candidates to the Supreme Court, he’s made it impossible for women of lesser means even to have that choice.

Today, every woman who enters a clinic risks a psychological stoning from threatening picketers. My friend talked about the demilitarized zone that abortion clinics have become and wondered how this country could abandon its women, its daughters, mothers and sisters, to what she called “mob action on the sidewalks.” The courts’ and police departments’ attitude toward the violence at the clinics, she said despairingly, is “that it’s just a cat fight--let the women work it out.”

Once again, religious beliefs, moral values and the dictates of human conscience have ignited intolerance. If a woman believes abortion is wrong for her, there must, of course, be laws to insure she would never be forced to have one. But that woman’s choice has never been the issue. It’s the women who choose abortion who are under siege.

The effort to ban abortion is based on the notion that state legislatures--mostly men--are morally superior to and more responsible than every woman in the country. For the “sinful” women who “get themselves pregnant,” as one Republican state senator in Indiana declared, the recommended punishment is motherhood. Even if one believed single, pregnant women were indeed evil and irresponsible, wouldn’t a punishment of involuntary motherhood constitute child abuse?

The woman behind the counter at Woolworth’s might have figured me for a sinful woman last month when I bought several dozen condoms for my college-bound son. Though I’ve been passing along information about sexuality since my son learned to speak and read, I squeezed in one more important talk on the topic before he left home last month. I reminded him that condoms were vital, not just to prevent AIDS but also to prevent pregnancy. Using a condom was an act of respect, I added. The greatest sexual sin in my personal family value system was sleeping with someone you didn’t protect.

AFTER I LEFT BERKELEY, I BEGAN A leisurely drive south along PCH, by now looking for music on the radio, something to beat the blues. I wondered if there would ever be an end to tiresome debates on family values. It was exhausting trying to qualify for the good mom, dodging accusations as the bad mom. Does merely stepping out of the house really make a woman a threat to the framers of the Republican platform? In 1992, the choice for most women to be full-time moms or homemakers is a fiction, as my seat mate on the plane back to Connecticut pointed out. Motherhood, we both agreed, is impossible without money. Even if sometime in the future we were all to have government vouchers for the schools of our choice, our kids would still need sneakers and jeans. If my family values did not include work, we would have been on welfare for the last 15 years.

Even Phyllis Schlafly, our model American mother, isn’t against every kind of day-care; she couldn’t be the mother of six and run a national anti-abortion movement without baby-sitters and household help. No, it is day-care funded by big government that inflames Republican ire. Good moms marry millionaires and pay private baby-sitters; bad moms rely on a patchwork of public programs.

While we outlaws have been struggling to expand our consciousness about the devastated economy and imperiled environment, about civil rights and urban despair, Republican politicians have been hammering away for more than a decade about school prayer. It isn’t that anybody faces a threat when getting together in churches and private homes to pray--it’s that the Republicans want every schoolchild to pray with them, at exactly the same time, inspiration notwithstanding.

“Barbarians” are taking over American cities, Pat Buchanan warned, barbarians from “public schools where God and the Ten Commandments and the Bible were long ago expelled.” This theory didn’t cut it with my sister Regina, who had the wine chilled and a delectable snack waiting for me when I finally got home. She had just moved in with my non-traditional family, making us even more so: Now my younger son, a high school senior, lives with two single women, one a “FemiNazi,” the other unemployed.

My sister left her job at Lawrence High School in Massachusetts last year in sheer disgust at the shambles the Education President has created in our public schools. As the term began last year, six of her students did not have desks (not a problem once the dropout rate kicks in, she was advised). There were no lights in her classroom for four months (a problem on cloudy days, when she had to move her English class to a corner of the cafeteria). And she had to buy her own mimeograph paper that year (unfortunate, since it coincided with a teacher pay cut).

It’s clear, given these conditions, that prayer is not going to change the future for the students of Lawrence High School without an investment in their community and families. When Regina helped one of her brightest students with her college application, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at Maria’s description under “Honors and Awards”: “I have never been arrested.”

The war rages on here in Connecticut. Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson is quoted in the morning newspaper, advising Iowans to defeat the state’s equal rights amendment because it “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Although a local editorial called the Republican convention a “bad joke,” I never laugh when Phyllis Schlafly joins the two Pats at the podium. I have a healthy respect for their skill in manipulating the power of myth.

The polls regularly tell us that Americans will believe anything for a while--but eventually we’ll “bounce” back to reality. Sometimes, however, we come to our senses too late. I’ve been on the enemies list of these folks before when my feminist friends and I squared off against Phyllis Schlafly and her platoons of Peach Ladies during the ERA debates in the ‘70s. They are not a fun bunch in combat.

The media training sessions for Schlafly’s national anti-ERA organization were an efficient boot camp, outfitting members for battle in telegenic peach or apricot colors, drilling them to smile sweetly into the camera. Then as now, they approached the issues with ferocious piety and righteousness, fighting against gay and lesbian rights and equal employment and blaming women for rape, battery and unwanted pregnancy. No matter how hateful their words, the Peach Ladies From Hell never stopped smiling. No wonder the men of the religious right are fearful of women.

A genius at manipulating fears, Schlafly distracted attention from the desperate economic realities of women and created a circus of debates about “unisex toilets and women in the draft.” Sound familiar? The ERA failed in America because, in part, myths are more powerful than our reality. The irony is that unisex toilets have become the norm in many restaurants and public facilities. And even President Bush would not be so impolitic as to praise the brave men without also mentioning the brave women of “Operation Desert Storm.” Both of the imagined nightmares of the ERA have come true, and women are still only a dime closer to equal pay than they were 22 years ago.

The Houston convention was the most witless spectacle American politics has given us to date, and yet analysts are still calling this a “close election.” If our leaders will not stand up and risk the truth, then it’s up to a nation of outlaws to band together and defend ourselves.