Religious-Right Stance Will Win Votes, Gubernatorial Candidate Says : Minnesota: Allen Quist hopes to defeat a fellow Republican for nomination. He focuses on family values.

In the white farmhouse where Allen Quist grew up doing chores with his three brothers, politics was not considered polite dinner conversation.

But the world has changed for the worse since then, according to the man who wants to be Minnesota governor. So in the same southern Minnesota farmhouse he now shares with his wife and children, politics is the topic of the day, every day.

Quist, an unabashed religious conservative, squashed incumbent Gov. Arne Carlson when the state’s Republican Party conferred its endorsement last month. It was the first time in Minnesota history that the state GOP snubbed its own sitting governor. The state’s primary is set for Sept. 13.

The former state representative also is having a ripple effect on dinner conversation around the state, especially with his comment that there may be a “genetic predisposition” for men to be heads of households.

Quist, who was a professor of psychology and political science at a small Lutheran college for 14 years, says he’d rather get attention for his views on taxes and welfare reform. But he doesn’t think the spotlight on his moral views hurts.

“If they want to attack me for being on the religious right, my attitude is, ‘Go right ahead. You’re giving me the election,’ ” Quist said.

Quist, 49, says Americans should learn from the way things were a generation or two ago. Families were relatively solid, crime was much lower, and so were taxes.

He is convinced that the main causes of crime and other troubles today are what he calls the breakdown of the family and society’s failure to teach core values. He says as governor he would try to change that.

“The family is the best social welfare program ever invented,” he says.

He proposes welfare reform, including a two-year limit and making it easier for welfare recipients to marry without losing benefits. He would spend less on prisons and rely more on restitution.

He wants tax breaks for families, supports abstinence-based sex education, opposes civil rights legislation for homosexuals and opposes no-fault divorce laws.

He also opposes abortion. His political opponents have seized on the public disclosure that his wife, Julie, obtained a legal abortion in California in 1970. She was a leftist activist at the time and helped found the feminist Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis.

“Julie’s not the candidate, and that was 24 years ago,” Quist said. “She obviously has changed.”

The couple married in 1987, after Allen Quist’s first wife died in a car accident while six months pregnant with their 10th child. Julie Quist was a supervisor at AT&T; and had become a Republican Party activist and committed Christian before she met her husband.

She says she was ready to have a family, so she moved to the 800-acre corn and soybean farm, adopted Quist’s nine children, and gave birth to the couple’s own child about a year later at age 41.

“My background is somewhat sensational, but it’s not unusual,” she said. “Everyone has something in their past they’re not proud of.” She said many people have gone through breakdowns “and have come to look for what are the values that are truly lasting.”

The Quists also say the “genetic predisposition” comments were taken out of context. They say they are simply observing that men often lead a household, and they say male leadership does not mean female subservience.

“I never argued it has to be that way, and I observed that very often it is not,” he said. But the controversy “puts the two of us in the position of defending the traditional family. That’s a political winner for us.”

His candidacy is aimed at toppling a fellow Republican who is already in office. Quist has no qualms about that.

“We felt that Arne Carlson could not get reelected and did not represent a Republican viewpoint,” he said.

Carlson has alienated many in his party by supporting legal abortion and gay rights. He won in 1990 after a surprising turn of events; he lost the primary but became the Republican candidate after nominee Jon Grunseth quit the race after allegations that he fondled teen-age girls at a swimming party.

Quist said he could have tolerated Carlson’s liberal views on social issues had Carlson been more conservative with money.

Critics say that while Quist was a state representative, he was preoccupied with the moral issues, not the economic ones. His fight against gay bathhouses--including an undercover visit--is notorious.

“He went to the House floor and gave a booth-by-booth description of what he had found,” said state Rep. Don Ostrom, a Democrat who said even Republicans congratulated him when he defeated Quist in 1988 and 1990.

Carlson says that Quist’s interpretation of his economic record is wrong, and that Quist has an untoward fixation with moral issues.

“Instead of prowling through dirty bookstores, why didn’t he go out and change state spending policy?” Carlson said. “How can you spend 30 hours on the House floor haranguing your seatmates with issues on sex, and then come around and expect the public to take your tax proposals seriously?”

Quist believes he’s riding the crest of a public desire for personal responsibility and a return to shared values.