c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Talk about family comes as readily to politicians as wind to Chicago and sun to San Diego.

Democrats who gathered this week in Chicago, like their Republican counterparts who met earlier in San Diego, know that as the campaign unfolds, President Clinton and his GOP challenger, Bob Dole, will present dueling economic visions wrapped in the warm and emotionally charged rhetoric of family values.

For more than a year Democrats have sought to wrest from Republicans the identity of being the party of family values. They unleashed a torrent of talk on the subject in Chicago, beginning with gun control advocates Jim and Sarah Brady and paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve.”Over the last two years, we have heard a lot about something called family values and like many of you (I’ve) struggled to figure out what that means,”Reeve acknowledged in his speech Monday (Aug. 26) at the Democratic National Convention.

Many Americans share Reeve’s uncertainty about the meaning of the term, given the volume and velocity of family rhetoric and the competing soundbites offered by the two conventions.

And while the lines can be blurred, the meanings behind the cliches invoked by the candidates represent a real battle: The cluster of issues each party wraps in the mantle of family values reveals significant, even fundamental, differences between the candidates over the role they believe government should play in the nation’s life, the anxieties they believe the voters feel, and at least a part of the agenda they pursue when in power.

In his acceptance speech at the San Diego convention, for example, Dole challenged the Democratic vision, especially as put forth in first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent book,”It Takes a Village.””After decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values, what have we reaped, what have we created?”Dole asked.”And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock on which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a village _ that is, the collective, and thus, the state _ to raise a child.”The state is now more involved than it has ever been in the raising of children, and children now are more neglected, abused and mistreated than they have been in our time,”he said.”This is not a coincidence, and, with all due respect, I am here to tell you: It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The Democrats quickly responded, beginning with Reeve’s speech and continuing an unrelenting barrage during the convention.”… (S)ince my accident, I’ve found the definition that seems to make sense,”Reeve said, answering his own question about the meaning of the elusive phrase.”I think it means that we’re all family. And that we all have value.” The family values issue reached a crescendo Tuesday (Aug. 27) night when Mrs. Clinton, in a 20-minute speech on the subject, told cheering delegates that,”For Bill and me, family has been been the center of our lives.”But we also know that our family, like your family, is part of a larger community that can help or hurt our best efforts to raise a child,”she added.

Behind the dueling sound-bites are sharply different meanings.

For Republicans, family values are located in a cluster of social issues _ opposition to abortion, pornography and homosexuality, all of which they believe undermine the nuclear family. This view is strongly promoted by the religious conservatives who now influence much of the party’s machinery and who are organized in such groups as Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition, whose legislative agenda is billed as the Contract with the American Family.

In addition, Republicans support a restoration of organized prayer in the public schools and the use of tax funds to give parents, especially the poor, the choice to send their children to private schools as a means of bolstering families.

The GOP platform plank on education, for example, supports initiatives to promote chastity until marriage as the expected standard of behavior.

Religious conservatives also are pushing a”parental rights act”that would make it more difficult for government to remove children from parents’ custody and place them in foster care. Such a move would be viewed as a defeat of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which some conservatives perceive as a”very real”threat to America’s parents.

Conservatives also believe that the traditional family can be shored up by reducing government social spending and cutting taxes. Families, according to the Republican platform,”are suffering from the twin burdens of stagnant incomes and near-record taxes.” While most Democrats support such intimate and family-related issues as gay rights and abortion rights, they do not speak of them in terms of family values. Instead, Democrats link family values to pocketbook and”kitchen table”issues such as crime, education and the environment.”We’re looking at the needs families express when they sit around the kitchen table,”said White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta.”How are they going to educate their kids … their worry about crime in the street. These are the fundamental family issues.” During the first three days of the Democratic convention, speaker after speaker linked family values to a variety of anti-crime, environment, health and pocketbook proposals rather than to the social issues. Several speakers, for example, noted that the first legislation Clinton signed was the Family and Medical Leave Act, legislation allowing a family member time off for work to deal with a birth, adoption or family medical emergency. The bill was vetoed twice by Republican President George Bush.”Yes, kids need parents,”said West Virginia Gov. Gaston Caperton in a direct rejoinder to Dole and the social conservatives who stress the nuclear family over the role of other institutions.”But kids also need churches, temples and decent communities _ and they need good schools. To me, that’s the very essence of family values.” In her speech, Mrs. Clinton ticked off a host of initiatives the Democrats support in their version of a family values agenda: legislation to bar hospitals from sending mothers and their newborns home within 48 hours following birth; a”flex-time”law that would give parents the option to take either overtime pay or time off, whichever suited their family need; and an”America Reads”program, the goal of which is for every child to be a proficient reader by the third grade.

Congressional Democrats also used the convention to outline another series of proposals they linked to aiding families _ expanded child-care and education tax credits, broader health-care coverage for children, and hiring more police officers.

The president himself, during his whistle-stop trip to Chicago, even linked his environmental initiatives to the family:”I want an America in the year 2000 where no child should have to live near a toxic waste dump, where no parent should have to worry about the safety of a child’s glass of water and no neighborhood should be put in harm’s way by pollution from a nearby factory,”Clinton said Wednesday.

Even before the Democratic Convention began, there was evidence that the nation was clearly divided over these conflicting visions of family values.

A Gallup Poll released in mid-August showed that 45 percent of the public identifies Republicans, who invented the term, as the”party of family values.”Forty-one percent of those surveyed identify the Democratic Party with family values.

The election could well hinge on which version of family values rings true with Americans, who may be as confused about the meaning of the term as was Christopher Reeve.

LJB END RNS