I found this piece I wrote during the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, it was more prophetic than I hoped.
By John Oberon
Family values has become a political buzzword lately. I have yet to hear it clearly defined, yet everyone tosses it around as if it were as common and understandable as a baseball. I don’t think it is.
In the past, we defined “family “ easily: a husband, a wife, and their children. Families were people related by blood, marriage, or adoption.
Today, families fragment as often as they endure. It is not uncommon for parents to go through two divorces, and have children from each marriage. “Son, you’ll stay with daddy and Jane over the weekend, then stay with mommy and Bill for a few days, then you’ll stay with grandma for a week.“ Is it any wonder that there is confusion about what is meant by “family “? We define families no longer by blood and unity, but by words and proximity. Whoever happens to live together at any given time, that’s a family. Now everyone belongs to a family, but what loneliness and isolation! Liberalism sucks the life out of the family and leaves us the hollow husk of cohabitation.
And what about the word “values “? In the past, a person who had values was a person who lived his life according to high moral standards, usually biblically based. He was chaste, polite, honest, a hard worker, all the standards liberals think “unrealistic “ or “uncompassionate “ when applied to people who do not meet them.
Today, “values” means whatever a person happens to think is important. That’s why abortion and divorce slay and pile the carcasses of children and marriages up to the sky. Now everyone lives by values, but what moral bankruptcy! Liberalism replaces the firm foundation of morality with the mushy sand of moral relativity.
Now let those two slippery words, “family “ and “values “, crash together in the maelstrom of American social politics and it is easy to understand why definition becomes so elusive and confusing. Family? Values? What’s that?
I will tell you what it is.
Family values is love made personal. Remember when love was personal... blood and marrow personal...when people defended their families like gladiators and marriage stood to the death? That’s family values. It is a death commitment to a life conviction. It is ironclad and battle ready, flooded with sorrow and buoyed by joy. It is the shining point warrior of virtue, scarred and hardened, striding through the misty fog of worldly love and dissipating it with the sweep of a hand. It is the substance of action which solidifies ideas, not the empty symbolism of words. It is the howitzer of sacrifice, not the pop gun of sex. It is all that and more when animated by the simple faith of the humblest American family.
But in certain segments of America, that doesn’t play well. There’s no zing, no zap, no zowie. Where’s the sex? The money? The fun? These things occupy prominent roles in some people’s minds, but true family values views them as only incidental, a by-product of what in reality is simply worship and obedience to God, and that is the foundation of America. And what about this sacrifice, and sorrow, and death commitment? If that’s family values then there is precious little to recommend it, even less on which to build an image. It needs considerable twisting to make it palatable to the public. It needs more “compassion “, more “tolerance “, more “understanding “ so it embraces virtually any perverted nightmare scenario a helpless, socially blighted, but “trying their best “ degenerate might dream up. We all must possess family values, or we will have none at all.
Yet still there are those who fail to realize that universal possession of family values and no family values are one and the same. If the standard for social behavior vanishes, then the value of social behavior vanishes as well. Right and wrong no longer exist in morality based on individual choice. Sound familiar? It should. America is perilously close to discovering what it means to be governed by a socialist democracy instead of a representative republic, where feelings outweigh fact and the diversity of choice and the ability to choose overshadow and excuse the choices we make.
May God help us in the midst of the chaos that will surely result from that viewpoint.