Sick of reading this ongoing Mark Sanford Harlequin romance novel?
Blame it all on Dan Quayle.
After all, he fashioned the rope that so many politicians have since hung themselves with.
It’s not the adultery, you see, it’s the hypocrisy.
The fact that Bill Clinton not only survived his second term in office — one in which he was impeached for lying about an adulterous affair with a young woman — but left it with the highest approval rating of any modern-day president (one point higher than Ronald Reagan) should have ended America’s obsession with our leaders and their extra-marital dalliances.
Perhaps it would have, if not for the parade of politicians such as Sanford, who continue to preen on their soapboxes and trumpet their “family values.” You know the type. They drag their dutiful spouses and freshly scrubbed kids out for photo ops and then stress the need for strong nuclear families and traditional moral values.
Then, they go and act like humans. And when we discover their idea of family values means chasing skirts in Argentina or wide- stancing it in a men’s room stall, we laugh at the hypocrisy and sniff, “What nerve they had, talking about family values.”
Someone should be talking about family values in this country, but I think it’s past time that politicians, almost always Republicans, retire it from their stump speeches.
There is no longer any moral high ground left for them to stand on. It has cratered under the weight of the sins of self-righteous preachers and Bible-clutching politicians who get to know, in the biblical sense, way too many people outside their marriage.
It helps to remember that back in 1992, when family values first became a real political issue, President George H.W. Bush and his veep, Quayle, were barely clinging to the White House. Los Angeles was still smoldering after the Rodney King riots and Quayle, already a liability for the ticket, was trying to win over the right-wing conservatives with a family values speech.
“I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw [in L.A.] is directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society,” Quayle said.
Then, he added: “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ”
He was right. Even Candace Bergen, who played the fictional Ms. Brown, later acknowledged that he was right.
But Quayle was mocked. Greatly.
Pay no mind to the fact that just a few years later a million men marched in Washington to say basically the same thing, and everyone applauded.
Strong families are the backbone of our culture. They produce the next generation of good citizens who obey laws and pay taxes and tend to their childrens’ educations and values.
But “family values” as a political wedge issue no longer works. I’m not sure it ever has. It conjures up images of straight married couples raising Christian children, but it disregards the fact not all families are “traditional” and, clearly, some traditional families are just awful places for kids to be.
If politicians cared more about the quality of families rather than the traditional makeup of families, we’d be better off. Check that — if they stopped preaching about family values altogether and left morals to the men and women of cloth, we’d all be better off.
If they did, we wouldn’t stare for so long when they fall from their self-proclaimed grace. And we could leave Dan Quayle alone.
E-mail Dan Haley at dhaley@ .
