Republican Sex Scandals a Sign It's Time to End the Family Values Wars
Republicans and Democrats should keep private lives private and divorce politics from "family values"
The GOP has lost credibility when it comes to judging the validity and integrity of marriages. Party members have become a punch line. Which is a good thing: That's an area in which government and politics have no business anyway. Private morality should remain private.
So it's time for a bipartisan cease-fire. Bipartisan because readers will write in with their list of cheating Democrats—but it's the GOP that, as a party, has styled itself as pious defender of marriage. Take the marriage front out of the culture war. Spare us any more awkward scenes of a pol, aggrieved spouse standing stone-faced next to him, pronouncing himself a sinner and then refusing to answer more questions (or, Sanford-style, giving a solo performance with more mawkish details than we really want or need).
And that cease-fire ought to extend to the latest incarnation of "family values," the crusade to "protect" traditional marriage from gays who want to marry each other. The Republicans' peccadillo problem undermines their (sometimes contrived) moralism on the issue. They should spend more time protecting marriages from internal problems than trying to gin up voter angst over bogus external threats.
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Reader Comments
Information is ok
What you do in your family reflects your values as a whole so I don't see the use of keeping information private. The GOP can stop being hypocrites however and the value voters need to think a bit more deeply about their vote.
But what WILL the repuglicans depend on?
Let's see if they are going to give up the family values that they are most hypocritical about then they will have to return to their broadest base of undereducated, racist, walmart shopping, Kia driving, made in America dumbasses who continue to take Fox News as a news outlet rather than base entertainment, listen to the Drug Addict Rush Limbaugh, believe we are in Iraq for something other than OIL. You know the religious right without the family values part.
Man, do I hope they run the Quitter Sarah Paliin for president in 2012!
No to John J
John J says marriage and children is the foundation of society. It's the foundation of the patriarchal Roman Catholic family whose church bans divorce. Even if a husband turns out to suffer from incurable premature ejaculation, his wife is supposed to put up with that until one of them dies. If he refuses to use contraception and makes her dread every mating with threat of another pregnancy and 18 more years of dependency, she's stuck with him. If she has a family that leeches on him all the time, he has no relief. Patriarchal marriages put inheritance first. When marriage does fail, it is the civil government that runs divorce courts. Leviticus states God's hatred of homosexuals. Lev.18;22 says gays are an abomination to God. Lev.20:13 says kiil homosexuals. But God also says "Thou shalt not kill." So that is used against people who need and want an abortion. Go to "Skeptics' Annotated Bible" to understand where a person with a low religious boiling-point can get the idea to kill an abortion doctor.
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