Republican Sex Scandals a Sign It's Time to End the Family Values Wars

An Oklahoma state legislator recently divined the cause of our economic funk. We are paying the price, according to a resolution state Rep. Sally Kern is sponsoring, for becoming a "world leader" in pornography, same-sex marriage, divorce, and other "forms of debauchery." It will come as no surprise that Kern is a Republican (a "Kern-servative" at that, according to her website).

If the states are indeed the national parties' farm teams, the Sally Kerns of the world will doom the GOP. Republicans can no longer afford to lustily fight the culture wars, and it's time for them to sue for peace on the marriage front.

The phrase "family values" first entered the political lexicon in the 1976 Republican platform, according to William Safire's Political Dictionary. But, coinciding with the rise of the religious wing of the Republican Party, the term came into its own in the 1980s, with the Bushes and Quayles gathering together on stage to cap off the 1988 GOP convention with an illustration of their support of traditional families (not like those godless, family-hating Democrats). It was an effective political issue, but never a magic bullet.

In 1992, when the Republicans gave over a whole prime-time evening of their convention to the "issue," conservative commentator turned failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan declared a culture war and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned that Democratic nominee Bill Clinton and his wife viewed the term as having nothing to do with "either families or values. They are talking about a radical plan to destroy the traditional family and transfer its functions to the federal government."

The party's social conservative base was thrilled. The rest of the nation was repelled. And five presidential elections later, the GOP still has not figured out how to square that circle. The Clintons, of course, exacerbated that tension by bringing it into stark relief. A core tenet of the "family values" argument is that if a man cannot be trusted to keep his vows to his wife, then he is unfit for the public's trust. Bill Clinton was manifestly, grandly unfaithful to his wife—the very epitome of the kind of politician conservatives warned against.

But voters didn't particularly care. The economy was percolating along, and while his eyes might have wandered in his personal life, Clinton remained focused like the proverbial laser beam on the economy. The GOP should have realized then that "family values" (or "traditional values," as it came to be known) had been played out. But the party's social arm remained—and remains—too potent.

Clinton was an extreme but not isolated example. Would you rather have philanderer Franklin Roosevelt running the country or proper husband Herbert Hoover? JFK or Jimmy Carter, who has presumably kept his lust confined to his heart? Slick Willie Clinton or sanctimonious George W. Bush?

And there is something inherently offensive about moralists passing judgment on others' relationships. A marriage is an intimate and complex organism. Extrapolating character judgments from behavior observed from afar, through the prism of the press, is dangerous at best.

But no one ever said that politically cutting issues had to be well thought through or sensible. They do, however, require a critical element of consistency that the GOP has squandered. The stories of Rep. Mark Foley "sexting" congressional pages and Sen. Larry Craig's "wide stance" were bizarre late-night fodder. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter turned up on the "D.C. Madam's" client list. And this year the taint reached the Republican class of would-be presidential candidates. Nevada Sen. John Ensign revealed an affair with a former campaign staffer who is married to one of his legislative aides. And then there is the unfolding tale of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, his Argentine amour (as well as other women, he told the Associated Press, with whom he "crossed lines"), and his turning "hiking in the Appalachians" into an instant political euphemism.

Granted, not all of the offenders were full-throated members of the "family values" wing of the party, but they were, at a minimum, fellow travelers. (Foley, Ensign, and Sanford, by the way, were all members of the House GOP class of 1994 who battled Bill Clinton under the leadership of then-married-but-already-dating-his-next-wife Newt Gingrich; all three voted to impeach Clinton.)