The Philadelphia Inquirer Fri  Oct 9  1992

Why family values count in this year’s election

By JOHN M. HAAS

“Family values” has emerged as one of the most confusing themes in the current election campaign. Apparently it has not played well in Peoria. A recent CNN/Time poll showed that only 5 percent of the electorate considered it a significant campaign issue. The overwhelming preoccupation of average Americans is the economy. After all, if the economy is not healthy, families will not be able to live out their own values, whatever they perceive them to be.

In most people’s minds family values and the economy have little to do with one another. “Values” have been banished to the realm of privacy and individual preferences. Yet family values invariably touch upon sex, and if there is one thing sex is not, it is a private matter.

The sex act by its very nature is profoundly social. It invariably (or at least very often) involves someone else. And most significantly, it is the act by which any given society grows and replenishes itself and by which the species is perpetuated. 

Why, after all, does the state concern itself with the sexual acts of private individuals? Why is it that the government is against the random copulation of its citizens? The answer is simple. The state has always regulated and licensed such activity because the very survival of the society for which government is responsible depends upon it. Governments concern themselves with sexual activity because it results in children. If families are not in place to care for, nurture and educate these children, they become the responsibility of the state. 

In what has become almost a universal societal act of denial, people seem to think that sex is somehow divorced from children. However, the billions spent over the years by Planned Parenthood bear testimony to the truth of the matter. Sex is inextricably bound up with having babies. The 1.5 million abortions performed in the United States every year is tragic testimony to this. 

The statistic that 27 percent of the children born in the United States this year will be born out of wedlock is further proof of the validity of what ought to be the common sense insight that sex is for babies.

All of this has profound – and, yes, economic – consequences. The federal program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children expends over $8 billion a year helping where families have failed or where there were no families to provide support. Much of this problem is the result of the “sexual revolution” and the discarding of family values.

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is reporting the highest incidence of sexually transmitted diseases ever. Notwithstanding antibiotics, sex education and the free distribution of condoms in our public schools, gonorrhea is at its highest levels since the end of World War II. Sexually transmitted disease has resulted in a tremendous strain upon our public health resources.

It is reported that $10.3 billion a year is spent for the care of persons with AIDS. This does not take into account the vast sums spent trying to find a cure or a prevention. 

Without suggesting in any way that we back away from our moral obligation to help those with this illness, it must be noted that the vast majority of persons with AIDS contracted the disease by engaging in behaviors which are clearly not consistent with “family values.” Many of the burdens resulting from individuals having chosen to place themselves at risk are now having to be born by society at large.

Governments have always taken into account the fact that married couples assume greater burdens for the social good in the rearing of children. After all, children are the future citizens, producers and consumers in society. Since parents make sacrifices to cover the costs of feeding, clothing, housing and educating their offspring for the good of society, the state provides tax exemptions and other assistance.

Now that people generally view sexual activity as divorced from the task of child-bearing and rearing, none of these “special” arrangements seem to make any sense. Consequently gay and other co-habitating individuals are demanding their own “spousal” privileges—but without assuming the corresponding social obligation of child-bearing and rearing. As a result we are now faced with the threat of yet more government entitlements to drain our national resources.

Families simply make economic sense. Professor Thomas Smithy of the University of South Carolina has found from his research that “adolescents whose parents have separated or divorced are more susceptible than others to peer pressures . . . and actually engage in more deviant behavior than others.” The deviant behavior to which Smith refers are drug use and sexual promiscuity – both of which result in high social cost.

The traditional family tends to higher productivity because of the natural division of labor and the demands placed on it. A study was done at an institute at the University of Wisconsin which found that married men work between two-and-one-third and four times harder than married women and twice as hard as women who were heads of families. It also found that husbands worked 50 percent harder than bachelors of comparable age, education and skills.

Recent census data also show that families make sound economic sense. The census found that the income gap between the white and black populations widened generally between 1967 and 1990. However, the income gap between white and black families actually narrowed considerably in the same period. In 1967 the black family earned an average $72 against $100 for whites. In 1990 in was $85 against $100. The gap is being narrowed. And it is being narrowed by black families.

The voters are right to be preoccupied with the economy. But they should also have enough common sense to see that family values make tremendous economic sense.

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John M. Haas is the John Cardinal Krol professor of moral theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.