What Happened to (GOP) Family Values?

[question everything]

What Happened to Family Values?

Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP.
Jacob Weisberg
NEWSWEEK
Sep 6, 2008

In the 1980s, the rising conservative movement tried to frame the pro-life cause as part of a broader family-values agenda that included reducing rates of illegitimate childbirth, welfare dependency and divorce. To Ronald Reagan and many of his most ardent supporters, abortion on demand was the pre-eminent example of the breakdown of traditional morality that brought about the sexual revolution. Few remember it this way, but Reagan's "evil empire" speech, delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, had more to say about the right of parents to prevent their daughters from receiving contraceptives without their consent than it did about the Soviets.

In fact, these two conservative social goals — ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family — were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion actually supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12th grade, 60 percent of high-school girls are sexually active (or, as Reagan preferred, "promiscuous"). Teen pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years but, even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream.

Forget the "Juno" scenario—in the real world, few unwed mothers give up their babies for adoption. If you do not allow teenage girls who accidentally become pregnant to have abortions, you are demanding that they either raise their children as single mothers or that they marry in shotgun weddings. By the numbers, neither alternative is promising. Unmarried teenage moms seldom get much financial or emotional support from the fathers of their babies. They tend to drop out of high school, go on the dole and are prone to lives of poverty, frustration and disorder. Only 2 percent of them make it through college by the age of 30. The Bristol Palin option doesn't promote family happiness, stability or traditional structure, either. Of women under 18 who marry, whether because of pregnancy or not, nearly half divorce within 10 years, double the rate for those who wait until they're 25.

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URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/157554

[BOSSHOG]

1. Nothing happened to the GOP FAMILY VALUES

its always been just a slogan to trick fuck stupid people into voting for those who have done a great job of keeping their dirty laundry covered up.

[Bob Dobbs]

2. "Family Values" of the republic party has always been a total fraud.

The situational ethics of the republics that allow them to push the anti-choice wedge issue while simultaneously supporting genocide as a tool of amerikkkan imperialist expansionism renders their "values" totally moot.