My Life and Times

November 6, 2004BELIEFS
The 'Moral Values' IssueBy PETER STEINFELS
he election of George W. Bush, it seems, turned on moral values.
It seems.
Hardly had the exit polls shown that 22 percent of the voters named "moral values" as the issue mattering most in their choice for president when Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, called that conclusion misleading. On the Wednesday edition of "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Mr. Kohut rightly pointed out that moral values may have ranked ahead of jobs or terrorism because it was an ambiguous, appealing and catchall phrase.
It is true that if the exit polls had constructed an equivalent catchall economic category adding concern about health care and taxes to that about jobs and growth, it would have been the top concern of 33 percent of the voters. If the poll findings had combined concern about terrorism with concern about Iraq, as apparently many voters did, the resulting category would have ranked first with 34 percent of the voters.
To underscore the ambiguity of moral values, consider three of the issues often subsumed under that umbrella. Stem cell research is immensely popular. Gay marriage is not. Legal access to abortion falls somewhere in between.
And surely concern about moral values mixes revulsion at the offerings of Hollywood, cable television, the popular music industry and pornographic Web sites with defense of displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses and of reciting "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance - and who knows what else.
Furthermore, many of these concerns are stimulated and shaped artificially and emotionally by the high commands and local shock troops in the culture wars.
So level-headed observers like Mr. Kohut are wise to warn that no one quite knows what reality lies behind the moral values catchphrase. But isn't it important to find out? The fact that 80 percent of the voters listing moral values uppermost in their minds voted for Mr. Bush suggests that there is some unifying, underlying reality there. Anyone seeking to understand American political culture should be more than a little bit curious, to say nothing of Democrats contemplating the future of their party.
There are, however, several surefire ways to short-circuit such an inquiry.
Comparing the so-called values voters with jihad-driven Muslim terrorists, an equation ventured by not a few post-election analysts, will do nicely, for starters. Loosely tossing around terms like fundamentalism and theocracy is similarly effective at anesthetizing the thought processes. Then there is the leap that fretting about moral values is merely a disguise for ignorance, irrationality and intolerance.
These caricatures cast millions of citizens as ominous Others, alien invaders not from another planet but at least from another era, probably the benighted Middle Ages or the nearly as dark 1950's. Nevermind the evidence of writers and scholars as different as David Brooks, Alan Wolfe and Morris P. Fiorina that Americans are not really as deeply divided as either the metaphor of a culture war or the electoral-vote map of the red and blue states suggests.
Barack Obama, the newly elected senator from Illinois, memorably challenged the red-state, blue-state dichotomy at the Democratic convention. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states," Mr. Obama said, and "have gay friends in the red states." Perhaps he could have added something about finding supporters of the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions in blue states and conservative Christian defenders of church-state separation in the red states.
Fanaticism exists, of course, and stupidity, too. Wild claims and aggressive demands have been made in the name of moral values, often enough by figures competing for public attention. Latching upon these is an easy and tempting way to deaden the kind of empathy and imagination necessary to comprehend another perspective.
A condescending incredulity offers a slightly more sophisticated way to derail any inquiry into the moral values issues. Just treat one's own views as so established and self-evident that any questioning of them can only be a puzzling and pathological "backlash." Are there really still people out there opposed to abortion rights? How incomprehensible!
Whatever one may think of same-sex marriage, for example, it takes a real stretch to pretend that it is not a noteworthy departure from existing social and legal norms. It would also be a long shot to deny that it was the Massachusetts Supreme Court along with local officials around the nation challenging current laws by officiating at same-sex weddings who placed this on the national agenda rather than the religious right or President Bush.
Voters' emphasis on moral values has prompted talk that the culture is undergoing a sharp conservative shift. A better case can be made that the cultural shifts of recent years have almost entirely continued in a liberal direction. On Nov. 2 a significant part of the nation balked. Gay marriage has proved, at least for now, unacceptable. Meanwhile civil unions, which stirred shock and fury in Vermont only a few years ago, have almost reached the edge of being mainstream.
A final way of skirting any exploration of the moral values so many Americans say determined their presidential choice actually has considerable legitimacy. One can challenge the very idea reflected in the exit polls that moral values constitute some distinct category of public concerns.
Are not moral values also at stake in decisions about war, in drawing lines against torture, in addressing poverty or in providing desperately needed housing and health care? It has become commonplace to note that for every injunction in the Bible regarding homosexuality there are hundreds, maybe thousands regarding care for the poor. All of a nation's common life, not just sexual matters or personal behavior, is shot through with moral and ethical issues.
These points are absolutely true. But those who make them should remember that enlarging the framework of the discussion is one thing, trying to change the subject is another. Whatever this large chunk of voters may have in mind by moral values, those things need to be identified and addressed, not simply steamrolled over by pointing to other issues that may be equally moral and equally or even more important.
Suppose that these barriers to pursuing the question of moral values can be overcome. What then? The endgame should not be some expedient concession or cosmetic exercise to garner votes next time around. The endgame should be an honest discussion of the moral stances dividing Americans, each side (and there may be more than two) addressing the contending arguments at their best and not at their worst. It is not unthinkable that a few minds might be changed, and a great many people feel less alienated.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top