Emerging Consensus on Values

"Plant the act, reap the habits. Plant the habits, reap the virtue. Plant the virtue, reap the character. Plant the character, reap the destiny."   -   Mother Teresa.

POLITICIANS ARE BOTH FOLLOWERS and leaders. Some create and direct public opinion. Others finely tune their tone to the pitch of the populace. Most both lead and follow public opinion. However, when politicians of both political parties sing in harmony, a safe conclusion is that public consensus has probably been reached.

In 1992 in San Francisco California, Vice-President Dan Quayle delivered the Poverty of Values speech which has come to be known as the infamous "Murphy Brown" speech. The thesis of the speech was that many contemporary problems are difficult for governments to solve because the source of the problem is a "poverty of values." For too many, a popular culture steeped in nihilism and hopelessness has left them bereft of the civic virtues necessary to prosper. For too many, homes with absent fathers have difficulty inoculating young males with the necessary self-discipline, leaving gangs to provide leadership. While popular culture romanticized single-motherhood with role models like the fictional Murphy Brown, the practical consequences of such arrangements for many of the poorest and least advantaged are poverty, violence and despair.

Quayle's public policy prescriptions included restructuring the welfare system to avoid subsidizing and enabling broken families, enforcing child support payments, and using tax cuts to enable and empower families to prosper. The entertainment industry, in Quayle's view, should be shamed into encouraging rather than disparaging two-parent families, hard work, and delayed gratification. Quayle's efforts were belittled and unfairly characterized as suggesting that the Murphy Brown program was the cause of the nation's problems. The idea that values matter or that character counts was ridiculed as a foolish notion of the Christian Right, mean-spirited people who long to foist their outdated and judgmental values on others.

Seven years later, following the tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, another vice-president, this time Al Gore, gave a speech that would have been unthinkable for him in 1992. Gore recognized the paucity of values that leads to violence and alienation. More importantly, Gore argued that many problems have a spiritual component that may require "faith-based" solutions. Gore explained:

"The men and women who work in faith- and values-based organizations are driven by their spiritual commitment; to serve their God, they have sustained the drug-addicted, the mentally ill, the homeless; they have trained them, educated them, cared for them, healed them. Most of all they have done what government can never do; what it takes God's help, sometimes, for all of us to manage; they have loved them   -   loved their neighbors, no matter how beaten down, how hopeless, how despairing. And good programs and practices seem to follow, born out of that compassionate care."

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