Family Values

There is a bill pending in both the Senate and House of the United States to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include homosexuals. If passed, the bill would do the following:

• Same-sex marriages would be sanctioned with all the rights and privileges belonging to legitimate marriages, including the right to adopt children.
• Schools, because they receive federal money, would be required to teach homosexuality as a civil right and valid lifestyle (some schools are already doing this).
• News media, licensed or regulated by the federal government, would not be allowed to oppose homosexuality.
• Under some circumstances the church may be forced to hire homosexuals.
• Homosexuals would have the protection of federal employment regulations and, under some circumstances, employers may be forced to hire a certain number of confessed homosexuals.

The Attorney General of the United States would be required to defend homosexuals at tax payers' expense and prosecute any person accused of violating the civil rights of homosexuals.

The House Bill is H.R. 1430, and the Senate Bill is number 574, in case you want to contact your Senator or Representative and object to the legislation. A letter from you will be effective in helping to stop the passage of the bills. Bill Clinton has said that if elected, and if the bill is submitted to him, he will sign it into law.

In an attempt to aid and assist the passage of laws that will protect and legitimize immoral homosexual behavior, some highly placed government officials, many members of the media-perhaps most of them-and some leaders in education are saying they do not know how to define a family. One technique for forcing undesirable and evil practices on unwilling subjects is to create confusion about the meaning of words. We have seen this done with the word gay. It is now being done with the word family. Some good men and women are saying they do not know what constitutes a family.

Gang members in ghettos say they band together to create family. Some of them have said they enjoy the gang because it is like family. Sociologists and psychologists say these poor benighted and misguided gang members are breaking the law, shooting the cops, and burning buildings because they have been deprived of family. They never knew the wan-nth and beauty of a healthy and stable relationship with mother and father. If they never had a family, then how do the gang members know the gang is like a family? They are the ones who do not know what family is, and yet their definition is what the psychologists accept.

A family is "a man and a woman joined by God and any children born to that union." This is the definition given in the second chapter of Genesis and sanctioned by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6. It is as simple as that, and why educated people do not know it is beyond my understanding.

Someone may say, "But what if the husband or the wife should die, is it still a family?" No; it is a broken family. If the husband or wife leaves the marriage, the family is broken. That is unfortunate and sad, but it does not change the definition of family. Under some circumstances we must do the best we can with what is left, but a family is still a man and woman having been joined together by God and living together. In the case of a broken family, whether caused by death or desertion, the shattered remains must pull themselves together and do what they can to survive, but that is not a whole family.

The sordid mess in the lives of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow may be a case in point. Sometimes we can define something by seeing what it is not. Family is not a 56-year-old man sleeping with the 19-year-old adopted daughter of his lover. We hear a great deal nowadays about non-traditional families. The Allen-Farrow relationship fits the mold. Here is how Don Feder describes the Allen-Farrow-non-traditional-family: "Her child by Andre Previn, their adopted children, her adopted children, their biological son, Mia and Woody playing house for a dozen years." That should warm the cockles of your heart.

If we get confused enough about what a family is, we may get to the point where we will consider two men living together in gutter-type sex, as foul and rotten as can be imagined, to be a family. That is what the homosexuals want. They are joined by the radical feminist movement. If laws are passed to protect sexual perverts, we will see little Jimmy and little Bobby going prissily down the street, hand in hand, on the way to the courthouse to get a marriage license, and then some simple-minded preacher joining them together as ... as . . . as . . . well, as what? Women will c 4 marry" women and have children by artificial insemination. If you think that is what God approves as family and sanctions as marriage, then you need to read your Bible some more.

Another point: Family is the idea that sex is confined to matrimony. "Let marriage be had in honor among all, and let the bed be undefiled: for fornicators and adulterers God will judge" (Heb. 13:4). Homosexual sex is by definition fornication.

It is alarming and shameful that public schools, supported by your tax dollars, are showing children how to fornicate under the misnomer of sex education. Feder points out, "Children need to be taught about sexuality in the home and in the house of worship and not by a sex educator with a lubricated latex device in one hand and a copy of Heather Has Two Mommies in the other."

Our young people must be taught family values. That means, to be brutally frank, teaching them the value of self-control and restraint, the sin of homosexuality, and the importance of "saving themselves for marriage." That is the only safe sex. It is nonsense to say that children are going to have sex anyway, and we may as well give them the best counsel about how not to conceive out of wedlock and how to protect themselves against syphilis and AIDS. Generations have succeeded in virginal living and waiting until the marriage license is signed before going to bed with each other. This generation can do it, too. May God give us the good sense to teach our children the value of virtuous lives.

I know he got clobbered for it, and I know what they say about people who rush in where angels fear to tread, but it is still true that what Dan Quayle said about Murphy Brown makes sense. Here is part of what he said:

... right now, the failure of our families is hurting America deeply. When families fall, society falls. The anarchy and lack of structure in our inner cities are testament to how quickly civilization falls apart when the family foundation cracks. Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father. It is from parents that children come to understand values and themselves as men and women, fathers and mothers.

And for those concerned about children growing up in poverty, we should know this: Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program of all. Among families headed by married couples today, there is a poverty rate of 5.7%. But 33.4% of families headed by a single mother are in poverty today.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Where there are no mature, responsible men around to teach boys how to become good men, gangs serve in their place .... The system perpetuates itself as these young men father children whom they have no intention of caring for, by women whose welfare checks support them. Teenage girls, mired in the same hopelessness, lack sufficient motive to say no to this trap.

Answers to our problems won't be easy. We can start by dismantling a welfare system that encourages dependency and subsidizes broken families. We can attach conditions such as school attendance or work to welfare. We can limit the time a recipient gets benefits. We can stop penalizing marriage for welfare mothers. We can enforce child support payments.

Ultimately, however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failure to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.

It doesn't help matters when prime time TV had Murphy Brown-a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman-mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another lifestyle.

You know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, and the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us know that some things are good and other things are wrong. Now it's time to make the discussion public.

It's time to talk again about family, hard work, integrity, and personal responsibility. We cannot be embarrassed out of belief that two parents, married to each other, are better in most cases for children than one. That hard work is better than hand-outs or crime. That we are our brother's keepers. That it's worth making an effort, even when rewards aren't immediate.

So I think the time has come to renew our public commitment to our Judeo-Christian values in our churches, our civic organizations, and our schools. We are, as our children recite each morning, 'One nation under God.' That's a useful framework for acknowledging a duty and an authority higher than our own pleasure and personal ambitions.

Thank you, Vice President Dan Quayle. May your tribe increase.