Mr. Dickerson has it exactly right when he contrasts Goldwater's sense of personal decency to Romney's shallow moralistic trumpeting.
This is the whole problem with the Republican fascination with family values. They're not about real families, but about families as the religious fundamentalists believe they ought to be. Everyone ought to live in a suburban, two parent household where Dad works and Mom stays home to raise the children. They should be active in Little League, Girl Scouts, PTA, Chamber of Commerce and, above all, the church. Okay, the synagogue, if you insist, but not the mosque, never the mosque.
Of course, most of the moralizers are on their second and third marriages, having folded in the face of temptation. Alcoholism and drug use, extramarital affairs, teen pregnancies, abortion (!), crimes of various sorts and homosexuality are just as common in the bible belt as anywhere else.
Whatever these family values might be, they're not helping the people who are promoting them so vigorously for the rest of us. We're doing no worse, and they're doing no better, when it comes to raising kids, keeping our marriages together, being good citizens, etc. Which makes one wonder why they're so very, very insistent about legislating these "family values" into the nation's civil code. Could it be they're just trying to use the power of government to force everyone else to believe what they believe?
