This is the second installment in what I believe.  As I said before, I’m tired of being told what I believe by people more interested in scoring a point off me than truly interested in having a two-way conversation. 

If you want to know what I believe, ask me.  Don’t just make it up on your own based on whatever criteria you think I ‘should’ believe.

Family Values

‘Family Values’ is a buzzword phrase that has ceased to have any meaning.  With the rise of the Religious Right over the past 15 years, there was first a desire to stop the social liberalism enshrined in the Great Society and the Civil Rights movement and move the country back to the days when things were simpler and more straightforward.

First, there is nothing wrong with advocating a conservative social agenda.  The desire to protect one’s family from the various and sundry influences found in the world is pretty common.  Hell, I want to protect my family from the evils in the world too – it’s just that what I consider evil are men that advocate strict Christian values but are not living the life they are trying to force on everyone else..

However, somewhere along the line, the term ‘family values’ came to mean a specific agenda advocating a single lifestyle as the only acceptable one.  Everything else is bad and wrong and needs to be stamped out.  Worse, it’s an idealized version of how life used to be that never actually existed – it is the desire to make society into the world of 1950’s television.  It’s doomed to failure – especially when the 2000’s television version of the world is as popular or more so in conservative regions as in the more liberal ones.  (look at the ratings for Desperate Housewives in places like Dallas or Birmingham as an example)

In my opinion, this portrait has been put forward by those people, religious or otherwise that are looking to gain money and power all the while knowing that this vision of the world is unobtainable.

American Culture Wars

We hear more and more often about the culture war going on between the Right and the Left here in the US.  While I agree the battle is going on, I think that it is a sham.  It’s a useful distraction used by Corporatists to get the political support to advance their own agenda and has nothing to do with social agendas.

As the Religious Right gained power through its family values based worldview, many Corporatists jumped on the bandwagon.  These are people that are interested in advancing a fiscal agenda that favors corporations and the wealthy.  They feign interest in the social agenda to get the support and votes of the family values social conservatives then toss them one or two bones on their social agenda while focusing most of their time on advancing their fiscal agenda.  (Look at the 2004 elections.  What came out of it on a social level other than making gay marriage more illegal?)

The worst part of that is the fiscal values advocated by these false social conservatives often hurt the very people that support these politicians.

So, there are people getting rich and powerful by advancing the social agenda and there are people who truly believe in the agenda that are getting screwed.

My perspective of a family value is anything that helps to form strong family units (here a family unit would be described as any small group of humans that are financially and emotionally interdependent).  So my family values are made up of earning a living wage, access to healthcare, legal support of this family unit by the courts and by government, and respect for one’s fellow humans and for their families.

Now, what’s wrong with those values?  Don’t they make the family stronger?  Is it necessary to count the number and types of post-pubescent genitalia before one can determine who is and isn’t part of a family?