Henrietta Hay's Column

The latest political buzzword is the generic form of "family values." Everybody is using it. Since long before the Murphy Brown/Dan Quayle brouhaha I have been trying to decide which century and which family the politicians are talking about. They are waving it around like The Flag, Mom and Apple Pie.

We have several million families in this country, including a lot that do NOT contain two parents and two and a half children, and the country has been going for about 200 years. That makes a specific search for "family values" a major mathematical project. It is, of course, not in the dictionary. The closest Webster comes is, "value," defined as, "...that which is desirable or worthy of esteem for its own sake...the social principles, goals or standards held or accepted by an individual class, society, etc." It does not say when or whose.

Linus has his security blanket. We have "family values" to wrap ourselves in when things get tough. We are thinking of a simpler world of small towns and farms and our own dimly remembered childhoods. People of my generation often yearn for things to be "the way they used to be." We want the comfort of Linus' blanket and the blanket is gone.

But maybe those "family values" we revere weren't quite what we think they were. By family values do we mean the values of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who owned slaves? Or the values of President Ulysses Grant who was an alcoholic? Or the values of the solid citizens of Salem who accused 141 women of witchcraft and burned to death 29 of them? Or maybe the national D. A. R which refused to let Marian Anderson sing in Constitution Hall in 1939 - because she was black?

Fortunately for the progress of civilization, values change over years and most of us survive our family's values. I was lucky enough to have had a wonderful childhood. I have great love and respect for my parents. But one of their family values was prejudice. I was taught that I must be polite to the black woman who did the ironing, but that she was not my equal. I was taught that there was one Catholic Church and three or four Protestant churches in town, and that there was a big not-to-be-crossed chasm between them. This was a middle class family in Middle America in the twenties and these were good people. It was a way of life. Good and decent people discriminated against everyone who wasn't like them. We lived in a society of comparative isolation from the rest of the world and we were quite sure that ours was the best.

When I got to college and discovered that there are all kinds of people in the world and all kinds of ideas I suffered a major culture shock and had to outgrow that family value pretty fast.

Years later television and jet planes came along, and we're not isolated any more. All of us, like it or not, are now aware of the whole world, with all its colors and religions and ideas, and we are living right smack in the middle of it. Our tight little circles have become a big one and it's scary. We want our little circles back and we're calling them "family values."

It is unfair to use the phrase, "return to family values" as a theme for political gain. Even though it has no real meaning, that image of a perfect life in a perfect world somewhere in the past plays on people's prejudices and fears. And each candidate is trying to "out-value" the other. They're even bringing their children into the act.

Generic family values, as the term is being used this year, can be defined as the white middle class family consisting of mother and father and kids, mother in the kitchen, no sex before marriage, nothing but the three R's in school, tough discipline for the kids. Come on guys, get real. It ain't that way any more. It never was. Even Murphy Brown knows that. We're going to have to learn to live without the blanket or get ourselves a new one