'Family values' needs redefining in America

Lately, with all this talk of cloning and stem cell research there's been a lot of talk about a "return to family values." Science has become far too decadent in its pursuit of knowledge, so now we should look to the American family for tradition.

It's an old cliché but it makes a nice sound bite and it evokes some magical nostalgic American past where things weren't so bad, where everyone has a mom and a dad who work and live in an upper middle class life. Usually it conjures up stillborn rerun images of the 1950s, in which A) things were even worse than they are now B) we were living in constant fear of a nuclear war and C) any sort of interesting feelings were repressed until they withered and died.

The nuclear family only comprises some 5 percent of American families! No one is the nuclear family, but everyone wants the nuclear family. And why? The idea is discriminatory in its very foundation. By allowing only a man and a woman to be married, it discounts any and all long-term homosexual relationships. It also discounts any single-parent family, and forces that single parent to not only raise and feed and clothe his or her child but be obsessed with finding that "other half." Where do the elderly fit into old-style family values? At least in some other societies, despite other ingrained prejudices, the elderly are seen as individuals worthy of respect and often share a home with their grown children and their families. But not the age-old American family values that have the elderly (especially those suffering from Alzheimer's or other forms of senility) cruelly erased from the black and white rerun. And speaking of black and white, let's just be honest about the "return to family values" — it's pretty much a Caucasian idea. The nostalgia is for the pre-civil rights movement 1950s. Though its been embraced as the dream of a society, it's really the dream of white upper-middle class men, most of whom are dead or dying.

It strikes me as rather unbelievable that a minority of families that leaves out the majority of minorities can convince a majority of people that it’s the right way to live.

In the nuclear family, after all, if the wife works, her job is seen as secondary to her husband's. Even after large increases of women and mothers in the workplace, we're still brought up to see the "Donna Reed" fantasy of the man as the breadwinner and the wife's job as either secondary or nonexistent. We pay women less because, after all, it's their husbands' job to support them, right? A woman's real role is seen as that of a caretaker and nurturer, when really who says that this has to be so? It might look as if that is the biological purpose for men and women, since it's such a recurrent image in our society, but that's more a product of conditioning than biology.

These family values rob children of the possibility of a care-giving, nurturing father, or even two care-giving nurturers. Fathers may be first-class breadwinners, but their role in parenting is seen as secondary at best.

My brother and I grew up in a nuclear family and it's no great shakes. Yes, I love my parents and my brother, but if everyone lived in families like ours, it wouldn't make things better. It wouldn't get rid of teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, drop the crime rate, or even instill morality back into the youth of our nation. But the old idea and ideal, maybe getting rid of that would help. Maybe ditching old family values for a new set would help us all out a lot. Maybe if any group of people living together with love should be the ideal. Even if that group's only two people.

Maybe the reason why so many families are "dysfunctional" is because they weren't meant to fit the rigid mold of the nuclear family.

We're a society of 256 million freethinking individuals, each of whom is guaranteed a right to the pursuit of happiness.

The fact is, happiness is no more guaranteed to a nuclear family than anyone else. And unhappiness is in everyone's life, so wouldn't it be nice to have a family's — any sort of family's — support.

After all, that's where the value is in family anyway.

Tom McHenry is a junior in the School of Liberal Arts. He can be reached at opinions@purdue.edu.

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'Family values' needs redefining in America

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