Values aren't the problem

Morality is America's new political buzzword. The press and the pundits needed an explanation after November's election, when the antics ended after one day and Ohio turned out not to be the new Florida. They looked at the electoral maps and the exit polls, and settled on morality, citing the 22 percent of Americans who cared most about "moral values" when casting their votes, mostly in support of the president. Americans wanted values in 2004, the story goes, and Democrats just didn't get it.

The morality wars make for good cable television, but the story being told in the press has one fatal flaw: it's fiction. The number of Americans voting primarily based on values has declined, from 40 percent in 1996, to 35 percent in 2000, to 22 percent last month. No matter what Fox News says, George Bush did not ride a tidal wave of righteousness back to the White House.

The facts haven't stopped morality from defining the post-election discourse. Democrats ponder how they can win churchgoers in the red states. Progressives fear that their party will abandon controversial causes like same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, conservative family groups are having fun. They've started letter-writing campaigns declaring the evil of "Desperate Housewives" star Nicollete Sheridan appearing in a towel on Monday Night Football, and they've successfully pushed a number of ABC affiliates not to air the violent war epic, "Saving Private Ryan." Apparently, American values come in a box set with a remote control and a healthy helping of indignation.

I don't know what Americans want in a president, but I'm certain it doesn't have anything to do with Sheridan's bare back. Democrats have been quick to cede the moral high ground to Republicans at a time when the party has little ground to give. But if the right wants to make morality a political issue, even as fewer Americans let values determine their votes, they'll have to give us more than a steamy locker room or men in tuxedos standing at an altar.

According to the conventional wisdom, the blue states are a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. But the states with the 10 highest divorce rates in America, according to the 2000 census, all voted for George W. Bush in 2004. Massachusetts, home of gay marriage and John Kerry, had the lowest divorce rate of any state in the nation. Of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in America, as reported by the FBI in 2003, seven cast their electoral votes for the president. Does this mean that all Republicans are immoral or adulterous or violent? Of course not. But it does mean that those in the glass house of the Republican Party ought to have thought twice before they cast the first stone in the culture war. And it does mean that Democrats ought to speak up when they are called opponents of marriage and lawfulness.

If Republicans and the media want to turn policy into a debate over moral belief, Democrats can fight and win. It is not moral to allow 36 million Americans to continue living in poverty. It is not moral to let 45 million Americans without health insurance suffer without care. No system of values I want to live under looks for loopholes to torture prisoners and calls the agreements designed to protect them "quaint," as Alberto Gonzales, our new attorney general, has done. No man deserving of our votes could support the repeal of a rule barring indicted leaders from serving in the congressional leadership, knowing that the rule had been implemented and was being revoked for partisan reasons. Surely, charity, humanity and honesty have not gone out of style.

Democrats did not lose the 2004 election because of what is on television or because of the moral degradation of homosexuals, feminists or residents of the coastal states so quick to turn blue on election night. But the party of civil rights and public assistance cannot let itself be cast as a morality-free zone. Democrats did not lose this election because of morality, but if we do not tell the truth and fight back, we just may lose the next one. Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.