The GOP’s ability to position itself as the defender of the American family has been weakening for a long time—but Trump’s immigration policy is its death knell.
“We are a country of compassion. We are a country of heart,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen declared in her rambling and dishonest press conference on Monday about the Trump administration’s policy of separating families crossing the nation’s southern border. Americans have responded to that policy, and the horrific images from the border, with outrage.
By and large, however, white evangelicals—Trump’s most solid backers and the base of the religious right—have not parted with the president on this issue. As Trump’s zero tolerance border policy has separated nearly 2,000 families, and as his white evangelical base remains indifferent or even supportive of children being taken from their parents, it seems like we can at last retire the idea that the GOP can still call itself the party of “family values.”
The very awful thing being done at the border—children being taken from their parents by a barbaric state—is the actual doomsday fantasy religious-right folks long imagined would happen, the one that has fueled much of their “family values” rhetoric. But the key difference now is that they only fantasized that this would be done against them—against their white, conservative, religious families with “traditional” arrangements of gender and sexuality.
Unlike the events currently taking place at the border, the parent-child separation that the “family values” movement warned of was not a physical one, but rather mostly of an ideological, cultural, and spiritual nature. “Family values” conservatives envisioned the nightmare scenario of an overbearing state that insinuated itself into the traditional nuclear family, particularly through the public education system, in order to usurp parental authority and place children in opposition to their parents’ values. In this way, conservative warnings about a federal government bent on “destroying the family” were not so much prophetic as they were myopic and self-focused. The indifference and even support of white evangelicals, who gave Trump 81 percent of their support in 2016, to the physical separation of children from their parents at the southern border marks the end of “family values” conservatism—and also reveals how much the movement always served as a cover for the privileging of white, heterosexual families over peoples and families who didn’t look like theirs.
“Family values” politics, as the historian Seth Dowland has explained in his recent history of the movement, arose in the 1970s out of religious conservatives’ fears about how the social and political changes of the previous decade were altering traditional gender roles, loosening sexual norms, and weakening moral opposition to evils like homosexuality and pornography. The first time the GOP used this phrase was in its national platform in 1976, expressing its “concern for family values.” The statement went on to say, “it is imperative that our government’s programs, actions, officials and social welfare institutions never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.”
Arguing that the family—by which they meant the two-parent heterosexual unit with a male breadwinner and female homemaker—was under attack from Washington and Hollywood, religious conservatives partnered with the Republican Party to fuel a whole set of reactionary politics through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that targeted feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, public schooling and sex education, and abortion rights and gay rights, all through the language of “family values.”
Read the full story at Slate
