The rhetoric of "family values" went into remission during the 2000 presidential election. In striking contrast to the moralistic tenor of prior Republican campaigns, this time the GOP co-opted the Democratic language of "inclusiveness." George W. Bush, the so-called compassionate conservative, refrained from bashing gays, portrayed prochoicers under the "good people can disagree" banner and avoided the stock-in-trade Republican tactic of demonizing welfare recipients as sexually promiscuous cheats. Even Ralph Reed, of Christian Coalition fame, felt obliged to engage in big-family-tent talk. "I'm proud of my faith identification and of my conservative principles, but I also am somebody who is inclusive," Reed declared in January, announcing his bid to be chairman of Georgia's Republican Party and touting his ability to "reach out to moderate and prochoice Republicans."

However cynical such utterances may be, the softer, "nonpartisan" brand of moralism that now reigns in public discourse signals a positive shift in the cultural climate. We can count it as a social victory of sorts that harsh rhetoric against gays, prochoicers, people of color and immigrants is no longer admissible in polite political company.

Less comforting, however, are the political origins of this shift. During the Clinton years, the ideology of a self-described "centrist" neo-family values movement triumphed over the religious far right, on the one hand, and progressive family politics on the other. Beating a hasty retreat after his early attempt to lift the military ban on gays, Clinton publicly converted to the marriage-first ideology (although his personal practice, of course, was quite another matter). The evils of single parenthood became national dogma, expressed most pointedly in the 1996 welfare law, which diverted federal support from single-mother families to state initiatives aimed at promoting marriage and reducing "fatherlessness" as a cure for poverty. Family-values rhetoric was shunted to the margins of electoral discourse because it no longer served to differentiate the two major political parties.

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