Decline and fall: growing numbers of people believe that strengthening the traditional foundations of family life is a good first step toward curing our social ills.

For people who support traditional family values, there's plenty of evidence that our society is in trouble:

* Frequent use of abortion as a means of birth control;

* Widening acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships;

* Decline in church attendance;

* Increasingly explicit sex and violence in movies and popular music;

* Advertising images that show younger and younger models in erotic poses;

* The growing trend for people to have sex and make babies without marriage vows;

* Rising drug use.

Traditionalists in our society look at these developments and shudder. They see them as clear signs that we have lost our moral compass; that our society is doomed if we don't find our way back to what's called "family values."

At the core of the family values movement is the belief that the family is the fundamental building block of civilized society. For them, the family is defined as a man and a woman who have made a solemn commitment to each other. The vows these two people take cannot be broken, and involve a special package of rights and responsibilities designed to protect family members in a mutually supportive way. There is a strong feeling that the mother should stay home with her children and the father should be the breadwinner. Dad should be looked up to as the head of the household and Mom would not want to join any feminist groups.

This traditional, two-parent family is seen as the only place where children can be raised in the "right" way. For the family values supporters this means passing on to the kids those values they themselves hold dear. The central values being commitment, duty, and responsibility.

Commitment means recognizing that marriages are not always perfect, but you don't bail out at the first sign of trouble. Duty means doing what's right for your family and your community, and that involves sometimes putting the needs of others ahead of your own. Responsibility means it's the parents job to provide for the family and raise the children not that of some social agency.

The family values supporters believe that divorce has been made too easy. Instead of staying together and trying to work out their problems, couples can simply cut and run. As divorce becomes more the rule than the exception, stigmas against it inevitably wither away. It isn't possible to generate mass disapproval for something that most people do.

And, as the stigma against divorce collapses, so too does the stain on having children outside a married relationship. If single-parent families are as good as two-parent families why wait for marriage to have children? If it is okay to create a single-parent family through divorce why not do it without subjecting yourself and your children to the trauma of divorce?

"Living together" not only increases but becomes respectable. Cohabiting couples start to demand and receive the same advantages, both legal and social, traditionally reserved only for married people.

Cohabitation, the great rival of marriage, begins to win the competition. "Relationships" drive out marriage. As the culture of divorce submerges the culture of marriage, marriage itself becomes unable to perform its historic function: committing the love and money of adults to their children -- and the future.

This is the kind of future that the more conservative elements of our society are trying to keep from happening. Family-values supporters express their political voice through the Reform Party of Canada or the Progressive Conservative Party.

They oppose government policies they see as being destructive of family values. For example, they say that government-funded day care discourages families from raising their children at home. They oppose offering birth-control devices and providing sex education to younger and younger children; pointing out that while such programs have been in place the rate of teenage pregnancies has increased and so has the incidence of sexually transmitted disease.

They believe that most government social policies aimed at improving family life have actually had the reverse effect. They would certainly agree with Hans Mohr, former president of the Vanier Institute of the Family, who once said: "From childbirth, which happens mostly in hospitals, to dying, which mostly happens in the same place, much that has been important to and in families is now carried out by experts. And, experts can teach us just about anything, except how to live in our particular family."

ACTIVITY:

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union makes this point: "A nation's morality used to be measured by its civic virtue -- how society treated its citizens, whether justice and fairness prevailed, whether people were free to pursue happiness in their own way, and whether it was safe to be different from the majority. Measured that way, the '50s were a time of moral depravity transformed by the '60s, a time of moral advance." During the 1950s in Canada, discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, and religion was widespread and relatively open. Native Canadians could not vote in elections; a woman who wanted to end a pregnancy had to seek out the services of an illegal, back-street abortionist; until `1955, it was illegal for women to work in the federal civil service; birth control was not legalized until 1969. In that context, do you think a return to traditional family-values would necessarily involve a return to the inequalities described above? Give reasons for your position.