[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 91 (Friday, July 10, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7930-S7934]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS: HOW WE CAN REDISCOVER COMMON MORAL GROUND

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, the distinguished leader's reference to 
the Constitution provides a transition for me today, and I appreciate 
it.
  Mr. President, 222 years and 6 days ago, our Founding Fathers issued 
what we today regard as America's birth certificate: the Declaration of 
Independence. We know well the significance of this date which we 
celebrated, once again, last weekend all across the land and the 
subsequent events that comprise the remarkable and unique story of our 
freedom. But sometimes, it seems to me, we have lost sight of the 
substance of the document itself, and its continued relevance to our 
polity. So today I would like to revisit this great statement of our 
American ideals to see what guidance it gives us about our current 
condition.
  Reread Jefferson's master work and you will see that it was not just 
the declaration of our independence, but also a declaration of our 
interdependence, a defining statement of the common conditions and 
values, the shared principles and purposes that would unite a diverse 
population of English and European pilgrims into a nation.
  The original Americans did not all come from the same land, but they 
all did agree that there are fundamental truths that are self-evident.

  They did not all hold the same religious tenets, but they did all 
hold an unerring faith that those inalienable rights that Jefferson 
enumerated in the declaration were endowed not by some benign king nor 
by the grace of a new government, but by their Creator.
  I was moved to reflect, Mr. President, upon the declaration's meaning 
as our latest national birth date passed last Saturday by the recent 
comments of two prominent contemporary political activists about the 
state of our values in America in 1998, comments which, when taken 
together, I fear show how we have lost some of the unity of our 
founders' national vision.
  The first came from Dr. James Dobson, the head of Focus on the 
Family, who for sometime now has been ringing a national alarm bell 
about the Nation's declining morality. It was just a few weeks ago that 
Dr. Dobson caused a stir by proclaiming to the national press that we 
are in the midst of a civil war over America's future, pitting the 
moral haves against the moral have-nots.
  Not long after, Jane Fonda gave a speech on teen pregnancy that 
actually echoed Dr. Dobson's martial proclamation, but from a very 
different perspective. Ms. Fonda attacked the views espoused by Dr. 
Dobson and others on abortion and sex education, accusing them of 
ignoring children that ``are not white, middle-class Christians'' and 
warned her audience that our society is in the throes of a ``holy 
war,'' pitting the forces of tolerance against the forces of 
intolerance.
  It would be easy to dismiss this apocalyptic talk, this talk that 
seems, in some words, certainly to be intemperate, as just another bout 
of the hyperbole that dominates so much of our political discourse 
these days if it were not for the accumulation of evidence suggesting 
that Dr. Dobson and Ms Fonda are each in their own ways on to 
something. Maybe, as the stark contrast and conflict of their views and 
the way in which they express them suggest, the values that have long 
held us together are coming unglued. Maybe we are on the verge of 
abandoning the declaration's premise of interdependence and sliding 
toward either individual isolation or open conflict.
  There is certainly a slew of public opinion polls showing that most 
Americans are gravely concerned about the condition of our values. 
There was a Gallup-USA Today survey released in March found that 49 
percent of Americans believe that we are in the midst of a moral 
crisis. And another 41 percent said they believe we have major moral 
problems. What is driving these numbers, the polls suggest, is a 
swelling sense that our moral safety net, the interlaced norms of 
behavior we depend on to maintain a civil society, has become badly 
frayed, and that this fraying has contributed to some of our most 
pressing social ills, from the recent outbreak of children slaughtering 
children, to the ongoing epidemic of children giving birth to children, 
to the general coarsening of conversation, communication in our shared 
public places.

  Mr. President, then consider, if you will, the vociferous complaints 
of millions of American parents--I certainly hear them in Connecticut--
who feel as if they are locked in a competition with the immensely 
powerful, popular culture to raise their own children, a culture which 
more and more rejects, rather than reflects, the fundamental values we 
Americans have abided by for generations that have served us so well, a 
culture that glorifies murder, mayhem and drug abuse, promotes 
promiscuity and the latest perversion of the moment, denigrates 
authority with a numbing regularity, and wallowing in titillation and 
sensationalism and, it seems so often, all things scandalous.
  Or closer to home, here in Congress, consider what our investigation 
of the 1996 campaign finance scandal revealed. We live in a political 
system where the clear intention of laws governing campaigns are 
regularly violated, where we have defined political deviancy down so 
far that it seems the only relevant standard left is what is 
technically legal--which is another way of saying, ``What can we get 
away with in order to raise vast sums of money to run more television 
ads, to win more elections?''--and where hustlers cynically compare 
gaining access to the White House to dropping tokens into a subway 
turnstile.
  Or consider the hostile tone of the debates we often hear in this 
Congress about visceral, values-based issues, particularly such as 
abortion or homosexuality or school prayer. The rancor of these 
discussions, which is eagerly amplified by the news media, only 
reinforces the impression that values are something that divides us as 
Americans today rather than defining us.
  So there is ample evidence, I think, to suggest that something is 
deeply wrong with America's moral health today. Nor is it a stretch to 
conclude that Dr. Dobson and Ms. Fonda, together with the legions of 
other culture warriors who have seconded their respective convictions, 
raised some legitimate and consequential questions about what it is 
that ails us in our capacity to remedy it.
  Among them are, What has happened to the founding principles that 
undergirded the Declaration and, for that matter, the Constitution and 
have sustained us for generations? Have we, in some sense, taken 
tolerance too far? Is our commitment to a common moral code on a set of 
fixed points of right and wrong self-evident truths that we declared in 
the Declaration disintegrating? And if it is, can a house so divided 
against its own values stand strong for long?
  Mr. President, in my remarks today I will try to offer some answers 
that may add to our understanding of the controversial and complicated 
values debate, with the hope I may help to, in some small way, move it 
beyond the warped groove we seem to be stuck in these days. I do so 
convinced that America's moral Cassandras are on to something, that our 
Nation is in the grip of a crisis of values, that there really is a 
conflict at our core, and that the recent spate of school shootings and 
murders are a warning sign of even greater trouble ahead.

  But I also do so convinced that we are misdiagnosing this conflict by 
framing it as a civil war, and that those who do, in fact, make it 
harder to overcome the very divisions that they bemoan and we, as a 
people, must repair if we are to fix what is, indeed, broken in our 
society.

[[Page S7931]]

  Let me first try to say a bit more about what I mean by common 
values, because I know from experience that these words carry heavy 
baggage with them today and, as such, are often interpreted differently 
by different people which is, in itself, a symptom of the larger 
problem we face.
  The best reference point I can think of is the Declaration of 
Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are the 
great founding expressions of American values.
  What are those core principles? Equal opportunity, freedom of 
religion and expression, particularly individual autonomy, self-rule, 
personal and civic responsibility, tolerance, and a respect for the 
basic dignity and underlying pervasive respect for the basic dignity of 
human life. All of these are derived, I believe, and can be seen from 
the documents--the Declaration particularly--all of these are derived 
from our faith in God, in our belief in the existence of moral truth 
and a higher law, and all of which, I suggest, are essential to living 
and sustaining a free and democratic society.
  These Founding Fathers, we know, had their roots in the Judeo-
Christian ethic, the Declaration's drafters, but the values are not 
exclusive to any one religion. In fact, over the years, they evolved 
into an American civic religion--principled, purposeful, moral, public, 
and not least of all inclusive--an American civics religion that 
cemented our common bonds as Americans for generations and made real 
the ideal of e pluribus unum--``one out of many.''
  But there is a profound tension that I think we have to acknowledge 
in these founding values between rights and freedoms, which we, as 
individuals, have been endowed, as the document says, by our Creator on 
the one hand, and in the mutual responsibilities and common obligations 
we must accept to form a government capable of securing those freedoms 
on the other hand--in other words, the coinciding claims of 
independence and interdependence that Jefferson articulated so 
brilliantly in the Declaration.
  And it is in these tensions, I think, that we find the antecedents of 
the conflict that today engages Dr. Dobson, Ms. Fonda and so many 
others. It is, at its heart, not a conflict, I think, between warring 
camps of American citizens so much as a clash of competing fundamental 
American values--independence versus interdependence, the belief in 
moral truth versus the value of communal tolerance. It seems to me that 
we are not experiencing a wholesale repudiation of the basic common 
values I have described, but rather a shift in our national moral 
equilibrium in which tolerance has emerged as the more popular 
principle of the day.
  A great challenge we face in our time, given this shift, is how to 
sustain tolerance without inviting immorality and how to uphold moral 
truth without becoming intolerant. This tension is illuminated by the 
research that Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe did for his 
recent book ``One Nation After All,'' which was based on interviews 
with 200 middle-class Americans from eight different communities across 
the country.
  Wolfe set out to test the conventional wisdom reflected, particularly 
in Dr. Dobson's comments that ``a deep divide existed between upholders 
of traditional cultural and moral values and those attracted to more 
modern themes of personal or group identity,'' end of quote from Alan 
Wolfe. What he found, to the surprise of many, is a high degree of 
agreement across ideological, theological, racial and ethnic lines on a 
core set of common values, on the basic questions of right and wrong 
that still bridge our many differences as Americans.
  But Wolfe also found a correspondingly high degree of reluctance to 
translate those privately held values into public expressions that hold 
others accountable to those shared standards.
  The common refrain Wolfe heard was that people did not want to appear 
intolerant and did not feel comfortable imposing their morality on 
their neighbors.
  Of course, in some ways this rise in tolerance has made us a much 
better country, much truer to our founding ideals of equality and 
opportunity. We have opened a world of new, more equal opportunities 
for women; for instance, working to eradicate many confining and 
misguided biases. We have made great progress over the last generation 
in fighting bigotry and discrimination against African-Americans, 
making more real for them after a terrible national history of 
inequality and persecution, the equality of opportunity the Declaration 
and Constitution proposed for all Americans.
  The same is happening with regard to our fellow Americans who are of 
Hispanic and Asian descent, or today who follow the faith of Islam, a 
group that is growing in number in our country. And we have begun to 
stamp out the prejudice long harbored against homosexuals and accept 
them as fellow citizens deserving of the same basic rights and respect 
as all other Americans.
  But the triumph of tolerance in our values in recent decades has also 
had a less constructive effect. The pendulum has swung so far and has 
become so wary of the label ``intolerant'' that I think we are 
increasingly unwilling, and in some cases incapable, of making moral 
judgments. This is evident in the evolution of public attitudes about 
the family, where we have gone from earlier times stigmatizing 
adultery, divorce, and particularly out-of-wedlock childbirth, to 
normalizing these behaviors, with little apparent consideration given 
to the damage these choices can do, particularly to children 
individually or to our society collectively.
  It is also evident in too many of our schools, where teachers and 
curricula avoid mentioning the word ``values'' or won't dare to 
instruct children in the meaning of right and wrong for fear that is 
too controversial or may offend some.
  It is particularly evident, I fear, in the influential entertainment 
media, where executives at multibillion-dollar conglomerates too often 
refuse to draw any lines that they will not cross to raise their 
ratings and revenues. These men and women produce a market to our 
children--records that find fun in cop killing, gang rape; even at the 
extreme, pedophilia; video games that reward young players for mowing 
down innocent people with weapons; homicidal hotrods and television 
talk shows that degrade the human spirit and delight in the 
exploitation of human misery and perversity.
  If criticized, the people who run the entertainment business often 
wave the first amendment around as if it were a constitutional hall 
pass that excuses their conduct, loathe to admit that the pollution 
they are dumping into the public square has much less to do with free 
speech than it has to do with higher profits.
  The media moguls are surely not the only business leaders who have 
suspended judgment and let the values of the market, or the inherent 
lack thereof, rule practically unfettered. Much as Alan Wolfe's 
research suggests, more and more business leaders seem to be checking 
their privately held values, which are strong and deep, at the office 
door and, by extension, at least when they are functioning in their 
businesses, their sense of social responsibility. As a result, it too 
often seems as if the bottom line is the only line and that raising 
consumption is a far more important priority than raising healthy 
children.

  The purest distillation of this ethos, I think, can be found in the 
new world of the Internet. Our shared enthusiasm for this exciting and 
immensely valuable new medium has, unfortunately, been tempered by the 
almost complete absence of boundaries or rules to guide online conduct. 
This is not just true of the criminals and the miscreants, the 
pornographers, pedophiles, and scam artists who, sadly, are taking 
advantage of the net's anonymity to do wrong, but also a distressing 
number of businesses that should know better. A recent report by the 
Federal Trade Commission on cyberspace privacy showed that many 
nationally recognized companies are using exploitive and manipulative 
marketing practices online to target web-surfing grade schoolers as 
potential customers. Specifically, an FTC survey of 212 sites aimed at 
kids found that 89 percent collect personally identifiable information 
and fewer than 10 percent provide any form of parental control over 
what information can be solicited.
  Now, one could argue that it is not fair to judge these companies by 
their conduct in cyberspace since it is such a new medium. But one 
could also argue,

[[Page S7932]]

as I would, that the best way to gauge someone's ethics is to judge 
their conduct when no one is looking. Well, is anyone looking today in 
America? The founders of our country, the people who drafted the 
Declaration of Independence and signed it, believed that God was always 
looking--which is why they showed such deference to what they described 
as the Supreme Judge of the world in the Declaration of Independence 
and why they made religious freedom the first freedom. They knew that 
in this Republic that they were creating, where the power of the state 
was to be limited, where the state would not be all powerful, that 
faith in God, in a higher law, would be a necessary and powerfully 
constructive source of good behavior among the citizenry.
  Surveys done today consistently show that more than 90 percent of the 
American people say they believe in God. I can't think of another 
question we could ask on a poll in this country that would get that 
high a response. We exhibit levels of religiosity that are far greater 
than any country in the world. Yet over the last generation or two we 
have grown increasingly reluctant to allow that faith to be expressed 
in public, so much so that it seems at times we have banished religious 
values and religious institutions from our public policy deliberations 
and construct a discomfort zone for even discussing our faith in public 
settings, ironically making religion one of the few remaining socially 
acceptable targets of intolerance.
  If you look at the talk shows on television and see subjects that are 
being discussed there which go way over the line, think of how little 
we see similar discussions of matters of faith. In driving religion 
from the public square, we manage to slowly and significantly, I fear, 
dislodge our morality from its religious foundations and thereby have 
lost what I described a few moments ago as our unifying national civic 
religion.
  In some ways, the Ten Commandments became just another ``do and 
don't'' list that people feel free to argue with, negotiate, or ignore 
outright. Without the connection to a higher law, we have made it more 
and more difficult for people to answer the question of why it is wrong 
to steal, cheat, or lie, or settle conflicts with violence, or be 
unfaithful to one's spouse, or to be exploitive with children. We have 
often deprived our public life of what I believe is the best source of 
better behavior that the human race has, which is faith in God and a 
sense of personal accountability and responsibility that should go with 
it.
  The net result of the intertwined trends that I have just described--
the triumph of tolerance, the lionization of the market, the breakdown 
in authority, and the loss of public accountability that comes from 
faith--is that we have succeeded in creating a values vacuum in 
American life today. In this vacuum, where moral certainty fears to 
tread, there are fewer and fewer bright lines and more and more blurs 
of gray. The difficult balance of truth and tolerance, which for most 
of our country has sustained us, has been lost. And we are increasingly 
inclined to ask, ``whose values?'' when a question of morality is 
raised.

  How much does this really matter? Well, according to Harvard's 
Michael Sandel, the dissolution of our public morality, coupled with 
the lost sense of common purposes, has effectively crippled our 
Government's ability to resolve our most complicated issues in 
formulating public policy. Without a common vocabulary of values and 
basic moral assumptions that should form our policies and our laws, 
Sandel suggests that our most important public debates are doomed from 
the start because we lack even a shared framework for reaching 
agreement.
  Professor Sandel goes further, arguing in his recent book 
``Democracy's Discontent'' that the breakdown in our common moral code 
has put the entire American experiment in self-government in jeopardy. 
Sandel says that in moving toward a value-neutral polity, we have 
abandoned what our colleague, Pat Moynihan, has so aptly called the 
``central task'' of any society--to inculcate values and develop virtue 
in its citizens, its children. By turning our backs on this mission, we 
have depleted the public capital necessary for a democratic government 
to function effectively. The consequences? A public philosophy that 
Professor Sandel says, ``cannot secure the liberty it promises because 
it cannot sustain the kind of political community and civic engagement 
that liberty requires.''
  This cause for concern was reaffirmed by an important new report 
released last month by the National Commission on Civic Renewal, 
chaired by our former colleague, Sam Nunn, and by former Education 
Secretary Bill Bennett, which found that we are increasingly becoming 
``a Nation of spectators,'' passively disengaged from the duties and 
work of self-government. The commission examined 22 different trend 
lines, such as voter turnout, newspaper readership, and survey 
measurements of public trust, and determined that our civic condition 
has declined precipitously over the last generation.
  Now, these indices of our current moral and civic decline become even 
more rattling when we consider what is filling the values vacuum today 
and what that means for our future. As our traditional values 
transmitters have shrunk from the task, the omnipresent, powerful 
popular culture has stepped in to assume that vitally important role. 
That means that the people setting the norms of behavior in this 
country and the standards of right and wrong more and more are the 
television producers and syndicators, the movie moguls, the fashion 
advertisers, the record manufacturers, the software designers, and a 
host of other players within the electronic media-cultural complex that 
collectively exert a powerful hold on our consciousness.
  The work these people and many others are doing too often sends the 
worst kinds of messages. They teach our kids that the proper way to 
resolve a disagreement is with a fist to the face or a bullet to the 
brain, that sex is a form of recreational activity without 
consequences, and that parents exist either to be mocked or ignored. 
These messages are breeding more of the same values vacuum that created 
them in the first place, communicating to our children that standards 
are fungible and matters of right and wrong are negotiable at best, 
irrelevant at worst.
  Most entertainment industry leaders deny that they exert this kind of 
influence, but the evidence to the contrary is accumulating in such 
abundance that the media conglomerates, I think, are on the verge--
dangerous verge--of becoming the moral equals of the tobacco industry. 
Indeed, much like the link between cancer and cigarettes, the decidedly 
negative effects of prolonged exposure to violence on television has 
been proven conclusively by an overwhelming body of social science 
research, a conclusion embraced by the American people, yet continually 
disputed in public by producers of violent programming.

  There is also a recent, growing body of research to show a 
correlation between heavy viewing of sexual content and kids initiating 
sexual activity before they otherwise would have. A survey done by Time 
magazine last month showed that 29 percent of teenagers said they 
learned about sex mainly from television, second only to their friends 
as a source of knowledge, indicating that the small screen has become a 
big sex educator. Also, many child development experts have voiced 
concerns that the omnipresence of graphic sexual displays throughout 
the media and in advertising is helping to sexualize our children at an 
unhealthily early age. It was because of these reports that I sponsored 
legislation in the fiscal 1998 Labor-HHS appropriations bill directing 
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to 
initiate a broad-based research initiative on the media's influence on 
children's sexual behavior. That is now underway. Hopefully, it will 
provide us a clearer understanding of the relationship.
  What the experts tell us has recently been corroborated by an 
abundance of real-life experiences. Earlier this year, in Norfolk, VA, 
for instance, educators within the local public schools observed that a 
disturbing number of children who watched Jerry Springer's fight-filled 
talk show were often choosing to settle their disputes, as they 
explained, ``like they do it on the Springer Show,'' with punches and 
kicks. One principal in Norfolk was so concerned that she sent home a 
letter with each

[[Page S7933]]

student pleading with parents not to let them watch Springer anymore.
  What can we make of the horrific bullets that children are firing 
with frightening frequency these days in the cafeterias, hallways, 
classrooms, and courtyards of America's schools? I am certainly not 
here to claim that the media is solely to blame for this spate of 
student gunfire. To do so would be unfair and would ignore the factual 
complexity of each case. Yet, it would be a far greater folly, I think, 
to ignore the pattern emerging that indicates that there is a 
connection between these violent acts and the culture of violence 
enveloping our children.
  According to a recent report in the New York Times, which reviewed 
the most well-publicized cases of student violence over the last 9 
months, as well as a few earlier incidents, we can conclude that each 
of the attackers ``seemed to be obsessed with the violent pop 
culture.'' We know from various press reports that the boys in 
Springfield, OR; Pearl, MS, and Edinboro, PA, listened regularly to the 
nihilistic, hateful lyrics of shock-rocker Marilyn Manson. We know from 
the testimony of a teacher from Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, 
AR, that the older of the two shooters there was a devotee of vicious 
gangsta rap music, and that a favorite song of his by the group Bone-
Thugs-n-Harmony plays out an open-field massacre of revenge quite 
similar to the plan the 13-year-old and the 11-year-old accomplice 
executed in March. And we know in some detail of the fascination a 14-
year-old in Moses Lake, WA, who mowed down three students in his 
algebra class 2 years ago, had with Oliver Stone's ghoulish movie, 
``Natural Born Killers,'' because two friends of his told authorities 
that the boy had confided to them that it would be ``pretty cool'' and 
``fun'' to go on a killing spree like the movie's lead characters.
  To truly understand this connection, though, we need to know more. I 
am the first to say that, though I am critical of the entertainment 
media. Senator Brownback and I took one step in that direction earlier 
this week when we convened a discussion forum on Tuesday with several 
leading experts, including writers, social scientists, a district 
attorney, and a clergyman to explore in greater detail the roots of 
this deeply disturbing trend of student violence. The discussion we had 
produced a remarkably strong consensus that, in fact, the culture is a 
major contributing factor, and the dissolution of the family is clearly 
another factor. But culture, everyone tells us, is a contributing 
factor. That is why I am considering legislation that would ask the 
Justice Department to conduct a far-reaching study to examine the 
relationship between media violence and juvenile crime. It is an issue 
that has already been deeply politicized and, in some respects, 
oversimplified, and before it gets any more so, we need to see what the 
science can objectively tell us.

  But at the same time, I don't think we have to wait to conclude that 
something is deeply wrong in our society when our children are 
slaughtering each other, and that the enormously attractive and 
stimulating images of murder and mayhem so rampant throughout the 
electronic media are playing some role in this American nightmare.
  We can and also should talk about easy access to guns too many kids 
enjoy, which is evidenced by a recent study showing that nearly one 
million kids brought a firearm to school at least once this past school 
year, and nearly half of them did so at least six times. And we can and 
should talk about the need for greater parental involvement and faster 
intervention by counselors and other school personnel when kids show 
signs they are homicidal or suicidal.
  But I think we have to also talk honestly about the reality that boys 
in many parts of the country for a long time have had easy access to 
guns, that some have always been spurned by girls, and some have always 
had emotional problems, some have had reason to be angry with teachers 
or fellow students. Yet, to my knowledge, we have never before in our 
history seen a similar series of cases where some of these young men--
boys really--work out their problems by grabbing guns and massacring 
their teachers and classmates. So I think we have to ask, Where do they 
get such an idea? Maybe it is from the contemporary culture.
  Before this lunacy goes any further, we must ask the entertainment 
industry, which, notwithstanding my criticisms, really has done so much 
good by enlightening our minds and touching our hearts, but also 
confront the harm it can do, the effect the entertainment industry can 
have of pushing some troubled children, particularly, over the edge, 
that they hear our pleas to stop raining down so much death and 
messages of death on our children.
  Thankfully, we are beginning to hear cause for hope from the 
corridors of American cultural power, as more and more media executives 
have been willing to break the silence associated with the values 
vacuum. Both ABC President Bob Iger and former NBC Chairman Grant 
Tinker have given speeches at major television conventions this year 
decrying the Springerization of the airwaves as ``an embarrassment to 
our business,'' in Iger's words, and challenged broadcasters to ``stand 
for something,'' in Tinker's words.
  And Disney Chairman Michael Eisner made a forceful statement to the 
American Society of Newspaper Editors this spring in which he candidly 
criticized those in the industry who ``hide behind the skirts of the 
Constitution'' to justify marketing of ``vile programs'' like Springer. 
These are permissible under the First Amendment,'' he said, ``but they 
are not desirable if we aspire to call ourselves civilized.'' He then 
called on his peers to make the kind of moral judgments that they and 
too many of us have been reluctant to consider. ``Edit we must,'' he 
said, ``not to stife conflict or conviction, but to eliminate 
debasement.''
  Also encouraging is what is happening outside the cultural epicenters 
of New York and Hollywood. In recent months, a political consensus has 
begun to take shape about the dire state of our moral and civic 
condition, bringing together disparate voices on the left and the right 
to cry out for renewing fundamental values in our public life.
  This consensus is expressed eloquently in an important new report, 
``A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truth,'' which was 
issued by a diverse collection of leading academics, theologians, 
social activists, civic leaders and politicians, from Harvard's Cornel 
West to UCLA's James Q. Wilson. This report, which Senator Coats and I 
were privileged to play a role in shaping, is particularly significant 
because it reassets the central premises of the Declaration's claim of 
interdependence, that there are moral truths that we as a people must 
uphold for our experiment in self-rule to work.
  This emerging consensus was also evident at the National Fatherhood 
Summit that was held here in Washington last month. This convocation 
was called to highlight the crisis of father absence we are 
experiencing in this country, in which the number of children living 
without a father of any kind that has quadrupled over the last two 
generations, and to mobilize a response. The day-long affair was 
thoroughly bipartisan, with the leaders of both houses of Congress 
serving as honorary co-hosts and Vice President Gore delivering the 
key-note address, and it produced unanimity about the critical 
importance of fathers in the raising of children and the need to 
strengthen the two-parent family.
  For the left and the right to reach agreement on this front 
represents remarkable prograss. A few years ago it was not just 
politically incorrect but politically dangerous to talk about the 
primacy of the two-parent family, as Dan Quayle learned, and to 
emphasize the critical role fathers play in the lives of their 
children. To do so was considered a knock against single mothers and 
perhaps all women. But the Fatherhood Summit and the Call to Civil 
Society suggest that we have turned an important corner in the politics 
of the family, and reflect a common understanding that to iterate the 
value of involved fathers is not to denigrate the value of single 
mothers who are often some of the greatest heroes in our society today.
  Perhaps the most telling indicator of how far we have come is the 
recent statement that Murphy Brown herself made about the subject. 
Candice Bergen, the actress who played the sharp-tongued television 
character, recently declared that Dan Quayle ``was right''

[[Page S7934]]

to talk about the troubling marginalization of fathers in his infamous 
speech in 1992--although she still holds firm that the former Vice 
President was wrong in his specific criticism of Murphy Brown's choice 
to have a child on her own. ``It was a completely logical speech,'' 
Bergen said in a newspaper interview. ``Fathers are not indispensible. 
They are vital to a family.''
  Which raises an obvious question: If Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown can 
find common moral ground now, why then do we continue to hear the 
steady beat of the culture war drums echoing throughout the political 
arena?
  No one can deny here, nor do I think there is any question that these 
differences do reflect the broader philosophical schism dividing parts 
of our society, a moral fault line that generally separates--and here 
is how I would describe that fault line--it generally separates the 
champions of tolerance like Jane Fonda from the defenders of 
traditional values like James Dobson.
  But I suspect the values vacuum that overrides all has been 
represented to both exaggerate and exacerbate these divisions, making 
the extent of our moral disagreements appear far greater than Professor 
Alan Wolfe's research, and several other supporting polls, actually 
show them to be. It seems that the less we express our morality 
publicly, the more trouble we have finding a common vocabulary of 
values, which makes it even more difficult for us to discuss civilly 
and constructively those issues that divide us, or to identify those 
principles that unite us. This communications breakdown deepens the 
contempt and suspicion that each side already feels for the other.
  The news media, I am afraid to say, which itself has been infected by 
that anything-goes mentality--not always, but often infected by the 
anything-goes mentality pervading the entertainment culture--seems too 
often to fan the flames of controversy. The result is not so much an 
honest, engaged debate about values, but a culture war echo chamber 
that only heightens the average citizen's distorted sense that the 
country is locked in a mortal moral struggle.
  The conflict over homosexuality's place, the place of homosexuals in 
our society, I think, offers a contemporary example of this tension 
that is very real in our lives and in our discussions and debates. 
Let's start with the reality that many Americans continue to believe 
that homosexuality is immoral and not just because the Bible tells them 
so. In fact, Professor Wolfe's research showed that this is one of the 
few areas where Americans of all religious inclinations feel so 
strongly that they are willing to risk the tag of intolerance to 
express or hold to their points of view, although most of the people he 
interviewed tempered their disapproval by making clear that they did 
not support discrimination against gay men and lesbians. It is unfair, 
when you think about Professor Wolfe's research, then, for anyone to 
automatically conclude that people who express moral reservations or 
even disdain about homosexuality are bigots, or to publicly attack them 
as hateful. These are sincerely held morally based views.
  Yet the suspicions and concerns of the gay community are 
understandable when one considers the Senate's treatment of James 
Hormel's nomination as Ambassador to Luxembourg, which is now being 
blocked by multiple holds by Members of this Chamber. If we truly 
believe in the claim of equality and the universal principle of 
fairness of the Declaration of Independence, and if we want to talk 
more broadly about values with true credibility in this Chamber, I 
think we owe Mr. Hormel a chance to be evaluated by the same standards 
we have applied to other nominees. We owe him a chance to be judged by 
his career and competence, not by his sexual orientation. We owe him a 
vote on this floor.
  If we truly hope to repair the moral breach that separates us and 
prevents us from confronting what most Americans agree is a crisis of 
values, I think we have to start by recognizing that the tone of the 
debate matters as much as the substance. We need to declare a cease-
fire in the culture wars, to lay down our rhetorical arms, step back 
and look at the person across the PTA meeting room or the abortion 
clinic or the affirmative action rally not as the enemy, but as a 
fellow American, deserving of the same respect and courtesy we all 
expect for ourselves, who happens to have a different, deeply held 
point of view. We need to build on the common moral ground staked out 
by the call to civil society and begin to reassert in public life those 
fundamental values that, despite the collateral damage of the culture 
warring, continue to connect our incredibly diverse populace.
  I think the largest responsibility, the first responsibility, falls 
on those of us who are concerned about the weakening of our common 
values and the ramifications for our society. We have to acknowledge 
that many of our fellow citizens not only feel uncomfortable talking 
publicly about matters of morality, they are also skeptical of those 
who do. Indeed, one of the great ironies of our time is that many 
Americans have come to regard morality as a code word for intolerance. 
So our challenge today is to persuade the skeptics that it is crucial 
for the future of our country to rediscover those common core 
principles that made our democracy possible in the first place--those 
common core principles that were described, declared in the Declaration 
of Independence--and to renew their strength. We in Congress have the 
opportunity and the responsibility to support the search for common 
moral ground.
  From those of us who have been privileged and honored to be elected 
to lead this country, the American people have a right to know that we 
hear their anxieties about the Nation's moral future, that we are 
striving to reflect their core values in our work and in our lives. But 
more than that, we have to recognize that so much of what we aspire to 
in this body, by passing legislation to serve the public interest and 
make this a better country, will ultimately be for naught if we do not 
fill the values vacuum in American life and rediscover, reclaim the 
high ground, the common moral ground.
  For those reasons, I hope, in the months ahead, to return to the 
Senate floor, this historic Chamber that truly serves as the American 
people's forum, to speak with my colleagues from across this great 
country about different aspects of the values crisis that I have 
discussed today and to try to offer some specific ideas about how, 
together, we can better secure, ``the Safety and Happiness'' that our 
Declaration of Independence promises us all.
  I thank the Chair and my colleagues for their patience. I yield the 
floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from 
Minnesota.
  Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be allowed to 
speak for up to 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
  Mr. GRAMS. I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. Grams pertaining to the introduction of S. 2291 
are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the 
absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hagel). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

                          ____________________