No political party has monopoly on morals By Leonard Pitts

So, anybody up for a chat about family values?

The term has been a registered trademark of the GOP — the self-styled Morals Party — for years, a bludgeon against Democrats who, by implication, oppose families and have no values. Like most political language, it’s a code, intended to be understood by those with ears to hear. “Family values” means the pol in question has God on speed dial and can be counted upon to oppose gun control, the so-called “homosexual agenda” and abortion, while pushing schools to teach, as Tina Fey once put it, that Adam and Eve rode to church on dinosaurs. …

Now Foley is in seclusion, sending his representatives out with roughly an explanation a day: Foley is a drunk, Foley was molested as a teenager, Foley is gay. Of them all, that last would-be clarification is the most vexing, playing as it does to the conservative predilection for conflating homosexuality and child molestation — as if Foley’s actions would be one iota less execrable if the pages were girls. Meantime, his party has its knickers in a knot over whether Speaker Dennis Hastert will survive this scandal.

I am preoccupied by different questions: what should we make of the fact that members of the Morals Party have behaved with such an appalling lack of same? How could our self-appointed decency police have been so inert while one of their members practiced perversion against children? Isn’t protecting children a family value?

I make no case for Democratic moral superiority. The Monica Lewinsky, Gary Condit, and Barney Frank scandals are too fresh in memory for anyone to suggest that with a straight face. But at least the Democrats had the good taste not to sell themselves as The Morals Party, never claimed to have God on speed dial.

One feels sorry for those who bought what the GOP was selling. One hopes they will be less gullible in the future.

And the Morals Party? There is no such thing.