Republican 'family values' are destroying American families

Like the titular character from The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger, child entertainer, educator, and overall perfect person, Ms. Rachel is the honey badger we all need.

Ms. Rachel shows what family values should mean

She's just gonna keep on keeping on, despite whatever anyone throws her way. She encourages kindness in an increasingly cruel world and does it with a smile. Recently, Ms. Rachel visited families outside Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center. She sang with children whose parents had been detained. She listened to families describe what separation had done to them. She carried children's handwritten letters to Washington, hoping that seeing the consequences of public policy through the eyes of actual children might inspire compassion in those responsible for creating them.

The effort was probably doomed from the start. But she tried.

If the phrase “family values” had not been hijacked and dragged through the mud by one of the most catastrophically corrupt, morally vacant, and transparently greedy movements in American history, one might reasonably conclude that Ms. Rachel embodies what family values are supposed to look like. She comforts frightened children and advocates for their families. She shows concern for vulnerable people. She believes children deserve safety, stability, and love regardless of where they were born or who their parents are. In other words, she behaves exactly the way conservatives spent decades claiming Americans should behave.

And yet, the party of family values seems to harbor a surprising amount of hostility toward Ms. Rachel.

The long history of conservative family values hypocrisy

In the past, when one used to think of conservative family values, one might conjure up memories of former U.S. Louisiana Senator David Vitter's "original sin" involving escorts and an alleged diaper fetish. Or the time when Dr. George Alan Rekers, cofounder of the highly conservative and vehemently antigay Family Research Council, was photographed returning from a 10-day European vacation with a young male escort he had hired from Rentboy.com. Or when Reverend Ted Haggard, one of the nation's most influential conservative Christian leaders, founder of the New Life Church megachurch, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, admitted to frequenting male escorts and using methamphetamine. Or Senator Larry Craig, the conservative family values Republican from Idaho, arrested in a Minneapolis airport men's restroom sex sting.

Or Governor Mark Sanford disappearing to Argentina to visit his mistress while his staff claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Or Senator John Ensign's affair with a campaign staffer's wife. Or Congressman Mark Souder's resignation after an affair with a staff member, despite years spent championing family values, causes. Or Alabama Governor Robert Bentley leaving office amid revelations involving a close adviser. Or California Assemblyman Mike Duvall enthusiastically narrating his extramarital exploits into a microphone he apparently forgot was live. Or Ohio Representative Wes Goodman resigning after being caught engaging in sexual activity in his legislative office despite presenting himself as a champion of "natural marriage."

Or any one of the seemingly endless parade of politicians, pastors, activists, culture warriors, antigay crusaders, moral guardians, self-appointed defenders of Christian civilization, and professional scolds who spent decades warning America about the dangers posed by LGBTQ+ people while somehow remaining completely incapable of surviving their own sermons. Or the current Secretary of Defense, whose own mother once described him in writing as an "abuser of women" who "belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego."

Or perhaps the twice-impeached president of the United States, found liable for sexual abuse by a jury and ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages, who nevertheless remains the undisputed standard-bearer for a political movement that has spent the better part of half a century lecturing the rest of the country about morality, decency, marriage, character, and what constitutes an acceptable American family.

Now the hypocrisy is policy

These are all true but funny jokes coming from the actual clowns who lived them out in front of us. Modern conservative family values are also being lived out in real time in front of our very eyes, but this time around, there’s nothing funny. With the installation of Project 25, “family values” has evolved from a marketing slogan into a governing philosophy, and for the first time in decades, we are seeing what it looks like when translated from campaign rhetoric into public policy.

Today, Republican “family values” means more than 500 babies and toddlers passing through immigration detention facilities, while politicians who spent decades warning America that gay people were destroying the family congratulate themselves for protecting children. It means Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres died in ICE custody while his family struggled to bring his body home. It means Geraldo Lunas Campos, a father of four, is entering detention alive and leaving behind children who will spend the rest of their lives without him. It means Víctor Manuel Díaz's family rejecting official explanations and searching for answers that may never come. It means Parady La's daughter spent days trying to find her father before learning he was dying in a hospital.

It means Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, poet, writer, and American citizen, was shot during an immigration enforcement operation and was almost immediately transformed from a human being into a political talking point. It means Luis Beltrán Yáñez-Cruz, a father of three, entering detention alive and leaving in a coffin while his daughter wondered why he could not simply come home. It means Heber Sánchez Domínguez died in a detention facility while his family and the Mexican government sought answers about what happened.

It means Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who spent his life helping other people survive, was killed after stepping forward during a confrontation he believed required compassion rather than violence.

Even death can be hidden by paperwork

And because the people overseeing this system understand exactly how horrifying these outcomes appear to the public, family values also mean ensuring the public never receives a complete accounting of the damage. When ICE believes someone is likely to die in custody, the agency has repeatedly been accused of releasing individuals shortly before death, allowing those casualties to disappear from official detention statistics. In some cases, advocates learned about the deaths only after hearing from other detainees. Journalists and civil rights organizations were forced to reconstruct what happened because the government would not.

In New Mexico, a transgender asylum seeker who repeatedly sought medical care while detained was reportedly handed parole paperwork from a hospital bed after weeks of alleged neglect. She died four days later without ever leaving the hospital. Other cases documented in litigation involved individuals who were effectively released while hospitalized and unconscious, transforming what would have been an in-custody death into someone else's administrative problem.

Even death, it seems, can be reclassified if the paperwork is processed quickly enough.

The vulnerable are paying the price

If all of this sounds about as Christian as David Vitter wearing a diaper and getting spanked by an escort, you might be right. I'm not a believer, but I do believe that one of the central tenets of Christianity, and most other major religions, is that we are supposed to protect the vulnerable, care for the suffering, welcome the stranger, and show mercy to people who have less power than we do.

What we're witnessing instead is the same family values hypocrisy America has been watching for decades, only now the consequences extend beyond embarrassing sex scandals and sanctimonious press conferences. The hypocrisy has graduated from farce to public policy. The punchline is no longer a disgraced senator, a closeted antigay crusader, or a politician caught violating his own standards. The punchline is a toddler in detention. The punchline is a daughter waiting for a father who isn't coming home. The punchline is a family searching for answers while government officials argue over which death counts and which one doesn't.

It's the same hypocrisy we always knew, just dialed up to eleven and injected with enough steroids to kill Goliath.

LGBTQ+ people were never the threat to families

For my entire life, I have been cast as a threat to the American family. I've watched on television and read endless think pieces framing my existence as a debate to be considered whenever someone wanted to discuss morality, marriage, children, or the future of civilization itself. I've heard every version of the same tired argument. LGBTQ+ people destroy families. We undermine marriage. We weaken communities. We corrupt children. We caused the downfall of Rome. We are apparently responsible for everything short of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and frankly, it was probably a gay dinosaur who brought that on too.

Entire political careers are still being built around convincing Americans that people like me represent one of the greatest dangers facing the country. Every election cycle arrives with a fresh warning that if gay people gain equality, if transgender people gain visibility, if queer families gain acceptance, some fundamental pillar of American life will collapse, and everyone will be forced to live in hell for eternity. Judging by recent events, they may have confused hell with an ICE detention facility.

The scapegoats did not create this crisis

And while every community produces a few villains, the LGBTQ+ community did not build the particular hellscape that increasingly passes for modern public life. We did not build a detention system through which hundreds of toddlers have passed. We did not separate families and then argue over whether the resulting deaths should count on official government spreadsheets. We did not create a system where grieving children stand outside detention facilities, hoping someone in power might care enough to listen. We did not spend decades proclaiming the sanctity of the family only to transform family separation into a cruel administrative procedure. We did not give the world Andrew Tate.

We did not hand Elon Musk a social media platform and encourage him to spend his days amplifying conspiracy theories, culture-war fever dreams, and whatever fresh outrage happened to wander across his timeline between ketamine treatments. Those choices belong to the people who spent half a century insisting they were the only ones qualified to protect American families.

After decades of warning the country about the dangers posed by drag queens, transgender teenagers, same-sex couples, and people like me, they finally got the opportunity to implement their vision for America.

The culture wars never helped working families

And the families who once supported them have nothing to show for it beyond debt, supplements, anxiety, and a growing sense that someone sold them a bill of goods. We are living through what increasingly feels like some kind of modern Great Depression with worse food and less hope, or whatever we're calling this particular era where the stock market behaves like a roller coaster operated by Satan, housing becomes completely unaffordable, healthcare exists primarily as a luxury product, childcare remains out of reach for millions of parents, and working families are forced to make impossible choices every single day. The American middle class has become little more than a nostalgic memory.

Communities promised renewal are now being asked to sacrifice water, land, and resources for the privilege of hosting the latest shiny data center while politicians explain why prosperity is always just one more election cycle away. The culture wars never lowered a grocery bill. A drag queen never raised anyone's rent. A transgender teenager never made healthcare inaccessible. A same-sex wedding never made it harder to buy a home. After decades of blaming immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else convenient enough to serve as a political scapegoat, Americans are left confronting a far less comfortable and far more obvious reality.

The people who claimed to champion family values have spent years identifying enemies and virtually no time improving the lives of actual families.

Real family values begin with compassion

The rest of us have real values. The kind that compels a children's entertainer to stand outside a detention center and sing to frightened kids because nobody else will. The kind that inspires someone to carry handwritten letters from children to Washington, even when the chances of changing a politician's mind are somewhere between slim and nonexistent. The kind that recognizes a family as a family, whether they're straight or gay, Black, white, brown, rich or poor, immigrant or citizen, documented or undocumented. The kind that understands children are not bargaining chips, grief is not collateral damage, and human dignity should not depend upon whether someone wraps themselves in a flag, a cross, or a political slogan. In more obvious terms, the kind of values Ms. Rachel teaches preschoolers every day.

Maybe it's time the rest of us stopped listening to the people who spent decades claiming ownership of family values and started listening to the woman teaching them.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness

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