Alex Henderson

The Culture Wars

Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish: Maggie Gallagher’s “Family Values” Column Comes to an End After 18 Years 

By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, January 8, 2013

On January 2, 2013, the syndicated column of Republican social conservative Maggie Gallagher came to an end. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The 52-year-old Gallagher is a well-known figure on the Christian Right. Her column, which started in 1995, was distributed by Universal Uclick and was carried by about 25-35 different newspapers. Gallagher has written five books, co-founded the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in 2007, directs the Culture War Victory Fund (which she founded in 2011), enjoyed a cozy relationship with the George W. Bush Administration and has written for the National Review extensively. But after the re-election of President Barack Obama in November 2012 and the passing of pro-gay marriage ballot measures in Maryland, Maine and Washington State, Gallagher found herself feeling dispirited and told Uclick she planned to discontinue her column. Gallagher’s final column, titled “This I Believe: A Farewell to Optimism,” had a melancholy tone and reflected her realization that social liberals are winning the Culture War in the United States (at least outside of the Bible Belt). Gallagher lamented, “Divorce has declined for the privileged; for everyone else, stable marriage has gotten to be even further out of reach…..More and more young men are deciding the hard work of becoming marriageable is not worth it: porn, beer, video games with the guys, freedom and fleeting sexual encounters are good enough.”

During the 18 years Gallagher wrote that column, she generally didn’t have as snarky a tone as one expects from Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter or the buffoonish Sarah “Mama Grizzly” Palin. Her positions, however, were the usual Christian Right dogma: anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-porn, anti-sex education except for failed abstinence-only programs.

But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and Gallagher has had some valid points on rare occasions. Yes, a child is better off in a two-parent household. Yes, fathers are important. But like so many social conservatives, Gallagher points the finger in the wrong direction. Instead of blaming gay marriage, porn videos, Roe v. Wade or sexually explicit hip-hop lyrics for the decline in “family values,” Gallagher should blame the real culprit—and that culprit is not social liberalism, but rather, economic stress. Corporate America has declared war on the middle class, making it much harder to raise a family in 2013 than it was in the 1950s or 1960s.

Social conservatives like Gallagher love to point to the 1950s as the golden age of family values, yet they fail to mention that the economic climate of the time made it much easier to raise a family. During the 1950s, a college degree practically guaranteed a good white-collar living in the United States—and millions of blue-collar Americans went to trade school, joined unions, bought houses and had no problem raising families with only a high school diploma. There was poverty in the U.S. in the 1950s, but there was also a large, robust middle class and a heavily unionized work force. It’s much easier to raise a family when you aren’t being financially assaulted at every turn. But Gallagher and her misguided ilk would rather blame gay men and porn videos than focus on the financial attack that American families have been facing thanks to corporatist Republicans and—let’s be honest—many corporatist Democrats as well (Chris Hedges is absolutely right when he points out that the Democratic Party is hardly blameless when it comes to outsourcing, union busting, banksterism and the abuses of health insurance companies).

If young American heterosexual men, as Gallagher claims, are choosing beer and “video games with the guys” over marriage (not that those things are mutually exclusive), sex columnist/gay marriage supporter Dan Savage is not to blame. Nor is Larry Flynt or porn director John Stagliano. Try blaming the fact that today’s young men—or, for that matter, young women—are facing the worst economic conditions in the U.S. in 80 years. Gallagher, a Republican who endorsed Rick Santorum in the GOP presidential primary of 2011/2012, needs to take a good look in the mirror. By endorsing the corporatist, anti-union, anti-working class, anti-health care reform policies of the Republican Party, Gallagher has done her part to harm the “traditional family” she claims to love so much.

It should also be noted that by promoting abstinence-only sex education, Gallagher’s column contributed to something that, ironically, she rails against: abortion. The data bares out the fact that in socially liberal places where comprehensive sex education is the norm, there are lower abortion rates, fewer unplanned pregnancies and fewer out-of-wedlock births. Abstinence-only “sex education” has been an abysmal failure, and Gallagher contributed to the problem whenever she promoted the Christian Right lie that sex education encourages promiscuity.

We haven’t heard the last of Maggie Gallagher, who will still be blogging on her MaggieGallagher.com website.  But her syndicated column is no more. That’s a good thing.

Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, Skin Two, The Pasadena Weekly, JazzTimes, Cash Box and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.

Maggie Gallagher speaking in 2010.