Family Values

I graduated with a degree in English from a Midwestern university known for its colleges of engineering and agriculture. But the parchment I clutched as I left the leafy campus for a final time was considered by many to be essentially worthless, along with degrees in such other unprofitable courses of study as history and philosophy. Unless, of course, one decided to duck the vicissitudes of real life by going to graduate school and spending the rest of one’s life within the cozy shelter of ivy-covered walls.*

That wasn’t my original intention. I had survived the rigors of math and science in high school and had always been interested in mechanical matters, the way things as disparate as clocks and car engines worked, and decided I would become an engineer. I safely navigated courses in chemistry and calculus but foundered in the turbulent waters of physics and advanced mathematics. I also made friends with students who much preferred partying to burying their noses in books, with the predictable result that I got a parade of failing grades and the disgrace of academic probation. I cast around for another major, with the consensus of those I asked being that the easiest of all was English, which required only the ability to read and write a grammatical sentence. I’d never found those tasks difficult, so I opted to switch, damn the consequences, which included the fact that engineering graduates were then in high demand and I’d miss out mouth-watering salaries being offered by company recruiters.

Thus I stowed my slide rule in a drawer and trudged to the Humanities building, which was like entering a different world. Instead of a classroom filled with clean-cut males, there were both sexes, some of the males with long, shaggy hair and females in peasant dresses and sandals. But despite relief from stuffy conformity, I loathed the courses that dragged me from Beowulf through the florid swamps of classical and romantic literature although I liked Chaucer and loved most of Shakespeare. Ask me today for an exegesis on Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and I can feel a cloud of ennui descend upon my brain. I took two courses in creative writing, one in nonfiction and the other in fiction, bored by the first but my senses quickened by the second. A course in drama that exposed me for the first time to playwrights like Pirandello, Ionesco, Brecht, and Strindberg opened my eyes to the potential pleasures of theater, which I’ve enjoyed ever since.

My favorite, however, may have been a course in linguistics. Those readings of Chaucer and Shakespeare had awakened me to the fact that the English language is a mutable thing in the constant process of evolution, but learning something of its origins, its relationship to other languages, the reasons it looks and sounds the way it does, was a kind of revelation. And etymology had been an interest since childhood, when I’d lie on the living room floor with the family dictionary, reading random word definitions with the attention I might devote to the panels in the newspaper funnies. Words—what they mean, where they come from, how they can be used. And most acutely, the way words and the way we use them shape our thoughts.

I was reminded of this educational history the other day when I was wading through the daily effluent of various news and opinion sources and came across a quote by His Benevolence, Vladimir Putin, on the subject of LGBTQ people in Russia. It was crucially important, he warned, to protect traditional family values from a near-Napoleonic siege by the forces of homosexuality and transgenderism that were threatening the very pillars of western civilization. His raising of this alarm was no surprise, of course, since he had already engineered Russian laws banning same-sex marriage and medical changes in gender, phenomena that he had cast as “western anti-family ideology.”

But just what does “family values” mean? Etymological sources reveal that the word family comes from the Latin famulus, which means servant. From there it evolved to familia, a collective term for all the servants of the household. Such was the original meaning of family in English, but it was later broadened to all the members of a household, and then constricted to a group of related people, the way it is regarded now. As for the word value, it comes to English from the Old French word of the same spelling, which derived from the Latin valére, meaning to be strong. Value is now used in a different but related sense, as the worth or importance of something, ranging in possibility from astoundingly great to piteously small. In the plural, it is most often used to mean a general set of beliefs embraced by individuals or groups as a guide to behavior, more or less synonymous with "morals" or "ethics.”

I’m no linguist, notwithstanding a long-lived interest in the subject, but it strikes me that the wedding of family and values is irrational. “Family" by current definition is a form of social organization, and “values” as defined above cannot be inherent in that form any more than "values" can be inherent in a sales chart, or a freeway system. This is not linguistic nitpicking, but an illustration of how the misuse of language allows propagandists to do their devious work. To Vladimir Putin the word family doesn’t refer to a form of social organization, but to an idealized "family" consisting of man and wife with children holding values such as a belief in God and the evils of homosexuality and transgenderism. He isn’t speaking inclusively of units organized around parents and children, because the values referred to exclude single parent families, families in which the parents aren't married, families headed by gays or lesbians, and presumably, atheists and political liberals, along with biracial families and those in which members believe in a woman's right to choose.

Putin’s kind of histrionic warning has been repeatedly sounded in various forms by conservative leaders and figures throughout the world, including our own dynamic duo of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. But the first name that came to my mind when I read the news item was Alexi Navalny, the Russian dissident whose poisoning in 2020 was widely attributed to persons operating at Putin’s behest, and who later died in a notorious penal colony. His arrest and imprisonment was almost certainly ordered by the Russian president, who has expressed a desire to hold that exalted office for the rest of his life. A vision of the future without any room for critics and dissidents.

At the time of his death just over a year ago, the 48-year-old Navalny had been married to his wife Yulia for twenty-four years, and was the father of a 23-year-old daughter and 16-year-old-son. They were, in other words, a traditional family, a man and woman who had gotten married and produced children the way men and women had all the way back to Adam and Eve. But that didn’t stop Putin from taking his thumb and smudging out the male element of the entity prized above all others in the perfect society that resides in the dark, sinister country of the dictator’s mind.

Closer to home, gainfully employed men with wives and children have been snatched off the street by federal agents and whisked to detention facilities far from their homes. Their offense? Not being American citizens, which justifies erasure of the family bonds so beloved of the pious Vance and others of his ilk. You can call it hypocritical, you can call it cruel, you can even call it evil if your conception of good and evil extends beyond the thundering of platitudes from the Sunday pulpit.

I was born and raised in a traditional family, with father, mother and two siblings. In the community there was the occasional bachelor, who may or may not have been heterosexual, and what we called old maids, or “spinsters” in polite conversation. In my trek through the educational system, I encountered several, but I don’t remember any speculation about their activities outside the classrooms. I’d heard about men who liked to dress in women’s clothing, but I didn’t know any. Actual sex change was a concept as implausible as a trip to the North Pole. A couple who were friends of our family got divorced, which was a community scandal although it existed mostly outside the children’s sphere of interest. When I was older I heard rumors of adultery, but only one, involving a farmer and the wife of the local grocer, appeared to be a matter of common knowledge.

Once beyond the rigid boundaries of an insular rural community, though, I met people who were different. People of different races. People with different political and religious beliefs. Gay men. Lesbians. Transvestites. People who referred to themselves with terms I’d never heard before. I could have fled in horror, but I didn’t. I hadn’t heard the term “family values” but the family I’d been a part of and the values I was expected to embrace had become oppressive. Thus to mingle with people so completely different from the ones I had grown up with was a kind of liberation. They weren’t monsters, and I couldn’t imagine them as a threat to the established order, whatever that was deemed to be.

But Vladimir Putin clearly does, along with those like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Argentina’s Javier Milei and the would-be authoritarians in our own country. Their shrill warnings about attacks on “family values,” are examples of how language is used to conceal motives that might not otherwise be palatable to listeners. Putin is clearly interested in power, expressing it to vanquish those deemed enemies, like Alexei Navalny, and to spread his country’s hegemony, as in the waging of war on neighboring Ukraine. Authoritarian regimes need a compliant population, and those who are different, like gay and transgender people, threaten that compliance. They must be suppressed, erased, by whatever means necessary.

*That English degree didn’t turn out to be useless after all. It helped me get my first job out of the university, as a reporter for a daily newspaper.