`Family Values' on the Campaign Agenda

The editorial " `Family Values'," Aug. 25, was right on target. It is ironic and troubling that those who most vociferously make pronouncements on this subject have spent their terms of office heaping huge economic burdens on the middle-class family. The misery of people on the bottom of the economic pyramid has been even more exacerbated, sometimes by ongoing benign neglect, sometimes by dismantling social programs, and sometimes by an unwillingness to understand.

Vice President Dan Quayle recently spoke on the subject of single-parent families, implying that such families are one of the causes of poverty in the United States. Such attempts to turn things upside down, while at the same time neglecting real family concerns, have served only to trivialize the "family values" issue. Values, especially those touching the family, are a society-wide responsibility and not a fit subject for politicization and demagoguery. Richard L. Allman, La Crescenta, Calif.

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