The "values" panic: the right has no monopoly on morals--or on moral bullying.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Moral values the most important issue for voters

ONE OF THE big stories to emerge from the election was the values vote. In a CNN exit poll, 22 percent of the voters said "moral values" was the most important issue ahead of both terrorism and Iraq--and 80 percent of these values-oriented voters backed George W. Bush.

Both right and left jumped on this news, the former to proclaim that Bush now had a mandate to, as virtue czar William Bennett put it, "promote a more decent society, through both politics and law"; the latter to paint Bush voters as hordes of Bible-thumping rednecks out to force their bigoted "values" down our throats.

Then came the revisionist view. The evangelicals' share of total voter turnout did not increase from 2000, and the presence of anti-same-sex-marriage amendments on the ballots in II states did not seem to give Bush much of a boost at the polls. Some suggested that "moral values" could have meant a lot of different things to respondents; novelist/blogger Roger Simon, a pro-gay marriage Bush supporter, noted that he might well have picked that item on the questionnaire because he views the war on Islamofascist terror as the predominant moral issue of our time.

The new conventional wisdom seems to hold, despite some attempts to revise the revisionism. On November 23 in National Review Online, Maggie Gallagher cited a Pew Research Center poll showing that most of the voters who picked moral values as their chief concern did indeed define "values" in terms of social or religious conservatism: 44 percent as specific social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, or stem-cell research; 18 percent as issues related to religion; and 17 percent as "family values" or "right and wrong" in general. (To 23 percent, "moral values" meant the candidate's personal integrity.)

The Pew poll also asked some respondents an open-ended question about their top priority in the election, rather than have them pick one from a list. Among Bush voters, 17 percent named "moral values" in general, 6 percent pointed to social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, and 4 percent mentioned the candidate's own morals. Since the Pew report grouped these three items under "moral values," adding up to 27 percent of the total, Gallagher asserts that "values voters" were Bush's key constituency, outnumbering the 17 percent whose main concern was terrorism. Yet add Iraq--an issue that most Bush supporters probably see as part of the war on terrorism and the "national security" vote increases to 28...