While the politicians scramble to protect their turf by hedging it in with their carefully tested "values" -- or not so carefully tested, depending on who you're talking about -- America is asked to choose one extreme or the other.
Americans can be forgiven for feeling that we have no other choice but these:
"Family Values" means little more than being anti-everything that doesn't pass the litums test of the Religious Right. Anti-abortion, anti-gay/lesbian, anti-anyone who isn't prepared to take the not-so-nonexistent religious test the Constitution prohibits.
"Liberal Values," once the sturdy cable with which FDR wove the social contract that protected the sick, the elderly and the poor, have come to be described as the ability to possesses and use the qualities of empathy, the ability to nurture and create and defend community. Uh-huh. Give me FDR, but it's not likely anyone will.
There is another compass by which our nation should steer its course, our true moral compass that has never led us astray and can guide us back to the firm ground on which this nation was built, on which it stood from the day after the Revolution ended to the day the Supreme Court stopped the counting of votes in the 2000 elections and ordained a President.
You will find this compass in The Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States.
And, lest anyone doubt, we still hold these truths to be self-evident.
