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Monday, October 30, 2006
Keep families out of politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Family matters don’t belong in political campaigns. Period. Sunday night’s gubernatorial debate, which I did not see, turned personal, according to the morning AJC headline. Gov. Sonny Perdue “attacked challenger Mark Taylor’s past drug use and drinking,” the AJC reported, after Taylor renewed his accusations that Perdue had used his office for personal gain in a land transaction. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use this,” the governor said in a discussion about the methamphetamine problem. “But it’s really about good parenting. It’s about being a good model for your children and not using drugs in front of them. Not driving when your young infant son is in the car.”
In 1992 court papers, Taylor ackowledged that he and a former wife had used marijuana and cocaine but said they stopped when she became pregnant with son Fletcher, who was born in 1983. The lieutenant governor’s behavior almost a quarter century ago, drawn from informtion revealed in a custody battle, is not germane to any issue that arises in a political campaign. Families are, or should be, off limits. None of us outside the Taylor family has any way of judging either parent’s fitness or of knowing whether any parental action or intervention might have changed the course of a child’s life in any general way or specific circumstance.
Taylor may make a marvelous governor or he may be thorougly incompetent — but these charges tell us absolutely nothing relevant about how he would function in that office.
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