Calculating political ledger balances and earnest pieties about children and families miss, I think, an important point - that in 21st c. America a toxic synthesis of legalism and puritanism has been weaponized, and even its engineers cannot contain its effects.

My heart does not bleed for Spitzer, Vitter, Gingrich, Haggard, Clinton, Baker, Foley, Swaggert, Hart and all the other zealots and demagogues who have been water-boarded in their own War on Nature. For the rest of us just being left unmolested by self-righteous busybodies and eagerly metastasizing bureaucracies to interact simply, peacefully and prosperously as a common weal has become the new political ideal.