Leadership Quote by Kenny Marchant

“Core set of family values” is doing the kind of political work that sounds like comfort and functions like a club. Kenny Marchant frames “this country” as a moral inheritance with clear owners and clear rules, then casts broadcast media as the intruder. The elegance of the move is its vagueness: family values are never defined, which lets the phrase operate as a floating signifier that different audiences can fill with their own anxieties about sex, profanity, queerness, race, religion, or simple cultural change. It’s less a description of a national founding than an attempt to deputize nostalgia as policy.

The verb choices are telling. “Discouraged and blatantly undermined” implies an organized attack, not an evolving culture. That paranoia is useful: if offense is an assault, then regulation looks like self-defense. “Airing of offensive material” shifts the burden away from specific harms (defamation, incitement, exploitation) toward a more elastic claim: “offensive” to whom, and by whose standards? Broadcast television and radio aren’t singled out because they’re uniquely corrupting, but because they’re uniquely regulable. Unlike cable or the internet, broadcast lives under the logic of public ownership of the airwaves and FCC oversight, making it a convenient battleground for symbolic policing.

The context is late-20th/early-21st century culture war politics, where “protecting children” becomes a moral alibi for controlling public speech. The intent isn’t merely to curb content; it’s to assert which families count as “the” family, and to translate that boundary into law, fines, and chilled expression.