George H.W. Bush: “The traditional family? Well, I guess everybody looks at his or her own experience. Barbara Bush and I have been blessed…”

“The traditional family? Well, I guess everybody looks at his or her own experience. Barbara Bush and I have been blessed with growing up in what you might call a traditional family, a family where a mother and dad are there, and they give love to a child. So I am, I guess, what you call a family values man. But where you don't have that, where a kid, a little child comes into the world and doesn't have the father--the father may have run away, not even there to know the name of the child--somehow we then have to help that little kid. I told it earlier, every kid ought to have somebody that knows his name. It should be the parent, should be two parents. If not two parents, it ought to be one parent. If it can't be that, there's got to be a mentor. There's got to be somebody who cares, somebody who loves that child. And on traditional family values where you can have the welfare system so it does not encourage a husband and wife to live apart. We've got to change it. We've got to make it so these kinds of traditional values have a chance to work in this troubled society of ours. So I'm not ashamed about talking about family values and traditions of that nature. We'll keep on doing it, and I think it's beginning to resonate. Because as I told Dr. Walker and some others earlier, when the mayors of these cities, a lot of cities, came to see me, including Mayor Bradley of now-troubled Los Angeles, they said, ``The thing that concerns us most about trouble in the cities, the most single cause is the decline or defamation of the American family.'' We've got to find ways to strengthen it. Haitian Migrants”