RIGHT OF CENTER: FREEDOM IS KEY TO RESTORING MORALITY

President Clinton twice this week exhorted Americans to help reverse this nation's moral decline. His words ring hollow.

They remind me of an overweight, unathletic boozer yelling instructions at Sterling Sharpe -- the Green Bay Packer receiver who broke his own NFL single-season record and caught 116 passes last year -- on how to catch a football.

Clinton told the National Baptist Convention that "each of us has a personal moral obligation" to improve society. He spoke in the context of recent killings of children by children and of children growing up without fathers. "We've got to turn this around," Clinton said.

The best way to turn this around is for government to get out of people's lives. In the past 20 years, it has become painfully clear that illegitimacy and single-parent child rearing has produced a growing number of angry, violent young men in our society. As long as Big Daddy government provides a welfare check, a housing subsidy and food stamps, what function does the young, urban male serve, save to breed the next generation of lost souls?

Clinton's speech drew fire from Jesse Jackson, who wanted the president to "address the need for an urban policy" and "rural recovery." To Jackson, it's solely an economic issue. The government needs to do something to spur economic opportunities for poor people so that children will stop killing children, single mothers will stop having babies or get married, and welfare and crime will vanish.

But economics has little to do with it. There was a time in this country when poor people set the standard for family devotion. In the harsh environment of barely eking out an existence, humans tend to revere God -- with the hope of an eternal reward in the afterlife for faithful service in this one -- and sacrificially devote themselves to one another. Material things often serve only to distract people from those things that are truly important, or they are the vain pursuit of those searching for fulfillment. When temporal material comforts are few, eternal truths often are the cornerstone of strong families and communities.

But all that presupposes a husband, wife and children comprising a family. It also presupposes a man's value as provider and protector and a woman's value as a nurturer and buttress. Too often today, the state is the provider and protector. While the single mother does her best to nurture her children, the cards are stacked against her. Her daughters learn from her example and from other single mothers in the neighborhood. Her sons likely will be placed in frightful schools where they won't learn even elementary skills needed for entry-level jobs, regardless of how plentiful they might be.

President Clinton said, "We are raising a whole generation of kids who aren't sure they are the most important persons in the world to anybody." But a person's value must be judged in light of an external reference point. We are valuable only in that we are created by a God who inheres value. Let's not confuse inherent value and worth with virtue. There is nothing virtuous, after all, about a high school graduate's inability to read, regardless of whether he feels he is "important to somebody." On the other hand, when a student earns an "A" on his term paper, he doesn't need someone to tell him he is valuable. His accomplishment is sufficient to provoke a good self-image.

Instead of opening wide the floodgates of opportunity by loosening the chains of government intrusion, we seek more programs and schemes to ensure security for everyone. We need to realize that security -- the kind that wants to solve all the world's ills through egalitarian social tinkering -- directly opposes freedom. Only through freedom can individuals emerge from the moral dark ages of modern American society.

Jay Eastlick is news editor of the Southeast Missourian.