What Families Really Value : SCOTT CHOE : ‘Honor and Respect Are Based on Love’

Has your family had its moral fiber today? And who determines the nutritional content and dosage, anyway?

Dan Quayle scolded TV’s Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ” With that condemnation, he started a national debate over family values--and the definition of the family itself.

Only about a third of U.S. families fit the traditional pattern of a working dad and a mom at home with the kids. If that structure is changing, what does that say for “traditional family values”?

Southern Californians--including a Latina great-grandmother, a Korean-American student and a black working couple--concur that family values are crucial but don’t necessarily agree on what those values are.

*

Scott Choe, 24, a sophomore at Los Angeles Community College, immigrated from South Korea 19 years ago and will be married on July 19. He lives in the Miracle Mile District with his parents, Sue Choe, 45 , and Byung Ik Choe, 56, and brother, Kenneth Choe, 19. *

“I believe you have to be married to raise children,” says Choe. “My preference and my future wife’s preference is that she stay in the house and take care of the baby when we start a family. If I can’t provide all the income we need, then she will work.”

He says the family values he will pass on to his children will be those his parents--and grandparents and great grandparents--have passed on to other generations of Choes.

“My family values consist of respect and honor--inside and outside of the home. And honor and respect are based on love. That’s how I was brought up.

“But sometimes in the Korean community I see more and more kids thinking they have so much freedom, that they are the greatest,” says Choe. “They are headed in the direction of almost being hoodlums and gang wanna-bes.”

And, Choe warns, “Since these kids appear to have no family moral code, the Korean-American community will suffer.”