Clinton Assails Out-of-Wedlock Births : Families: In address to black Baptist group, he calls the increase in illegitimacy a ‘disaster.’ He stresses that government cannot enforce morality.

NEW ORLEANS —  President Clinton, in a lengthy address to a Baptist group on the themes of values and personal responsibility, called the growing rate of out-of-wedlock births in the United States a “disaster.”

“It is wrong,” the President said in his first major speech since returning from a 12-day beach vacation. “You shouldn’t have a baby before you’re ready, and you shouldn’t have a baby when you’re not married. You just have to stop it.”

Clinton has spoken before of the societal costs of illegitimacy, but Friday’s remarks were his most direct and forceful. He said that aid programs can be changed to stop rewarding welfare recipients who bear children out of wedlock and that government programs can be revised to reduce welfare dependency.

But he stressed that government cannot enforce morality or teach responsibility.

“I’ll try to do my part, but this is not a government deal,” he told an estimated 12,000 members of the National Baptist Convention USA, the nation’s largest black denomination. “This is the way people are behaving, as if there were no respect for themselves and no future. We have to stop.”

Clinton’s remarks were warmly received. “You are among some of your best friends,” convention President T. J. Jemison told him.

The President was careful not to portray births outside marriage as an African American problem but a nationwide crisis. The rate of white out-of-wedlock births has nearly matched the black percentage and nearly half of all children born in the United States are now born to never-married women, he said.

“I don’t think we ought to give up on families,” Clinton declared as members of the audience shouted words of encouragement. “Somebody’s got to love these children.”

Clinton’s appeal followed several weeks of personal reflection about the direction of his presidency, and marked an effort to rise above the slough of partisan politics and proclaim a moral vision for the nation.

While he touched on the recently passed crime bill and mentioned in passing his efforts to reform the nation’s health care system, Clinton deliberately avoided much specific discussion of his legislative agenda.

The President has concluded in recent weeks that he has devoted too much of his time to policies and programs and too little to articulating a message of renewal for the country.

He returned from vacation a year ago with a similar resolve to surmount the mundane. His first major appearance after returning to Washington then was at an interfaith breakfast. He used the occasion to preach on the themes of faith and family.

Friday’s New Orleans address was one of what will be several attempts again this fall to detail what Clinton and his presidency stand for, aides said.

And in the 42-minute speech, Clinton touched all the bases--the sanctity of work, the centrality of family, individual responsibility and community involvement.

Friday’s speech came a day after former Vice President Dan Quayle spoke on the country’s “poverty of values,” hitting particularly hard on the obligation of men to assume responsibility for the children they father.

“If children grow up never knowing their father, they’re bound to assume that fathers are irrelevant and that males are not accountable,” Quayle said Thursday in San Francisco, returning to the scene and subject of his notorious “Murphy Brown” speech in 1992.

“Raising a child is not just a mother’s responsibility, it is a father’s responsibility too,” Quayle said.

A White House official said that the timing of Clinton’s speech and its similarity to Quayle’s message were “a coincidence.”

In Friday’s appearance, Clinton mused aloud about why Americans are not happier--and he more popular--given that the nation is at peace, the economy is generally healthy and unemployment is falling.

Clinton said that the nation is jittery because it is going through a period of profound change. He compared the insecurity of the post-Cold War era to the years immediately after the two world wars. He described the current era as a time of hope and fear intermingled.

The President also decried what he sees as rampant cynicism about public institutions and public servants, fueled by a hostile media and a culture of pessimism.

“We live in a time which almost seems to glorify the negative, the cynical, don’t we?” Clinton said.

He said that many people preach about a decline in values, but warned: “We should not let the voices of despair make our insecurities deeper. That is wrong.”

And he also said that discouragement about the current state of the nation should give Americans energy, not paralyze them.

“So to all those who preach that we need to return to the values of our faith, I say we do. But the real issue is, what are we going to do about it. Not what are we going to say about it but what are we going to do about it?” Clinton said.

“The saying is important, for we in words come to visualize the future, and we need the vision so that we do not perish,” he said. “But we must act on the vision and that’s where all the problems come.”

After listening to the President’s remarks from a front-row seat on the stage, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a leading civil rights figure, scolded him for ignoring that “economic desperation among blacks is substantial.”

“One would expect him to come here and speak of economic stimulus and jobs and economic development,” Jackson said. “Instead we are getting moral lessons on how to live. And they are good moral lessons. But we must fight welfare and crime with jobs and economic development.”

While in New Orleans, Clinton also attended a fund-raising luncheon with about 60 guests and met with the executive board of the National Conference of Black Mayors.