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20 Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown And Unmarried Moms
Washington Post ^ | May 25, 2012 | Isabel Sawhill

Posted on 05/26/2012 1:48:25 PM PDT by Steelfish

20 Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown And Unmarried Moms

Isabel Sawhill May 25.

On May 19, 1992, as the presidential campaign season was heating up, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a family-values speech that came to define him nearly as much as his spelling talents. Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown — the fictional 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS sitcom — for her decision to have a child outside of marriage.

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” the vice president said. “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

Quayle’s argument — that Brown was sending the wrong message, that single parenthood should not be encouraged — erupted into a major campaign controversy. And just a few weeks before the ’92 vote, the show aired portions of his speech and had characters react to it.

“Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to expand his definition and recognize that, whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes,” Bergen’s character said.

Her fictional colleague Frank, meanwhile, echoed some of the national reaction: “It’s Dan Quayle — forget about it!”

Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic. The number of single parents in America has increased dramatically: The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen from roughly 30 percent in 1992 to 41 percent in 2009. For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: culturewars; hollywood; motherhood; potato; potatoe; psychology; quayle; rkselection
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1 posted on 05/26/2012 1:48:33 PM PDT by Steelfish
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To: Steelfish
On May 19, 1992

I think most of us knew this decades before that.

2 posted on 05/26/2012 1:56:06 PM PDT by Mark17 (California, where English is a foreign language)
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To: Steelfish

America and the West built a wonderful social safety net. Little did we realize that it would be seen by so many as a trampoline. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.


3 posted on 05/26/2012 2:01:26 PM PDT by randog (Tap into America!)
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To: Steelfish

Even the Atlantic Monthly had a cover story called “Dan Quayle was right”. Of course, that was in 1993 after Clinton had safely been elected.


4 posted on 05/26/2012 2:02:32 PM PDT by ReformationFan
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To: Steelfish

All of the “stupid” Republicans are right. That’s why the Left calls them “stupid”. The truth is very dangerous to the Left and needs to be disparaged and called “stupid”, lest the sheeple catch on.


5 posted on 05/26/2012 2:05:11 PM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Like Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin has become simply a stick with which to beat Whites.)
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To: Mark17

Crime statistics, especially in single parent black households, bear witness to this every day.


6 posted on 05/26/2012 2:17:14 PM PDT by thethirddegree
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To: Steelfish

I agree with what Quayle was trying to say, but not how he said it.

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong”

This implies he supports abortion (which I know he doesn’t but that’s what it sounds like). Word choice is important.

He should have said pro-creating irresponsibly is wrong ... and that goes for men and women.


7 posted on 05/26/2012 2:23:20 PM PDT by Lorianne (fedgov, taxporkmoney)
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To: Steelfish

I agree with what Quayle was trying to say, but not how he said it.

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong”

This implies he supports abortion (which I know he doesn’t but that’s what it sounds like). Word choice is important.

He should have said pro-creating irresponsibly is wrong ... and that goes for men and women.


8 posted on 05/26/2012 2:23:33 PM PDT by Lorianne (fedgov, taxporkmoney)
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To: Steelfish
Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown — the fictional 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS sitcom — for her decision to have a child outside of marriage.

No he did not.

Dan Quayle criticized the writers of Murphy Brown for their decision to glamorize a fictional 40 year old, rich character having an out of wedlock child. He never did and never would have criticized any real woman who got pregnant and chose not to abort her child.

It is a very real distinction that Hollywood and the MSM have refused to recognize ever since.

9 posted on 05/26/2012 3:01:11 PM PDT by Bubba_Leroy (The Obamanation Continues)
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To: Steelfish

To me getting pregnant on purpose and raising a baby with no father is the most selfish thing a person can do to another.I can’t imagine what life must be like not knowing who your father is and what a hole that must be?


10 posted on 05/26/2012 3:05:38 PM PDT by chris_bdba
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To: chris_bdba

Worse is turning heterosexual love, families and marriage over to homosexual sex activists to social engineer.

It’s another step to destruction of humanity for the same purpose feminists (lesbians) pushed single parenthood, degraded fatherhood to the equivalent to an ATM machine and mined conflict and jealously between heterosexual men and women.


11 posted on 05/26/2012 3:26:46 PM PDT by SaraJohnson
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To: Steelfish

Like all liberal beliefs, when given time, prove to be wrong.


12 posted on 05/26/2012 3:32:08 PM PDT by Robert DeLong (u)
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To: Steelfish

The nasty, negative tone from Post readers tells me that getting the facts on marital breakdown has ZERO effect on the brains of leftist marriage-haters. All that matters to them is validation of their own selfish desires and choices, and those do NOT include what used to be called normal family lives.


13 posted on 05/26/2012 3:34:49 PM PDT by madprof98
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To: Steelfish

We knew Dan was correct back then, time has proven it so.


14 posted on 05/26/2012 3:45:21 PM PDT by cotton
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To: Steelfish
In a study I co-authored with Adam Thomas, I put [single mothers] into hypothetical households with demographically similar unmarried men who, in principle, would be good marriage partners. Through this virtual matchmaking, we showed that child poverty rates would fall by as much as 20 percent in an America with more two-parent households.

In later research, Ron Haskins and I learned that if individuals do just three things — finish high school, work full time and marry before they have children — their chances of being poor drop from 15 percent to 2 percent.

15 posted on 05/26/2012 3:52:55 PM PDT by Petrosius
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To: Petrosius

Note: All of post #15 should have been marked as a quote from the article.


16 posted on 05/26/2012 3:55:04 PM PDT by Petrosius
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To: Petrosius

Note: All of post #15 should have been marked as a quote from the article.


17 posted on 05/26/2012 3:57:20 PM PDT by Petrosius
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To: chris_bdba

Whenever I read about a woman doing that, I hope she has a boy. So that she can explain to her precious snowflake his worthlessness in the grand scheme of her world view.


18 posted on 05/26/2012 5:07:55 PM PDT by Kozak (The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home JM)
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To: Steelfish

At the time Quayle was mocked as being George H W Bush’s
“village idiot”. The current crop infesting DC make Quayle
look like a sage and wise elder statesman.


19 posted on 05/26/2012 9:47:05 PM PDT by nvscanman
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To: Steelfish

I’ve always suspected that the first-run ratings for “Murphy Brown” were somehow gamed to look better than they were for PC reasons.

The show’s dismal performance in syndication simply doesn’t match up with how well it did during its network run.

You can watch reruns of “Seinfeld” and “Friends” 24/7.

When’s the last time a rerun of “Murphy Brown” aired in your city?


20 posted on 05/27/2012 2:16:45 AM PDT by Blue Ink
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