[lbo-talk] Not Sure How I Feel About This: "Dan Quayle was Right"

[Alan P. Rudy]

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 at 8:36 AM, Ismail Lagardien wrote:
> Twenty Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown and Unmarried Moms
>  
> 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.”
>  
> http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/05/25-unmarried-mothers-sawhill
>  
> Ismail Lagardien

To hell with this, the horse it rode in on and the burr-encrusted saddle strapped to the poor animal.  Understanding that this is from a "liberal" institution reposting crap from the Washington Post, this piece collapses unmarried childbearing with irresponsibility, it nods to and then denies the prospect of unmarried cohabiting biological parents (much less unmarried non-cohabiting parents the both provide support for children), it completely ignores the >50% divorce rate, it is wholly silent on the death of the family wage and the end of the forty hour work week much less the reduced meaning of education/debt for career prospects, it refuses to differentiate the "consequences" along income lines, it refuses to engage in any way with changes in social services and public resources and it completely separates the issue of parenting from every other social trajectory in the United States.  And that's just without thinking much about this at all… why am I sure that Stephanie Coontz would rip Isabel Sawhill a new one?!

--  
Alan P. Rudy
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