REMEMBER MURPHY BROWN? It was three decades ago when then-Vice President Dan Quayle defended the traditional family and was rewarded with a sustained assault led by Candace Bergen nee sitcom star “Murphy Brown.”
Quayle’s sin, Issues & Insights reminds us this morning, was to extoll the intact family unit with a father and mother in the home to raise kids, instill positive values in them and maintain the sort of social cohesion required to preserve a healthy community.
“Quayle lamented that those controlling the commanding heights of the culture often send the wrong message. He specifically faulted the CBS-TV sitcom Murphy Brown for depicting its lead character as ‘mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.’ Quayle concluded his remarks by inviting a ‘national debate’ over these issues to ‘roar on.’
“The roar went on for months. Quayle was immediately denounced by Diane English, Murphy’s creator and producer. Hillary Clinton called Quayle ‘out of touch.’ The controversy reached a crescendo when the series returned for a fifth season that fall. Its season premiere was devoted to the Quayle speech with its star character lecturing the audience about the merits of nontraditional family structures.”
The intervening years have certainly provided abundant evidence of who was right and who was truly out of touch with human reality.
-Mark Tapscott
For context, Murphy Brown, as a single lady, adopted a child and became a single mom. In the show, however, she was a successful lady and quite self-supporting.
Non-traditional families? Heck, even the non-traditional families back 40 years ago are also under attack.
Sorry, but the traditional route to success (or, if you prefer, stay out of poverty) still holds:
- Graduate (high school, trade school, college)
- Get full-time job. Do it well.
- THEN get married
- THEN have kids.
In. That. Order.
And no, don’t start in with the exceptions to disprove this rule. Hard times, misfortunate not of one’s own making, and stupid decisions of one’s own making can play havoc with that formula – but it holds true for the general case.
With all of the “have it all NOW” variations that I’ve seen over the decades, I’ll still hold to the tried and true – a Mom and Dad raising kids together in a stable situation (aka, the traditional “nuclear family” that was the target of Hollywood in “Murphy Brown”) was and still is the recipe for overall success.
I grew up as the son of an Irish drunk. No, he wasn’t the violent type nor was he lazy. He just cheated, a lot, on my mom (just like he had done with his first wife). He was shown the door. And yes, that split had ramifications later on in life as a Dad myself (e.g., learning on the fly, not always doing the right things rightly, and making mistakes from never having that “training” from a stable father figure). So, a single-parent household.
For both my brother and I, it still worked even if there were “holes” – some of them deep holes. But we both followed the above – and did well enough.
Years later, Candice Bergen actually admitted that Quayle was right – a committed father was just as important as committed mom:
Bergen was attending the annual summer critics’ confab in Pasadena to promote her new Oxygen series, ”Candice Checks It Out,” in which she interviews non-celebrities on their own turf, but what reporters really wanted to check out were her thoughts on the decade-old Quayle quote. ”I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless,” the Associated Press quotes her as saying. ”But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.”
(H/T: Instapundit)
