Links, and a few comments on Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown
The Archbishop of Canterbury responds with grace to a jackass letter.
Ian Ayres of Balkinization on I Pay Them to Leave.
Sokari on Nigerian underground poetry series.
Family values point/counterpoint from Ross and Ta-Nehisi. Both posts are interesting and thoughtful, but I do have a minor kvetch about the “Dan Quayle was right” line.
Way back when Dan Quayle made his single mother speech, he got a whole bunch of people on his case for several different reasons:
- Some of it, yeah, was people who didn’t like him dissing single mothers.
- Some of it was people who thought he was making too much of a TV show, and that Murphy Brown becoming a single mother wasn’t any particular harbinger of social decline.
- Some of it was because there had just been a great big major riot in Los Angeles that was in large part provoked by that incident where cops were videotaped beating Rodney King, and Quayle’s speech about the importance of having two parents was seen as commentary on the riots. (I don’t remember enough about the speech to remember whether there actually was any link drawn to the rioting, but it was definitely part of other people’s commentary on the speech.)
Now, take Murphy Brown, since I never watched her and so she’s the one piece of this that I genuinely have no opinion about. It’s entirely possible (at least hypothetically) that Quayle was, in some sense, right about Murphy Brown. It’s fair game to critique TV shows for the messages they send out; sites like Racialicious do it all the time on racial matters. And if Murphy Brown’s single motherhood was handled in a way that deserves critique – if, say, the TV show did a rose colored glasses number on her single mother life, or made excuses for the father of her kid as he made a selfish exit, or some such thing – then, you know, go Dan Quayle. Or, on the other hand, it’s entirely possible that Quayle was wrong about Murphy Brown; not every TV show family needs to be the perfect two parent family – as long as Murphy Brown’s single parenthood is portrayed in a way that’s real, it’s reasonable content for TV.
But, either way, it’s at least possible to agree with Dan Quayle on one point and disagree on others – to agree with him that two parent families are on aggregate better, but disagree that there was something wrong with that TV show portraying a single mother, or to agree that the TV show’s manner of handling Murphy Brown’s single motherhood was off, but have serious problems with the right-after-the-LA-riot timing of Quayle’s remarks. And the “Dan Quayle was right” comments that conservatives have been making ever since tend to collapse a whole bunch of disagreements that were going on at the time into just one.
February 14th, 2009 at 9:13 am
A bit strange of a topic to write about. For a bit I thought you were reposting something you’d written 20 years ago. I’m guessing Dan Quayle wouldn’t have problems with this show in light of the things that are on TV these days.
And I do agree the Archbishop of Canterbury did reply with grace. It’s one of the cooler letters I’ve received.
christopher…
February 14th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Next, I’ll dial my time machine back just a little farther and talk about what Daniel Patrick Moynihan had to say in 1965
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Yeah, TV has moved on a pace since then. I don’t imagine Quayle and Candice Bergen have any serious problems with each other now
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February 16th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
The original “Dan Quayle Was Right” article by Whitehead also noted that children are happier in single-parent families than in families with a stepparent. Funny you don’t hear THAT bandied about by conservatives much.
February 16th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
No clue what the state of the literature was at the time of the Whitehead piece, but the current literature is really mixed on single- vs. stepparenting. Some studies find one has better average outcomes and some find the other does.
Virtually no studies find that either is better than being raised by one’s own two married parents.
Obviously no one is average, so social-science is generally not my preferred way of approaching this stuff….
February 21st, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Regardless of the state of the literature then vs. now, at the time that part of Whitehead’s article was completely ignored. Whitehead cited to a study that found that children in single-parent families were much happier and had lower rates of depression than children whose parents remarried. Yet, funnily, one did not see social conservatives exorting single parents to avoid remarrying.
In other words, it’s about intellectual dishonesty and cherry-picking, not about genuine disagreement in the scientific literature. You can’t really hold up an opinion piece as Received Wisdom for just the parts you like.