Dan Quayle was Wrong – Apparently it IS just Another Lifestyle Choice
Back when George the First was president, his VP, Dan Quayle famously dared to criticize the television dramedy Murphy Brown for portraying single motherhood as "just another lifestyle choice." Feminists leapt as one to the barricades to attack, belittle and generally upbraid Quayle for every possible offense, real or imagined.
My favorite at the time was the criticism that Murphy Brown was "just fiction" and therefore, apparently immune from comment. I'm not making that one up. The same people who had dissected and criticized every aspect of popular culture in a never-ending quest to find any hint of misogyny, all of a sudden were "shocked, shocked" to find the tables turned.
Not long after Quayle was dispatched to eternal irrelevancy by the 1992 presidential election, The Atlantic Monthly ran an article by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead that clearly revealed what many feminists had sought to hide - "Dan Quayle was Right." And he was, and he is.
I've never been a fan of the lightweight Quayle, but when a man is right, he's right and, well, Dan Quayle was right. In excoriating the Murphy Brown show, he was arguing simply that, for popular culture to present single motherhood as nothing more than a choice by an adult to conduct her life in a manner that was no one's business but hers, was not only factually wrong, it was abusive of children and contrary to the needs of mothers, fathers, children and society generally.
He was right, but we still ignore his message. By now, the information on single parenthood's effects on children has increased from the merely convincing to the overwhelming. There is very simply, no serious argument that supports single parenthood as a choice. Sometimes single parenthood is unavoidable, and that's unfortunate. But to choose single parenthood is irresponsible for everyone and particularly bad for children.
And yet we do it more now than ever. Most people are familiar with the fact that 40% of babies in the U.S. are now born to single mothers. Now just because a child is born to a single mother doesn't necessarily mean there's no father present or that he won't be there in every way until the child grows up. But it's a strong probability that he won't, as again much social science tells us. (See for example, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing group of studies.)
Read this article and it becomes clear that, for whatever reason, the women quoted in it, didn't get the message Dan Quayle (or anyone else) sent (Washington Post, 5/14/09). Read what they say and it's clear that to them, single motherhood is precisely a lifestyle choice. Read their remarks, and you'll notice that the welfare of the child they bring into the world never appears. The choice is about them, what appeals to them, what they want. Aging and mateless? No problem; get artificially inseminated. Not that into your boyfriend? Show him the door. What could possibly be the problem? He's on the hook for child support, and what else but money could he have to offer?
And yes, read the article and notice that it, like the mothers themselves isn't convinced that Dan Quayle was right. True, there are a few sentences to the effect that children fare worse in single-parent households, but the authors don't make much of the fact. And any problems children may suffer from not having a father seem to weigh, in the minds of the authors and at least one quoted expert, about equally with the mothers' freedom to do what they want.
We've seen this before and I suspect we'll see it again. Articles that still try to convince us that single-parenthood is really alright will continue to appear. They reflect our inability to deal effectively with what we know to be true.
Our institutions stand idly by while the fabric of our society rips further and further.
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