Recently, Naomi Cahn and Jane Carbone, the authors of Red Families v. Blue Families had an article in Slate criticizing pro-lifers for an increase in single-parent families. They argue that the religious culture in many southern and midwestern states makes women less likely to choose abortion when confronted with an unintended pregnancy. This leads to more single-parent families in red states.
However, in a response at NRO, I argue that the contraceptive culture that Cahn and Carbone promote also bears a great deal of responsibility for the rise in single-parent families. Indeed, several economic studies indicate that expanded access to contraception encourages more women to engage in premarital sex and increases the number of unintended pregnancies. Furthermore, men who impregnate women face considerably less social pressure to marry. The end result has been more sexual activity, more abortions, and yes, more single-parent households.
Not surpsingly Cahn and Carbone fail to engage this issue. They claim contraceptives are effective, but remain blissfully unaware of the studies of contraception programs in Scotland, Spain, and San Francisco that show no impact on abortion rates or unintended-pregnancy rates. Overall, Cahn and Carbone need to address the fact that the contraceptive culture they avidly promote has also played a role in the rise of single-parent households.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:37 pm
I think you haven’t addressed the charge. Forget about Scotland, Spain and other countries. The difference in single parent rates exists between the US south and Midwest versus the coasts. Are you saying that contraception is more available in Alabama than NY leading Alabama women to engage in more risky, premarital sex while NYC girls are leading chaste lives? If so then Alabama’s single parenthood rate AND abortion rate should be higher than NY.
But if you find the abortion rate in Alabama is lower but the single parenthood rate is higher than availability of contraception doesn’t seem to cut it. (Contraceptive availability seems like an odd argument to make here…during the health care debate critics of Obamacare keep saying over and over that contraceptives are cheap and easily obtained all over the US…now all in the sudden they aren’t?)
From both sides I think a critical factor missing is the ability of women to be single parents. Fact is it is easier to do so in the south and Midwest where the cost of living is lower and more extended family networks make it easier to raise a child as a single mom. Since many women do want to be moms at some point in their lives, then one would expect to see more single moms in areas where it’s easier to do so. Pro-lifers have removed the taboo of the single mom in order to celebrate women who opt not to have abortions. Witness the evolution of the GOP from the days of Dan Quayle, chiding Murphy Brown for unwed motherhood, to the celebration of how great a mom Sarah Palin was for raising a daughter who helped make a bastard just in time for the election.
February 21st, 2013 | 3:13 pm
“Furthermore, men who impregnate women face considerably less social pressure to marry. ”
Exactly right–we need to highlight the anti-woman reality of non-marital sex, a reality that a contraceptive culture only exacerbates, in the ongoing discourse over the HHS mandate.
Evidence indicates that it is far from clear that contraception benefits the common good–especially the good of women–and is, in actuality, often disruptive to family and social life. Thus, there is absent compelling reason to mandate contraception a basic health necessity–that is without even exploring the health risks that many FDA-approved contraceptive products pose.
Sadly, the freedom-of-indifference mentality that informs the logic behind the HHS mandate sees the repression in nature rather than the reductive and repressive notion of freedom and rights. According to this mindset, the cultural empowerment men enjoy from contraception is a result of both natural limits–the pressure to marry before menopause–and longstanding patriarchal hegemony. Adherents to this mentality believe that unimpeded access to contraception will level the sexual market for women.
In actuality, this logic is self-defeating. The HHS-mandate requires that employer-provided insurance plans cover all FDA-approved contraceptive products–ones for men very much included. Thus, the mandate will only, in effect, increase the surplus of contraception available to and used by men. Furthermore, the essential matter, as Michael J. New affirms, is simply that a contraceptive culture only gives men further license to irresponsibility.
The HHS mandate and the contraceptive culture, implicitly informed by an underlying ontology of freedom-of-indifference, only maintains a patriarchal hegemony. Women’s liberation is found in elsewhere.
February 21st, 2013 | 5:25 pm
” Pro-lifers have removed the taboo of the single mom in order to celebrate women who opt not to have abortions.
So pro-lifers removed the taboo? Really…I hate to break it to you – but that ship had sailed long before pro-lifers “celebrated” (more like just were relieved) a woman, practically any woman, who chooses not to have an abortion.
And as to the Murphy Brown/Bristol Palin comparison – one is a fictional character on a television show who was specifically chose from day one to have a child “without a man” – the other was an actual living breathing teenager who thought she was in love with another teenager and found out he was kind of a loser after he yo-yoed back an forth on commitment to her. Yeah, there exactly the same.
But hey, it’s always good to shoehorn as many insulting references to the Palins as possible – even when no one else in the post or thread had even thought of them.
February 21st, 2013 | 6:17 pm
And as to the Murphy Brown/Bristol Palin comparison – one is a fictional character on a television show who was specifically chose from day one to have a child “without a man”
Never really followed the show much but my understanding was the man skipped out on her, in fact it was her ex-husband so from the Roman Catholic POV she technically wasn’t a single mother but an abandoned wife….
But that’s neither here nor there, in the course of about 12 years we’ve seen a culture shift on the right from damming single-motherhood (even where it seems not to be the woman’s fault) to celebrating it. Sure Bristol wasn’t planned, but hey it’s not my ideological friends who pay her six figures to speak to groups about sexual morality. The reason is pretty clear, if single pregnant women don’t get abortions, they are going to become single moms and in areas where the GOP is strong negative views of abortion are associated with more single moms.
But hey, it’s always good to shoehorn as many insulting references to the Palins as possible – even when no one else in the post or thread had even thought of them.
Well someone has to point out all the holes and shoddy construction you guys’ logic. Think of me as the building inspector for arguments and this is a company well known for cutting corners .
February 21st, 2013 | 7:10 pm
The command to help the neo-widows and neo-orphans that have appeared in our age of abandonment of women is stronger in those places that actually haven’t stopped following the book that gave that command. Now it is snooty country club lefties who look down their noses at girls dumb enough to not get an abortion and bring another useless eater into this world, and screw up their chances of living in a Manhattan flat or a San Fran bungalow? Boonton, would you say the GOP has “progressed” and the left hasn’t? The Democrats are still stuck in hurting women and children?
February 21st, 2013 | 7:34 pm
That bastion of conservative journalism Jezebel had most coastal states at double Alabama’s abortion rate in 2008. in NYC around 41% of pregnancies end in abortion.
According to kidscount, Alabama only differs from NY state in children in single parent families by 3%. The three highest states are southern, yes. But after that percentages tend to be split between all regions mostly on economics; Rhode Island and Delaware easily equal almost the worst states in those rates. Other studies vary, but usually states like Iowa, North Dakota, and others maintain comparable rates despite being as pro-life as other states. Of course, Utah is even more so, and has the lowest rate of both in the nation.
February 21st, 2013 | 10:28 pm
Isn’t the obvious flaw in this argument that before abortion was widely legal, single parents were less common than they are now? I doubt that rhetorically discouraging abortion can have a greater effect on whether people choose to bear children out of wedlock than actually having it be against the law, and pretty effectively suppressed.
Whatever other factors are involved, and surely there are many, how can it be that people who argue in favor of going back to a previous state are to blame for a factor that was NOT present in that previous state?
February 22nd, 2013 | 4:17 am
Now it is snooty country club lefties who look down their noses at girls dumb enough to not get an abortion and bring another useless eater into this world, and screw up their chances of living in a Manhattan flat or a San Fran bungalow?
Ahh yes the elitist card. But I never said Bristol was dumb for not getting an abortion. And she is quite capable of living in Manhattan or a San Fran bungalow. As for ‘looking down’, I’m not the one who called her boyfriend a ‘loser’. That goes right to my thesis, she is embraced solely because she didn’t get an abortion but he is dismissed as useless. Sure people would like it if he was a great guy who was 100% there for her. But it’s just fine with them that she’s going it alone until she finds a replacement.
That is a huge cultural shift from 22 years ago where the conservative position was that any girl who got pregnant was dumb or indifferent to her baby’s needs if she didn’t have a father ‘locked in’ by marriage. Even Murphy Brown who had an ex-husband wasn’t good enough.
Both sides here are trying to pretend that single moms are always accidents..either unable to get contraception or fooled into having too much premarital sex by contraception and morally disinclined to having abortion. Neither really explains much.
February 22nd, 2013 | 4:30 am
pentamom
Isn’t the obvious flaw in this argument that before abortion was widely legal, single parents were less common than they are now? I doubt that rhetorically discouraging abortion can have a greater effect on whether people choose to bear children out of wedlock than actually having it be against the law, and pretty effectively suppressed.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/graphusabrate.html
The # of abortions per 1000 births is now about 285 where as right before Roe it was 180 and post Roe it has gone as high as 432. Before pro-lifers pine for the pre-Roe days too much, it is ironic that they aren’t that far from seeing pre-Roe days before Roe is abolished (if its ever) at least in terms of the numbers. What will they do if Roe is never abolished but people just stop having abortions as if it was?
Clearly a big taboo against out of wedlock births can either drive abortions to prevent a birth or it can drive marriages or some combination of both. While the late 70′s and early 80′s are stereotyped as a period of sexual excess, the reality is that they were probably a period where the taboo against single motherhood was still strong but shotgun weddings were rejected. Hence unsuitable pregnancies that would have been resolved with quickie marriages were resolved at the abortion clinic whereas today they are more likely to just go to term.
February 22nd, 2013 | 4:45 am
http://www.state.ok.us/osfdocs/budget/table25.pdf
The top 5 out of wedlock states are:
Mississippi
Louisianna
New Mexico
S. Carolina
Arizona
Utah and Idaho are indeed fighting it out as the states with the lowest rates but amont the top 5 with the lowest rate you see
Mass.
Colorado
Minnesota
New Hampshire
Clearly while they aren’t always 100% blue states, Red seems to have a stronger lock on the out of wedlock states.
Also an interesting counter here is that both red and blue states are having as many unintended pregnancies as each other, only blue states end them in abortion resulting in fewer single moms. It’s not easy to obtain data on pregnancy rates but an intereting proxy is STD rates. After all, if people can end up with an unintended pregnancy they can also end up with an unintended STD
http://news.menshealth.com/americas-most-std-infested-states/2012/04/05/ has a map of two different STDs state by state.
While NY always seems to come out bad, it does seem that the Red states are more often above rather than below the average.
February 22nd, 2013 | 9:23 am
That’s a fair point, Boonton. I wish we could lose the emotionally charged colloquialism “shotgun wedding” in these discussions, though. Many young people who married under these circumstances did so (and do so to this day) because they believed it was the best thing for themselves and for their child, not because of any fear of death should they refrain from marriage. I know it’s a bit of a term of art but its connotations tend to cloud the issue, as though it’s all fear of social or parental rejection and not at all a belief held by many young people themselves that marriage was a proper choice in the circumstances.
February 22nd, 2013 | 10:28 am
I agree the term is cartoonish but the taboo was real. Many married not just for their own sense of what was good for them but also out of a desire to protect their children. But in order to have a desire to protect the children you have to have a threat which means stigmatizing children of unwed parents. I think we can agree that’s pretty much off everyone’s table. But if you’re not going to stigmatize the children then the parents? Well the Dan Quayle tactic of taking on the mom was finished almost as soon as he did his first attack on Murphy Brown. Now the mythical Murphy Brown (elite liberal feminist having babies without a husband to show she don’t need no man!) is used by real single moms as justification for single momness (i.e. Bristol Palin).
What’s left seems to be bashing the father (calling Bristol’s bf a loser seems to go without question, but people bristle when I call the girl a loser, though by any reasonable standard of the word she is). But given the sex drive of younger men I’m not really convinced avoiding the disapproval of moral minded older bloggers is going to provide much of a counter-incentive.
What’s left is economic incentives and if you have places that have lower cost of living, lower competition to spend a lot on flashy consumption, deeper family and friend networks to provide aid, you’re going to get more single moms unless abortion is an acceptable option. Since pro-lifers have been most successful in just those areas, well now you know why the right is changing its mind about single moms while pretending not too.
February 22nd, 2013 | 11:16 am
Anytime someone wants to compare red states and blue states, they ought to take a look at Andrew Gelman’s book “Red State, Blue States, Rich State, Poor State.” In it he makes the point that even though richer states vote Democratic and poorer states vote Republican, within those states richer voters are more Republican, and poorer voters more Democratic. The difference is that in Texas, for example, a large majority of rich voters are Republican, whereas in Connecticut only half are, with the overall vote influenced accordingly.
Similar logic applies here: while it is true that more Republican states tend to have higher out-of-wedlock birth rates than more Democratic states, you need to look at groups within those states. The simple fact is that the gap in out-of-wedlock births between ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’ is explained almost entirely by the racial differences in those states. The out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks and Hispanics is consistently higher than the rate among whites. The red states mentioned as having higher rates of out-of-wedlock birth also have much larger black and Hispanic populations than those with lower rates.
This is not just a guess, as it happens. Examine Table I-4 here (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_01_tables.pdf#I04). The average among consistently ‘blue states’ (that voted for Kerry and Obama in 2008) is 29.2; among ‘red states’ (that voted for Bush and McCain) it is 30.1. The out-of-wedlock birthrate among whites is higher in Vermont (39.5) and Maine (41.3) than Alabama (27.7) or Mississippi (32.3). A wealthier blue state, such as Massachusetts (26.5), has a rate only slightly lower than Georgia (27.2). And, of course, Utah has by far the lowest rate of any state. Utah is also a religiously homogenous state, with a culture that promotes marriage and discourages abortion. Of course, it is also…
February 22nd, 2013 | 11:35 am
“I agree the term is cartoonish but the taboo was real. Many married not just for their own sense of what was good for them but also out of a desire to protect their children. ”
Yes, of course the taboo was real (what makes you feel the need to remind me of that?) but using the term entirely eliminates the idea that they had a sense of what was good for them to do.
It’s impossible to tease out how much of “a desire to protect their children” arose from actual conviction and how much from social pressure, in any given cases, or in the aggregate of cases. That’s precisely WHY we should avoid a term that implies that it was all social pressure, and no actual conviction.
It’s just another case of “words mean things.” I’m not trying to deny that many weddings happened largely because of pressure, but to use that term universally for all marriages that resulted from unintended/unscheduled pregnancy is to imply that pressure was the causal factor every time, and that simply wasn’t the case. Some people, even when they were teenagers, actually believed that they should get married because their child needed married parents on principle, and not just out of fear of what would happen to them or their children if they were not married. Some were probably having thoughts of marriage anyway and just got motivated a bit faster. But the term “shotgun wedding” prejudices the discussion entirely in the direction of social/familial pressure against the otherwise matrimonially unmotivated parents-to-be.
February 22nd, 2013 | 12:16 pm
Anyone applying for the job of building inspector for logical arguments ought to have some insight into the nature of statistical inference, uncertainty in estimation, the deficiencies of numbers produced by models (as opposed to actual counts), and the drawbacks of rankings as a meaningful means of comparison. In particular, one cannot use comparisons of large aggregates, such as States or Congressional Districts, to develop a meaningful conclusion regarding individuals included in those aggregates. CDs are at least roughly uniform in size, but states vary from RI to CA and one discovers (gasp!) that within the states are a wide variety of people espousing all sorts of stances or falling victim to sundry hazards of life. All states are purple. The trap is to suppose that because a majority in a state have voted for Political Party A and has also a high rate of (say) unwed motherhood, that the two are in any manner connected. First, a “high rate” does not mean “a high percentage of residents” and second, there is no evidence that the unwed mothers actually voted for Political Party A.
As for rankings, we observe that half the states will rank above the median for any metric, and that five states will always be in the top 10% and in the bottom 10% regardless of the magnitude or meaningfulness of the differences among them.
Being Ye Olde as well as ye Statistician, I actually remember the Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown contretemps. Quayle was held up for ridicule because Brown was a fictional character! (How droll!) But the objection was not to whether a woman was the victim of some misfortune, but that single motherhood was held up as an ideal. (Brown actively sought impregnation with no intention of reconciling with the ex. The objective was to obtain an ornament for her domestic life.) But what was do-able for an upper class woman with paid nannies…
February 22nd, 2013 | 12:25 pm
Boonton, there’s enough variation for people not to make the basis of Oow on pro-life attitudes. This is my point. It would be better to make the point on economics, because almost all the high Oow are economically depressed states. This is why Rhode Island is surprisingly there-RI is the economic time-bomb of the NE states.
I disagree that the data shows the premise. Plenty of red states beat blue or coastal states in both abortion rates and OOW ones. There’s no real link between pro-life and higher rates of either. Slate is just trolling socons like they always do.
February 22nd, 2013 | 2:20 pm
I have ‘t had time to read all the comments, so this may be covered. It seems that personal accountability never seems to come into this equation – no movement or organization is to blame for single parenthood; the people who conceived these children are ALONE responsible for their own actions that led to these single-parent families. Period!
February 22nd, 2013 | 2:22 pm
Pentamom
I agree, I’ll ditch ‘shotgun wedding’ unless there’s literally a farmer holding a shotgun at it.
Mike P
Very good point about racial differences causing stats to diverge. I’m wondering, though, about time series here. What did white (or black) rates look like in 1988 versus 2010?
Ye Olde Statistician
Valid point about states, I’d say NY should likewise not be held up as the state of arch-liberalism. It’s in fact very complicated politically which is why many major right wing media stars (Limbaugh, Hannity) cut their teeth in its media market and Republicans still win major office there despite the overall Democratic leaning of the state.
(Brown actively sought impregnation with no intention of reconciling with the ex. The objective was to obtain an ornament for her domestic life.)
Having never watched it I have wikipedia to go off of which says: “In the show’s 1991–1992 season, Murphy became pregnant. When her baby’s father (ex-husband and current underground radical Jake Lowenstein) expressed his unwillingness to give up his own lifestyle to be a parent, Murphy chose to have the child and raise it alone.”
It sounds to me like the husbands rejection of fatherhood came after not before she got pregnant. Anyone here with a good memory of 90′s TV?
February 22nd, 2013 | 2:41 pm
Dave
I think I kind of agree with you partially. I’d say that I suspect if we were in 1980 or even later people’s stance on unwed motherhood was ‘regrettable accident’ mode. In other words it was something to be avoided and the question was can it be avoided with abortion? Or can we avoid abortion with contraception? Or avoid contraception with ‘abstinance education’ schemes or sex ed programs and so on.
So a few years ago on Joe Carter’s old blog, he posted some article about contraceptives failing. As an example, he cited a magazine story about a girl who was using condoms, decided one day to stop and later on got pregnant and didn’t thought it wasn’t such a bad thing to go ahead and have a kid. He was citing this as a failure of contraceptives. But that’s absurd if you think about it. If you decide to stop using contraceptives, they didn’t fail you failed to use them. You might as well say she was a victim of ‘abstinence failure’!
The shift is the mindset that single motherhood means something has gone wrong to begin with. If your assuming people are trying to avoid single motherhood, then maybe it makes sense to see wider use of contraceptives breeding a false sense of security causing an even greater amount of risky sex hence more unwed mothers and abortions. But all of that hings upon the assumption people are all that concerned about avoiding unwed motherhood to begin with. If that assumption is false then the rest of the analysis is out the window.
February 22nd, 2013 | 3:19 pm
I don’t see any recognition of priority here. A scenario where there were fewer single parents but more abortions would not be morally superior to one where there are fewer abortions but more single parents. All this is is an interesting–if you are interested in statistics–correlation, but that’s about it. At that point, the question is what to do about helping single parents get married, if possible, or do the best they can, if not. That seems like the proper order of priorities to me. As an aside, I don’t know that a resurrection/implementation of social mores that generate literal or metaphorical “shotgun weddings” would be such a bad thing. I’ve got three daughters and I’m not a bad shot, either… :-)
February 22nd, 2013 | 8:53 pm
Boonton:
I am not sure I see your point. If I can reverse it, wouldn’t it mean all blue staters have an even worse fear of single motherhood, to the point of willing to endure abortion when they mess up with contraception? We would have people saying one thing and doing the exact opposite. The people who are least okay with the concept would produce the most, or the people most against thievery would be the worst thieves.
Not sure this is the case. To be honest even the economic argument is probably weak-Baltimore and Delaware aren’t that poor blue states compared to others. I think we just can’t make the kind of generalizations they do in the article.
February 23rd, 2013 | 5:47 am
Dave,
Let me try to boil down the argument a bit. The variables people have tended to think about when it comes to unwed mothers are:
1. Pre-marital sex.
2. Contraception.
3. Abortion.
One view is that #2 and #3 decrease it for pretty obvious reasons. The view presented here is that they do not because they cause #1 to increase so much that they offset any loss to OOW births caused by 2 and 3. Hence the quest to find data to see if high abortion areas are high OOW birth areas etc.
But there’s another more obvious variable at play here:
* Willingness to accept single moms.
The previous stance messed up by simply assuming everyone wanted to avoid OOW births. So maybe ‘blues’ resolved a ‘mess up’ on birth control with an abortion while ‘reds’ have taken abortion off the table so just need better access to contraception to avoid OOW births. But if a woman is indifferent to having children with or without a husband, all this is out the window. Variation in OOW births isn’t going to track with abortion laws or contraception access but simply with the desire of women to be moms or not.
February 23rd, 2013 | 2:17 pm
Boonton,
Inspector inspect thyself. No conservative is for single parenthood or thinks out of wedlock birth is a good thing. It is simply the lesser of two evils considering a choice between OOW birth and murdering children. And, harsh as it sounds, it is unfortunate that the old stigmas have disappeared. What you have there is a variation of the prisoners’ dilemma. The old taboos often caused individual suffering, but as a result, OOW births were less common; children had more stable upbringings and society as a whole didn’t foot the bill of health care, food stamps, AFDC payments, etc. I agree that those taboos and stigmas are dead, entropy only goes in one direction, but that is nothing to celebrate. It is a mark of our civilization’s decline, not progress.
February 24th, 2013 | 6:28 am
Booton
Can we equate “out of wedlock births” with “single parent families”?
In France (I do not know the figures for the USA) 44% of all births are out of wedlock, including 56% of the births of first children. Nevertheless, 85% of children under 15 are living with both their parents.
Again, single parent families can result from marriage breakdown.
February 24th, 2013 | 7:50 am
http://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/share-of-births-to-unmarried-mothers-by-race-1990-2010/ has a helpful chart going from 1990 to 2008, roughly showing us the transition from the age of Quayle to today. It seems the portion of blacks in the Red States doesn’t help the case of Reds here. While blacks have a higher rate than whites, the fact is the % for blacks only went up slightly since 1990 while whites have nearly doubled from 16.9% to 28.7%.
Fred
No conservative is for single parenthood or thinks out of wedlock birth is a good thing
Well this is the thing, it’s not about thinking its a good thing. That’s the Murphy Brown Myth which is used to argue its ok. Bristol wasn’t Murphy Brown because she would have been happy to have styed with her bf, but he was a ‘loser’ so it’s ok because she’s ‘open’ to having a father in the kids live.
The irony is I think real life ‘Murphy Browns’ have even lower illegitimacy rates and not because they just abort all year round. I think poverty has a big role to play here in willingness to accept OOW births. If your economic prospects are high, you will consider having kids something that’s very expensive to do. If they are low you won’t. Real life Murphy Browns probably consider themselves too poor to have OOW kids without a stable husband as part of their family even though they have much more disposable income than many who have OOW births.
February 24th, 2013 | 11:00 am
Michael PS
Can we equate “out of wedlock births” with “single parent families”?
Indeed we can’t, and an idea notably absent from even Quayle’s Brown attack was an attack on single parent familes that resulted from divorce. And we can also add to the mix households who are not single parent but not biological parent..in other words ‘blended families’ created by divorced people getting married to other people.
It is interesting to see how the ‘blame’ is always strategically placed outside. The mythical Murphy Brown, woman who decides to have kids without a father just because she can ‘do it all’, got such a huge focus even though she really represents nobody. She’s not only a fictional chracter but a fictional set of people. Real life Murphy Browns look more like Michelle Obama! Recall there was an earlier age where a divorced politician couldn’t get nominated for President….in fact I seem to recall the classic example was Nelson Rockerfeller and his nomination was opposed by a Mr. Reagan.
February 24th, 2013 | 5:44 pm
“She’s not only a fictional chracter but a fictional set of people. ”
Which was precisely the point of Quayle’s critique at the time. He was concerned that the undifferentiated message “it’s no big deal to have a child out of wedlock” could be sent by showing the example of a woman whose circumstances were anything but typical. The immature and impressionable don’t always sort out the relevant factors — that’s one reason we call them immature and impressionable.
Whether Quayle was right in thinking that even impressionable people are easily moved to such major life decisions by a TV character is a worthwhile question, but he was not ignorant of the fact that Murphy Brown was anomalous in her circumstances — that was the actual point of the critique.
February 25th, 2013 | 6:18 am
Leaving aside the fact that he was being a false witness against a fictional character (not sure if that’s technically a sin or not), I think it was more likely he was doing what politicans typically do, provide voters reasons to support him by not offending them. Hence the ‘message’ that blacks, who already had a high OOW rate, were being victimized by following unrealistic examples set by rich, white, liberal TV characters.
Granted that’s not a message that would reasonate with black voters, but the GOP has little hope of winning the black vote. For everyone else, though, it does a remarkable job of castigating a society wide decline in family values without actually blaming any real people in society. Sort of like saying the schools are turning out idiots but most people’s kids are very smart, good kids. To say his message didn’t work is to miss the point. The only point of the message was to win an election.
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