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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.