Quayle Deplores Eroding Values; Cites TV Show

Vice President Dan Quayle on Tuesday blamed the Los Angeles riots on a breakdown of American family values and accused prime-time television of contributing to moral decay by making a heroine of a character who bore a baby out of wedlock.

In a stern admonition on behalf of traditional mores, Quayle said the “lawless social anarchy” that erupted in Los Angeles emerged from a broader breakdown that has fostered a “poverty of values.”

He said the plight of urban America has not been helped by the portrayal this week on TV’s “Murphy Brown” of the title character “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’

“Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is,” Quayle said in a speech for the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, a copy of which was released in Washington.

The vice-presidential scolding contained tough law-and-order rhetoric that left little doubt that crime again will be a central theme of the Republican presidential campaign. But it was most notable for its call for a return to “moral values.”

“Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at (such values),” Quayle said, “I think most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong.”

Quayle has long been a conservative voice within the Bush Administration, and his speeches often serve to appeal to the Republican right wing. But in reproving a television character who for some women has become a cultural icon, he risked alienating voters important to the Bush-Quayle reelection campaign.

Told about Quayle’s comments, a senior Bush campaign official replied only, “Oh, dear.”

The CBS network said that its Monday night episode of “Murphy Brown,” the season finale in which she gave birth to a son, was watched, in whole or part, by 38 million people. It was the second-highest rated episode in the series’ history, topped only by last fall’s special one-hour season premiere in which Murphy Brown learned definitely that she was pregnant.

CBS said it had no comment on Quayle’s remarks, but Diane English, creator of “Murphy Brown,” said, “If the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.”

A spokeswoman for Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas said the popularity of “Murphy Brown” reflects the fact “millions of Americans think she has something relevant to say.

“The world is a much more complicated place than Dan Quayle wants to believe,” Clinton campaign press secretary Dee Dee Myers said. “He should watch a few episodes before he decides to pop off.”

Quayle voiced his concerns about unwed motherhood as he suggested that the Los Angeles riots were “directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society.”

He cited statistics showing sharp increases in illegitimacy and crime rates among black Americans to suggest that within the nation’s underclass, the most troublesome poverty is “fundamentally a poverty of values.”

As solutions, Quayle called for the “dismantling” of the welfare system to stop penalizing marriage and to make work or school attendance a condition of receiving benefits. He said the Administration’s own urban agenda of enterprise zones and expanded home ownership would also contribute to a process of economic “empowerment.”

Quayle also noted that the poverty rate for families headed by a single mother is six times higher than the rate among families headed by married couples. But the vice president devoted his address more to the diagnosis than to cures for the nation’s urban woes.

And the prescription receiving the most emphasis was what he called “a tough law-and-order policy.”

“When you hear the liberal commentators saying, ‘Well, this is just a Republican code word,’ say amen,” Quayle said at a campaign fund-raiser in Salinas on Monday night, according to the Associated Press. “It is a code word for safety and to be free of fear in our cities and we ought to be proud of it.”

Quayle also used his San Francisco speech to criticize those who have offered justifications for the Los Angeles riots, which left at least 55 dead and caused nearly $800 million in damage to homes and businesses.

“Instead of denouncing wrongdoing, some have shown tolerance for rioters. Some have enjoyed saying, ‘I told you so,’ ” Quayle said.

“Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame,” he said. “Yes, I can understand how people were shocked and outraged by the verdict in the Rodney King trial. But there is simply no excuse for the mayhem that followed.”

Quayle arrives in Los Angeles this morning for the final stop on a three-day trip to California, and is scheduled to discuss responses to the riot in a meeting with Mayor Tom Bradley, Peter V. Ueberroth and other officials.

A Quayle aide said the vice president would present to Bradley a plan first disclosed by White House officials last week that calls for the city to sell Los Angeles International Airport and use its share of the proceeds to help rebuild riot-damaged areas.

A proposal under consideration within the Administration would encourage that transaction by giving Los Angeles wider latitude to use the funds for job training and other programs explicitly authorized under an executive order that encourages privatization.

Times television writer Rick Du Brow in Los Angeles contributed to this story.