PERSPECTIVES ON SINGLE MOTHERHOOD : After the Snickers, a Serious Issue : The vice president’s accusation was a little off-target, but he’s right about the harm of crumbling values.

Why is Dan Quayle smiling?

To judge from the press coverage of his jab at the unmarried Murphy Brown and her newborn baby, you would expect him to be cringing in shame at his gaffe. The vice president has been accused of casting general aspersions on the morals of unmarried mothers, and Washington is in frenzy. The White House has alternately defended Quayle and apologized for him. Quayle himself, the morning after his speech, felt it necessary to declare his respect for single mothers and call them “true heroes.”

But later the same day, Quayle cheerfully attacked again. “This is typical Hollywood,” he said of Murphy’s TV show, “glamorizing something that is wrong with society.” Evidently he thought that despite Murphy’s personal popularity, most people were going to agree with him instead of his critics.

He is probably right. And if his opponents keep up the attack on him, they will be digging themselves into a deep political hole.

Granted, the temptation to attack Quayle was strong. His past rhetorical troubles have made him a perennially easy mark, and the language he used to describe new mama Murphy provided an opening. Quayle had Murphy “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” But most women who bear and bring up children alone do not do so in mockery of fatherhood or treat their circumstances lightly. Even Murphy herself, as she was portrayed on screen, was not quite so casual about her experience. The vice president’s words were probably meant to be acerbic but ended up sounding cruel. This lapse was enough to get the game going.

But criticizing Quayle by defending the morality of single mothers does not come to grips with the serious ideas he was broaching: the argument that family breakdown has been bad for this society and that popular culture has had something to do with the decline. These propositions are not so easy to wave away simply by calling anyone who makes them an intolerant moralist.

As for the social effects of the modern erosion, we have now had more than a quarter-century of research into the subject, and there is no longer any denying the disproportionate amount of social pathology to be found, even apart from low income, in female-headed households. This does not mean that single mothers are bad people. It means instead that being a family’s only wage-earner, only comforter and only role model is very, very hard. You do not have to look at statistics to know this. It is clear to anyone who has ever been or known or cared about a woman living and working in these grueling circumstances.

As for the effect of popular culture on this phenomenon, it is not something we will ever be able to measure, since the movies, music and TV shows all reflect social trends and help cause them. But, as media analyst Robert Lichter notes, there is little doubt that the connection exists. When producers and writers salt their shows with pro-environment or anti-racist messages, they certainly behave as if they have some influence to exert. And they will get agreement from any parent who has spent time watching his or her kid mesmerized by a television set.

Single motherhood does not always mean disaster, of course, and certainly not for women like television’s Murphy Brown. But there just aren’t very many women like her out there. The Census Bureau says that of the 10.1 million single mothers in this country, the ones of Murphy’s age, marital status and more than $50,000 annual income number just 15,000. What we see on Murphy Brown’s TV program is possible at her level of wealth but much less possible for everyone else. So when Dan Quayle talks about such a show “glamorizing” illegitimacy, he is not just making it up. And if such shows do have even an unmeasurable effect on our behavior, they are worth worrying about.

The people who say they agree with Quayle’s statements almost surely outnumber those on the opposing side of the debate. Just as important, the pro-Quayle folks like what he said not because they are intolerant but because they buy his underlying argument. It is one that his opponents would do well not to dismiss.