GOP Viewers Get Bad Vibrations : O.C. reaction: Group of Republicans are dismayed by ‘family values’ talk from Houston, and especially their party’s stand against abortion. Some turn to Clinton.

As Marilyn Quayle extolled the duties and joys of being a wife and mother, a group of Republicans gathered around a television Wednesday heard nothing to soften the anger that had brought them together in a show of support for Democrat presidential nominee Bill Clinton.

“It was very phony, very plastic, very dutiful,” said Patricia Oktay of Laguna Hills after listening to the vice president’s wife.

Like the 24 others who gathered at a Laguna Beach home to watch “family values” night at the Republican National Convention, Oktay said she was appalled by the party’s adoption last week of a platform plank calling for a constitutional amendment banning abortion for any reason.

Several in the group, who were mostly women, had personal reasons for wanting to support a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. Oktay, for instance, said her mother had almost died from an illegal, backroom abortion.

“I’m expecting my first grandchild, and I don’t want my grandchild in that same position,” Oktay said.

Nancy Skinner, Republican co-chairwoman of Pro-Choice Orange County, a bipartisan political action committee, said Clinton will be the first Democratic presidential candidate for which she will cast her vote. She believes that pro-choice Republicans are in the majority, but that many do not know that and are afraid to speak out.

Anita Mangels, host of the gathering, criticized Marilyn Quayle and First Lady Barbara Bush for trying to market their “personal brand of family values.”

She said that, instead, parents want to know “how to feed their families and see that their children have jobs after they graduate from school.”

Mangels complained that while Barbara Bush in her speech said that “every child should have someone to count on,” she didn’t seem to be thinking about what would become become of “all the unwanted children of unwilling mothers.”

The meeting at Mangels’ home was expected to be the largest of four gatherings of disenchanted Republican women that convened Wednesday night in Southern California. Other groups met at homes in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento.

Mangles said she believed anger over the Republican Party position on abortion, as well as concerns about the national economy and health and education issues, will prompt many former Republican loyalists to break ranks in November.

Mangles said she was “not surprised” by a press release issued earlier Wednesday by the Bill Clinton for President Committee that a press conference is scheduled Friday in Newport Beach to announce a statewide movement of Republicans for Clinton.

The statement said that the new group, to be called Independent Americans for New Leadership, will include a Republican member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, the president of a Fortune 500 company and a prominent real estate developer.

Among the smattering of men at the gathering supporting Clinton was David Scott, a member of the board of directors of the Silver Circle, an Orange County Republican fund-raising group. Scott said he also was “disgusted” by the party’s stand on abortion “in addition to 12 years of Republican inaction on the deficit and government spending.”

Barry Zanck, chairman of the Silver Circle, said he was surprised by Scott’s defection, saying that he believes that the importance some Republicans are placing on the pro-abortion rights issue is not indicative of the electorate.

“I heard in a survey that only 1% to 2% of the voters in the country would have the abortion issue determine their vote,” Zanck said. “I find it sad that people would risk so many of the inherent dangers that the Democratic party would provide to this economy.” Nonetheless, Zanck said he sympathizes with Republicans who dislike the party’s stand on abortion.

“I am pro life but I don’t think the government should tell the people what to do,” he said.