Quayle Decries Hollywood for ‘Adversary Culture’ : Campaign: Vice president says family values issue is not ‘mean-spirited.’ He tries to distance himself from GOP convention’s divisive tone.

Vice President Dan Quayle on Wednesday mounted another assault on Hollywood, calling it a “stronghold of the adversary culture” that mocks traditional values.

In the process, he attempted to distance himself from the vitriol of the Republican Convention by redefining the so-called “family values” issue in a way that his advisers hope will be less divisive. Internal party polling seems to show that the convention’s rhetoric cost the GOP support among moderate swing voters.

“Family values is neither meaningless nor mean-spirited,” he told a Kansas City business audience in a luncheon speech.

Contrasting the ethical values of Hollywood with those of his home town of Huntington, Ind., and other purportedly representative American towns and cities, Quayle said:

“This is a culture that flinches when it hears the word morality and lashes out when it is challenged to discuss values. Hollywood is a stronghold of the adversary culture. It is on the other side of the cultural divide from Huntington, and they don’t like it when someone from Huntington, with Midwestern values, challenges their so-called moral authority.”

He repeated his attack on the fictional television character Murphy Brown, saying she had glamorized the decision to have a child outside of marriage. “Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong,” he said, quoting his own speech of May 19 that sparked the ongoing battle between the vice president and leaders of the entertainment industry.

“These are the words that sent Hollywood into orbit,” Quayle said. “They chose not to join the discussion of values, but rather to attack and distort. Later this month, the first ‘Murphy Brown’ episode of the new season apparently will accuse me of attacking single mothers. Is it beyond all human possibility for Hollywood producers to tell the truth?”

Quayle said that he had never intended to criticize single parents and that he understood that most women rearing children alone are not doing so by choice. He noted that his grandmother and his sister were both divorced and reared families without fathers.

Without directly saying so, Quayle was attempting to portray Hollywood and the national media--and, by implication, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton--as the intellectual and moral stepchildren of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Quayle spokesman David Beckwith said that the “adversary culture” that Quayle referred to is “an outgrowth of the ‘do your own thing, whatever feels good’ ethos of the 1960s.”

“He wants to widen the debate from one show (Murphy Brown) to all of Hollywood” and to society at large, Beckwith said. “He’s not backing down.”

A senior Quayle adviser who helped prepare Wednesday’s speech said that it was an attempt to clarify the vice president’s position on single parenthood and to keep before the public what he described as a “broader clash of cultural views.” He added that the speech had been reviewed and approved by the White House--after several changes and deletions, which he did not specify.

The aide said Quayle was implicitly distancing himself from the vitriol of former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan and others at the Republican National Convention who said that the nation was involved in a cultural civil war between what they characterized as honest God-fearing Americans and homosexuals and other advocates of “alternative lifestyles.”