Letters: Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown, 20 years later
Re “Dan Quayle’s wisdom,” Opinion, March 26
Jonah Goldberg’s defense of Dan Quayle, who suffered as much ridicule for his condemnation of TV character and single parent Murphy Brown as for his spelling of “potato,” comes 20 years too late for the former vice president but right on time to point out the hypocrisy of the opposition to marriage equality.
If there’s any validity whatsoever to the notion that children must be raised by their married parents, why doesn’t Proposition 8 ban divorce, single parenthood and out-of-wedlock childbirth? Instead, an unpopular and historically scapegoated minority is being held to standards that its opponents fail to live up to themselves.
Kevin Dawson
Sun Valley
Goldberg starts to make a case that children in homes with married parents do better than those in single-parent homes, but then he weakens his argument with sloppy language. He disparages the views and motives of so-called liberal elites but doesn’t say who these people are. He mentions “feminists, Hollywood big mouths and the usual suspects,” but those labels are vacuous.
Is there really a marriage crisis that’s hurting children, and is there a group at fault? We can’t know by Goldberg’s argument.
Richard Sanders
La Quinta
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