From a speech by Vice President Dan Quayle to the Commonwealth Club of California, May 19, 1992 on the deterioration of family values
Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong….Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong….It doesn't help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown - a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice." [Emphasis added.]
Wow, did Quayle get raked over the coals for that one. For that he was condemned to decades of ridicule. He deeply offended a bunch of childless cat ladies.
Oops. Forgive me for saying that and offending. Yet, the cat ladies now are going after Sen. J.D. Vance for trying to make the same point: The decline of the importance of families, especially the absence of fathers, is hurting America.
He said:
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,
I knew one of the single, childless cat ladies. She was a colleague on the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board and, boy, she made the rest of us miserable.
She’d be called woke now, seemingly bringing the liberal talking points into our meetings and tolerating no disagreement, especially from me or from another woman on the board whom she considered a lesser woman because, well, she made sense.
Cat lady proudly displayed a poster in her office that proclaimed, tongue in cheek, “I forgot to have children!” For her, people who tried to explain the importance of traditional two-parent families were loathsome. And that meant Dan Quayle was personally loathsome.
Of course, she wasn’t entirely alone. Her view reflected the increasing popular attitude that it takes a village, more than a family, to properly raise children.
Vance was entirely right about cat ladies. But they’re not alone in mocking what used to be called “family values” in the 1990s. It seemingly has become an essential item of the progressive/liberal/Democratic credo.
No use going over here the many studies that clearly demonstrate children raised in single-parent, fatherless households struggle in multiple ways. The left usually cites sociological studies to support their views—even ones that are error, But as for these pro-family studies? They don’t count.
I respect ands admire women (including grandmothers) who work hard to raise a family by themselves. I loathe the men who have abandoned them,
But the personal attacks on Vance that distort his meaning is one example of how some Democrats will make a simplistic personal attack instead of taking the kind of deeper look that the issue demands.
Related: “Twenty Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown and Unmarried Moms.”
I know lots of women who never married....my godmother and friends whose finances died in WWII, classmates, coworkers.....never thought to question or denigrate their choices so why are do so many childless women think it's OK to go after us? we didn't bother them until they went after us