Just 15 years ago, a different Republican vice president was ripping into the creators of Murphy Brown for flaunting a working woman who chose to become a single mother. This time around, there's no stigma, no shame, no sin attached to what Dan Quayle would once have mockingly called Bristol Palin's "lifestyle" choices.
I do not think anyone wants to get into a 15 year old disagreement, so I think anyone who brings up an issue this contentious 15 years later should have the intellectual integrity to treat the issue as fairly as possible. I do not think the way Hanna Rosin treated Dan Quayle's speech is fair, which can be viewed by the fact that the noted "conservative" intellectual Candice Bergen (Murphy Brown) said there was merit in what Dan Quayle said (http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/1998/cyb19980601.asp#3):
Asked about that flash point in May 1992, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle attacked her TV character for having a baby out of wedlock, Bergen said: "We were all kind of bushwhacked by it." Yet she said it was "the right theme to hammer home...family values...and I agreed with all of it except his reference to the show, which he had not seen....It was an arrogant, uninformed posture, but the body of the speech was completely sound."
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