What happened with Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown?
In 1992, shortly after the riots in Los Angeles, Dan Quayle gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California that was famously known as “the Murphy Brown” speech. The reference to Murphy Brown occurred, I think, on page six or seven of a seven-page speech. But in this speech, he condemned the television character Murphy Brown for choosing to have a child out of wedlock and contributing to the friend toward fatherless families. He had a lot of other things to say, but this is what everybody remembered. And again, tremendous furor ensued over this single reference to Murphy Brown. She was a character people knew. Many people had sympathized with her struggle over whether to have the baby and whether the father of the child would marry her. But this became another kind of political benchmark in the debate about family structure. Criticism of Quayle for raising these questions, of course, was as intense as it had been for Moynihan, but from a different quarter of the political spectrum
