PERSPECTIVES ON SINGLE MOTHERHOOD : ‘Values’ Is Code for ‘Dad Is the Boss’ : Quayle longs for a fairy tale of the 1950s--a world where women and people of color knew their place.

I got home from grocery shopping at 11:30 the other night and startled my husband out of a deep in-front-of-the-television sleep. He’d been working long hours with no days off for three weeks and the nap left him disoriented. “I don’t know if I was dreaming or not,” he said. “I think Dan Quayle blamed Murphy Brown for the riots. I don’t remember falling asleep. Maybe it was on TV.”

The next morning, the newspaper verified that he’d been awake. I pondered once more the wonder of a vice president who makes pronouncements worthy of the most outlandish dreams.

Actually, I’d been waiting to see who would get around to blaming the women’s movement for the riots. I figured it would be Jerry Falwell or Cardinal Roger Mahony, who’ve blamed world problems on independent women before. But no, Quayle did it for them.

“Murphy Brown . . . mocking the importance of fathers”? Who writes Dan Quayle’s material? He just doesn’t understand that his own Administration is anti-abortion and pro-birth? And where was Quayle’s condemnation of that famous unwed father, Bishop Eamonn Casey of Ireland? Or of the ex-husband who decided he couldn’t stick around to be a father to Murphy Brown’s baby?

All of this goes much deeper, of course, than the marital status of a TV character. Yes, fathers are important. They are very influential in their actions and omissions. But what Dan Quayle and a lot of other fathers in power (of course, not all) are really supporting is the old-fashioned white middle-class family set-up, where they get to be the unquestioned boss.

We wouldn’t be having trouble getting funding for state-of-the-art birth control, child-care, parental leave, education programs and other supports for single-parent (“unwed”) families or dual working-parent families if these dads in government could acknowledge that “Father Knows Best” is not a real reflection of this nation.

The white middle-class family is a fairy tale. Quayle and his ilk are stuck in the whitest part of the 1950s and miss the days when all of the nonwhite males knew their places; African-Americans knew where to sit and women of all colors knew that their men were more important than they were. Yes, these guys (and some gals, like Phyllis Schlafly) are still determined to bring back the old days when white male supremacy went all but unquestioned.

“Traditional family values” is a right-wing euphemism for “a white family where Daddy’s the boss.” It’s the kind of family that Dan Quayle and many of us watched on television when we were growing up. Any other family structure or circumstance made things too complicated.

Murphy Brown threatens Dan Quayle because when he was growing up, women hid pregnancies, married or not. So much for the glory of motherhood. Our country’s government is not pro-motherhood or even pro-parenthood. It’s anti-choice, pro-married and in favor of “traditional” motherhood because the guys in government want the old fairy-tale days back.

A lot of viewers see “Murphy Brown” as a much-needed antidote to a vicious anti-feminist backlash that blames women for everything wrong in society. The show is validating and funny to a lot of women, in the home and out, who have struggled in a male-dominated society. “Murphy Brown” is a thinking comedy that takes political shots. Maybe Quayle took on Murphy merely because he can’t take a joke.

I’m not entirely unhappy that Quayle said what he said. He’s a potent reminder of how desperately this country needs to be rid of the Bush Administration. I’m also thrilled that “Murphy Brown” will gather even more viewers and higher ratings, because she truly is a good role model. She is the mother that the pro-choice movement is committed to supporting: the mother who has a baby because she truly wants it, not because she’s forced by circumstances, unmarried or married.

Finally, I would caution Quayle to tread lightly in the area of bashing unwed mothers as poor role models. There are many people who look up to the woman who modern biblical scholars now identify as the most famous unwed mother of all, the Virgin Mary. She’s had even higher ratings than Murphy.