QUAYLE HAS OPENED A NEW & CRUCIAL FRONT IN KULTURKAMPF

What did you think of Vice President Dan Quayle's speech criticizing the Murphy Brown episode on single motherhood? Is Quayle the nincompoop that Jay Leno and so many other media elites would have you believe? Or is he saying something important about what's gone wrong in modern American society?

Support for Quayle's critique and for the notion that he's winning the real debate among the American people comes from some surprising sources.

* The Fox TV network, through its syndicated show, "A Current Affair" the racy tabloid program asked viewers whether they thought Quayle was on the right track in criticizing Murphy Brown. The response from more than 50,000 viewers: 59 percent said that Quayle was right, only 41 percent said he was wrong.

* Liberal columnist Judy Mann, who seldom writes a piece that doesn't champion some feminist cause, hailed the Vice President's speech. She began a column this way:

"I called my editor the other day and told her she was going to have to start saving me from myself. There's no other way to put it: Vice President Quayle and I were seeing eye to eye on something important.

"It was his attack on cultural icon Murphy Brown, for as he put it `mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.' A few days before, I had written a column calling the show's story line `yet another cultural wipeout of fathers.' I'd like to think he read it here first."

* Liberal icon David Broder, the Washington Post's celebrated columnist, wrote last week that he was "baffled" by the denunciations of Quayle for "attacking the Monday night television heroine's plunge into single motherhood. It is not as if this is unfamiliar ground or unimportant.

"Some people suggest that the No. 2 man in government ought to have better things to do than stick his nose into a sitcom. Where were these people when millions of us watched enraptured by the previous week's bridal shower show, where the fictional Murphy Brown was feted by the real-life women anchors, interviewers and news readers from the three networks' morning news shows?

"If the network news departments sent their stars to Murphy Brown, Quayle's`intrusion' into the scene and his decision to treat Candace Bergen's character as if she were a real person cannot be wholly eccentric. More important, the Murphy Brown paragraph [in Quayle's speech] was embedded in a serious speech on community values ...."

* Newsweek's shrill liberal voice, Eleanor Clift, dumped all over Quayle in her article on June 1, but even Clift had to concede that Quayle "was right about some things. The absence of fathers is one of the central pathologies of the underclass. As a society, we do need to address the spiraling teen-pregnancy rate, especially in the inner cities."

* Even Time magazine, after ridiculing Quayle for taking on "Murphy Brown," had to concede that much of what the Vice President said "had a ring of common sense."

In an essay accompanying the main story, titled "Why Quayle Has Half a Point," Margaret Carlson essentially sided with the Vice President's criticism, saying: "There is nothing new about having babies without getting married. What's new is society's attitude, which has gone from punishing it, to tolerating it, to celebrating it."

Having both a mother and father, she argues, "is not some Republican affectation but an ideal to strive for. Coming into the world with one parent is a handicap, no matter how mature and moneyed the mother may be. Just because fatherhood can be reduced to 20 seconds, or dispensed with altogether by tapping into the Nobel-prize winner sperm banks, doesn't mean it should be.

"Imagine if men decided that motherhood was equally expendable. Sated with their corner offices and home gyms, guys of a certain age could go around paying women to have babies for them. The howl of feminists over such selfish, macho pigs could tie up talk-radio lines for years. Fatherhood may take moments, motherhood nine months, but doing it right takes a lifelong commitment of both parents."

It is one measure of how far we have slipped on values and norms of behavior that a Vice President's affirmation of norms that were dominant until the 1960s, should, 25 years later, cause a firestorm of criticism. That firestorm of criticism comes, principally, from the dominant electronic media elites, late-night comedians, and many in the prestige print press. Whichb is one reason why ordinary Americans feel so alienated from these media elites.

Quayle is correct to skewer these "cultural elites", and to attack them where they have helped do so much damage to American society. Cultural War? Bring it on. The traditionalists in America's kulturkampf have raised up a fighter, and he shows every sign of being a champion. And as the aforementioned quotes make clear, when pressed, more than a few of the cultural elites just happen to agree with the much-maligned Vice President.

This is a healthy debate, and we need more of it.