Culture & Religion

Please join us in persuading our fellow Minnesotans that liberty, hard work, gratitude and self-restraint are the best Minnesota traditions we can pass on to the next generation.

As columnists and others have recently noted, this month is the 20th anniversary of cultural historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s landmark article in The Atlantic Monthly, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” Simply put, what Whitehead said the Vice President was right about were his strong comments about family breakdown and the pivotal importance of children getting to grow up with both their mother and father; not just one or the other. For reasons described below, Quayle made his May 1992 remarks in what immediately became known as his “Murphy Brown” speech. Ms. Brown, as you may recall, was a television character played by Candace Bergen who had baby as a single woman.

We spend a lot of time talking and debating about marriage, but not so much reflecting on what we need to do to support and encourage marriage and family life. Mitch Pearlstein, founder and president of the Center of the American Experiment, is the author of From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation. He talks about the state of the American family and what can be done to help it with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

On just about every front today, Europe offers Americans a peek around the corner at our future. We seem to be taking Greece as our model on government debt, France on entrenched unemployment, and Italy and Spain on the bloated welfare state.