Back to Murphy Brown Politics with Rick Santorum

It was 1992, and Murphy Brown was one of the top sit-coms on television. People tuned in once a week to watch Candice Bergen’s character crack the glass ceiling by becoming a successful, investigative journalist and news anchor(woman).

Murphy Brown fit the definition of a successful woman back in the 1990s—nothing stood in the way of her career. Murphy Brown was free to pursue success, and nobody questioned her marital status or her child-free life.

You see, back in the early 90s, women had to choose whether they wanted a family or a career. A woman couldn’t have both.

America gasped when Murphy Brown became pregnant by her ex-husband who didn’t want to have anything to do with parenthood, and like Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, Murphy Brown was gonna keep her baby. Grab the smelling salts.

Vice President Dan Quayle pounced on Murphy Brown’s decision to become a single parent and made it a political issue we’ve all come to be familiar with—family values.

The family values campaign failed, perhaps due in part to Murphy Brown, because America no longer believed that family values was limited to people within a two-parent household.

Right now the failure of our families is hurting America deeply. When families fall, society falls. The anarchy and lack of structure in our inner cities are testament to how quickly civilization falls apart when the family foundation cracks. Children need love and discipline. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father. It is from parents that children come to understand values and themselves as men and women, mothers and fathers.

Ultimately, however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failure to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.

It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman – mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.”

Sometimes timing is everything. Nearly every GOP candidate has seen a surge in the polls followed by a drastic and sudden decline in popularity.

Congressman Ron Paul is the latest candidate to experience the rise and fall. He couldn’t quite pull off the win in Iowa due to the recent re-appearance of his racist newsletters and belief that if a woman is sexually harassed at work, she should quit her job.

With only a few days to become acquainted with Rick Santorum, and looking much more appealing than Huntsman and Bachmann, Iowa blindly thrust Santorum into the spotlight resulting in a surprise dead-heat with Mitt Romney.

Yes, timing is everything, because this near-win has the potential to provide Santorum with the momentum to be a front-runner for the remaining primaries.

Rick Santorum isn’t the most engaging GOP candidate in the field. Some people might even consider him to be downright boring. But with Santorum’s recent win in the Iowa caucuses, we can no longer allow ourselves to doze off or fast forward the DVR while he speaks.

Aside from making head-scratching statements regarding entitlement programs and then singling out black recipients, Rick Santorum has made some frightening statements that should have every woman around the country shuddering and shaking in their (work) boots.

While most GOP candidates are attempting to shove their definition of marriage down America’s throat, Rick Santorum is additionally focusing on rewinding the hands of time to when it was socially unacceptable for women to have children if they weren't married.

Actually, it’s much worse.

Rick Santorum desires to return America back to the Splendor-in-the-Grass era, when birth control didn’t exist and respectable women didn’t move an inch past first base. Yes, the good old days when women put out only after they were married or else be branded as tainted and thrown into an insane asylum (no exception for rape victims). Even after marriage, women must only put out because they have to put out, and in no way should it be enjoyable (for women).

Rick Santorum is prolife—no big deal. But where he differs from the rest of the GOP candidates is his very vocal, firm stance on birth control.

Yes, in addition to opposing a woman’s right to choose, Santorum also opposes any form of birth control for the obvious reason: it’s harmful to women.

Where Rick Santorum came up with this idea is beyond me: birth control harms women.

I can’t make sense of it even after saying it twice.

To clarify further, Rick Santorum believes that birth control leads to unplanned pregnancies, leads to the transmission of STDs, encourages people (women) to be irresponsible and is a danger to society.

It isn’t unreasonable to assume that Rick Santorum is nearing the century mark, but Rick Santorum is only 53 years old.

In 1992, Dan Quayle suggested social sanctions to encourage unwed, pregnant women find husbands or be branded as irresponsible and a burden to society.

Rather than evolving and accepting that single mothers (and fathers, too) are capable of raising a child on their own, Rick Santorum, 20 years later, suggests policies be put in place to encourage marriage in order to combat poverty and restrain irresponsible, loose women who pose a danger to society.

Like Dan Quayle, Rick Santorum has been very vocal about his beliefs concerning birth control and women, but not many people have been paying attention to his outdated, century-old views, because he hasn’t been seen at the center of the stage. Even the moderators have cut him off in mid-thought failing to have him elaborate on the policies he would implement that would encourage two-parent households.

Women need to remind Rick Santorum that we are all living in the 21^st century, and we like it here. It’s a place where women can have a family and a career. It’s a place where women can choose when they want to have children. It isn’t a Murphy Brown-world anymore, where people would pass out at the sight of a ringless, pregnant woman or whisper behind her back.

Iowa, you got it wrong.