THE ICONOCLASTIC WISDOM OF DAN QUAYLE: Jonah Goldberg in the L.A. Times:

But where Quayle was wrong — though only partially — was putting the blame on Hollywood.

The black family was falling apart decades before “Murphy Brown.” And since then, the white family has been breaking down even as the majority of Hollywood fare continues to romanticize traditional marriage or does an adequate job of showing how hard single motherhood is.

I don’t know why marriage for all but the well-off and well educated continues to disintegrate; maybe it would help if elites “preached what they practiced, ” to borrow a phrase from Charles Murray. Forbes writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that being married correlates about as positively with a person’s wages as going to college does. But experts hammer the importance of college while ignoring marriage.

Maybe after the debate over gay marriage settles down, elites could focus on the far more pressing marriage crisis unfolding before their eyes.

Somewhat related thoughts on Murray’s observation, and David Brooks’ proverbial bourgeois-bohemians, here.