Here is one of the central themes in any discussion of our rapidly deteriorating American
culture. For centuries, the traditional family was the basic building block of our
society, but now that concept is being diluted because of the redefinition of "family" as
any number of adults and children living under the same roof. Fatherlessness has
become a huge problem, made worse by the multi-billion-dollar welfare state in which the
conditions are ideal for rapid and illegitimate reproduction rather than long-term planning.
Spin-off pages: All the material about same-sex marriage, and homosexuality in general, has
been moved here, and all the
material about the issue of abortion has
moved here.
Material
about Feminism,
Antimasculinism and Gender-based Affirmative Action has been moved to a page
of its own.
Bad News for Marriage in America.
For the first time ever, the percentage of married households fell below 50 percent, according to the Census Bureau, which
released a brief Wednesday [4/25/2012] about families and households from the results of the 2010 Census. The percentage of
married households fell to 48.4 in 2010, down from 55.2 percent in 1990 and 51.7 percent in 2000.
Unmarried
Households are the Majority for the First Time. Is marriage just on the way out or is there something more at play?
DOJ
Alum Calls Crimes, Out of Wedlock Births in Black Community 'Elephant in the Room'. "Nonetheless I
think we have to recognize that it's going to be tempting for the police and individuals to profile so long as
a disproportionate amount of street crime is committed by African Americans and there will be a disproportionate
amount of street crime is committed by African Americans for so long as more than seven out 10 African Americans
are being born out of wedlock," [Roger] Clegg said.
Church, Sex, and Society.
Although few want to hear it, contraception and the mentality it engenders are corrosive evils. Like pornography,
contraception cheapens sex. Our culture no longer respects sex as a power capable of producing human life.
Instead, for too many, sex is either a hobby or a tool to get what they want from others. Trivializing sex trivializes
marriage, which in turn degrades women and families. Destroy the family, and society is sure to follow.
Where's
the Outrage Over Black Family Breakdown? The unemployment rate for black teens in 1965 was 29%, today it's
40%. Since the days of Johnson, Democrat policies like welfare have only worsened the problem for blacks by rewarding
black women with taxpayer dollars for raising fatherless children. Moynihan's report it reads like it was written
yesterday rather than nearly 50 years ago. "In a word, the tangle of pathology is tightening," wrote Moynihan.
Indeed it is. The destruction of the black family is where blacks should be firmly directing their outrage[,] not in hoodie
protests "full of sound and fury" and achieving nothing.
If Obama Had a Son. In fact,
young black men are being hunted and killed in appalling numbers. But the violence and mayhem that disproportionately
afflicts the African-American community is part of a society-wide disorder. It has a racial angle, but it's not about
race. That disorder is family breakdown, and no discussion of violence or murder or victimization is informed without
reference to that overwhelming fact. Why do African-Americans, with 12.6 percent of the nation's population, account
for 50 percent of the murder victims? Because fatherlessness is most pervasive among blacks.
Cause of Death: No Father. Most children
born to American women under thirty are now born out of wedlock, even though studies show that their children are more likely to
experience poverty and other negative consequences as a result. Studies also indicate that children raised in non-traditional
homes are more likely to commit crimes and suffer abuse than children raised in traditional homes. A series of incidents over
the last few weeks illustrate this sad fact, and suggest that such children may also be more vulnerable to violence outside the home.
Michigan
is breeding poverty. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don't have the skills to
raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can't afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry
layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences. Michigan's
social problems and the huge costs attached to them won't recede until we embrace reproductive responsibility.
Last year, 43 percent of the babies born in Michigan were to single mothers.
Combatting
Child Poverty. Census data now show that a quarter of young children in America are mired in
poverty. The media won't report on — and the president won't lead on — its root
cause: an epidemic of illegitimacy.
Obama Baits the
Dependency Trap. [Scroll down] It's a mystery how anyone could honestly believe that
strengthening the chains of dependency will produce self-sufficient citizens. Fourteen point four
percent of Americans use food stamps. Of the households using food stamps, one in three is black,
according to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Getting free food from Nanny State
surely takes the sting away from fatherlessness — and adds to the pressure for cradle-to-grave
welfare.
"Gender-neutral"
Childrearing: When a Sexual Hang-up Leads to Child Abuse. First there was "Pop" in Sweden, then
"Storm" in Canada. Now out of Britain comes Sasha, a boy, we hear, who is being raised by his parents in
a "sex-neutral" fashion. And this isn't just your modernistic grandmother's neutrality, where she didn't
want to push toy guns and trucks on her son. Sasha's parents, Beck Laxton and "partner," as he's described,
Kieran Cooper, are going the full feminist monty.
Liberals Aren't Funny, They're a Riot!
When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower
than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them! Barely two generations
since LBJ's Great Society programs began, the black illegitimacy rate has tripled to 72 percent.
Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has septupled, from 4 percent to 29 percent. Instead of
a "War on Poverty," it should have been called a "War on the Family."
Big
Government Means Small People. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats
have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered
vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children
(and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the
state as their husband.
Obama's culture of death.
The modern left understands one fundamental reality: Destroying Christianity destroys the culture
and civilization it spawned. They are inextricably linked. This is why socialists, such as
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Saul Alinsky and George Soros, have championed
militant anti-Christianity, free love, contraception and abortion. Smash the family and traditional
morality and the economic system they gave birth to — capitalism — will come crashing
down. This is the Marxist project: Sweep the Christian West into the dustbin of history.
NBC's Diversity Bet
Fails. NBC's past season, from Fall 2010 to Spring 2011, was a massive bust. NBC's big
bet on diversity failed. ... Sooner or later someone at a network will take a gamble on men, and provide a
staple of cheap, entertaining, and amusing male-skewing shows. The country will be better off, because
traditional male-oriented shows for the most part must embody fairly conservative values. Honor your word,
show physical and emotional courage, stand up and fight, protect the weak, punish the wicked. Those are
the stories men of all ages are interested in, and are almost completely absent on the TV screen every night.
The Thomas Ball Story.
The difference in these two cases comes down to what the American media finds relevant: girls and
women, they're important; men and boys, not so much.
Census shows
whites lose US majority among babies. Preliminary census estimates also show the share of
African-American households headed by women -- mostly single mothers — now exceeds
African-American households with married couples, a sign of declining U.S. marriages overall but also of
continuing challenges for black youths without involved fathers.
Unwed
parents are six times more likely to split by the time their child is five. Unmarried parents
are six times more likely to split by their child's fifth birthday than those who are married, say researchers.
Cohabiting partners face a 'disproportionate' risk of breaking up in the early years of their son or daughter's
life.
The New Weimar Family. Married
couples no longer head a majority of families in the United States, according to Census Bureau data.
According to an AP story, married couples represent only 48% of households, based on data from the 2010 census.
It is the first time in American history that unmarried households outnumbered legally married ones, according
to the piece.
America's deepening
class divide. In 1960, everyone was married — 88 percent of the upper middle class
and 83 percent of the working class. In 2010, 83 percent of the upper middle class is married
and only 48 percent of the working class. This gap "amounts to a revolution in the separation of
classes." In 1960, births to single mothers in the working class were just 6 percent; now they
are close to 50 percent.
As
gov't plays 'father,' 'black males have become dispensable'. In an appearance on Thursday night's
[6/2/2011] "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network, [Walter E.] Williams argued that welfare has done more
damage to black society than slavery or Jim Crow. "[T]he welfare state has done to black Americans what
slavery could not have done, the harshest Jim Crow laws and racism could not have done, namely break up the
black family," Williams said. "That is, today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in
two parent families. Historically, from 1870s on up to about 1940s, and depending on the city, 75 to
90 percent of black kids lived in two parent families. Illegitimacy rate is 70 percent
among blacks where that is unprecedented in our history."
Has America Embraced the Spirit of Anti-Christ?.
[Scroll down] There have been a number of changes in government policy and private habits over the last
50 years which have drastically impacted the quality of life in America for the worse. None have had
a more dire impact than the destruction of the traditional family.
• 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.
• 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes.
• 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.
• 70% of juveniles in state operated institutions come from fatherless homes.
• 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.
• 40% of children in America do not live with their fathers.
What happened to father?
Forty percent of American youth and 80 percent of all minority children are born out of wedlock.
What happened to the vows at the altar?
Three arrested in Atlanta subway
mugging. Authorities have arrested three suspects in the assault of two Delta Air Lines employees
who were mugged and beaten on Atlanta's subway earlier this month. ... The suspects include a 16-year old male
whose name is not being released because of his age and two brothers, Zantavious Sanchez Scott, 20, and
Jarquez Scott, 19, MARTA police said.
The Editor says...
Notice if you will that the two "brothers" have different surnames. I can't help but
suspect that the root of their trouble is an unstable fatherless upbringing.
Family
breakdown was elephant in the room at anti-bullying circus. Call it the Nanny State run
amok. By hosting an all-day White House conference on adolescent bullying last week, President Obama
elevated a schoolyard issue to the level of public enemy No. 1, perhaps on a par with the first lady's
labors on behalf of childhood obesity. Typical of all federal "preventions" that mobilize the Departments
of Education or Health and Human Services on behalf of some perceived crisis, none of the players of the
conference had the guts to yank at the underlying root of the bullying culture: family breakdown.
End the Drug War, Save Black
America. [John] McWhorter sees prohibition as the saboteur of black families. "It has
become a norm for black children to grow up in single-parent homes, their fathers away in prison for long spells
and barely knowing them. In poor and working-class black America, a man and a woman raising their children
together is, of all things, an unusual sight. The War on Drugs plays a large part in this."
Jesus And Obama Tie In Recent Poll. Who are the role
models for today's 13-17 year olds? That's the question recently posed by Barna Group in his annual
YouthPoll. The way youths answer this question has great import. According to the study,
["]Teenagers' preferences and tastes greatly influence America's cultural identity. The people teenagers
look up to as their role models matter a great deal in determining the shape and substance of the next generation
of churchgoers, consumers and citizens.["] Youth were not permitted to identify their parents as
role models. Yet, family members were still listed as the chief role models by 37% of respondents.
[Italics added.]
Black Education:
[Scroll down] Another part of the black education disaster has to do with the home environment. More
than 70 percent of black children are born to unwedded mothers, who are often themselves born to unwedded
mothers. Today's level of female-headed households is new in black history. Until the 1950s, almost
80 percent of black children lived in two-parent households, as opposed to today's 35 percent.
Often, these unwedded mothers have poor parenting skills and are indifferent, and sometimes hostile, to their
children's education. The resulting poorly behaving students should not be permitted to sabotage the
education of students whose parents are supportive of the education process.
'Mother,'
'Father' Changing to 'Parent One,' 'Parent Two' on Passport Applications. The words "mother" and
"father" will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the
State Department says. "The words in the old form were 'mother' and 'father,'" said Brenda Sprague,
deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. "They are now 'parent one' and 'parent
two.'"
Politically Correct Passports?
Last Friday [1/7/2011], the State Department announced that they will be removing the words "mother" and
"father' from passport applications and replacing them with "gender neutral terminology." "The words in
the old form were 'mother' and 'father,'" explained deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services,
Brenda Sprague. "They are now 'parent one' and 'parent two.'" The State Department's website was
more forthcoming: "These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child's
parents and in recognition of different types of families." Who are these people? Who sits around
in offices supported by taxpayers and ruminates about the terminology on passport applications — and
collects a paycheck for doing so?
The Editor says...
Man, the State Department is really messed up. Who's in charge of the State Department
these days? Oh, yeah. Now I remember.
Heather has two
passports. The Obama administration's war on traditional values is picking up steam.
Just three days before Christmas, the State Department buried an announcement that "mother" and "father"
were being banished from the bureaucratic lexicon. In their place, politically correct terms intended
to appeal to the vanity of homosexual activists will be inserted. Application forms for documents such
as passports will use "parent one" and "parent two" or "parent A" and "parent B" instead of
supposedly obsolete concepts like mother and father. ... Obama administration officials are all in favor of
breaking down the distinctions between men and women and any role they might play in society.
The Editor says...
Stuff like this makes you wonder: Is
President Obama really a Christian?
Attacking
the Family: Making the Terms "Father" and "Mother" Passe. I'm sure the fact that the homosexual
group the Family Equality Council (FEC) had been lobbying for years to get the passport applications altered
had nothing to do with this decision whatsoever. In justifying the change, executive director of the
FEC Jennifer Chrisler said that the "government needs to recognize that the family structure is changing."
This is nonsense. It's much like addressing our growing obesity problem, saying that the "government needs
to recognize that physiques are changing" and then casting corpulence as normal.
Cultural
vandalism. Lost in the wake of the horrific shootings in Tucson was a modest battle in the culture
war: The State Department quietly decreed that some passport applications would henceforth be gender
neutral. No more "mother" and "father"; such terms were apparently too retro, too judgmental for the
Foggy Bottom bonzes. Instead, Parent One and Parent Two would do just fine. O Brave New World,
that has such bureaucrats in it.
State Dept to Keep
'Mother,' 'Father' Categories on Birth Abroad Records. The State Department is again revising
the form it uses to document children of U.S. citizens born in another country, allowing the categories of
"mother" and "father" to remain while adding a third "gender neutral" option of "parent." Last month
the State Department announced on its Web site that it was removing the "mother" and "father" categories on
birth records of children born abroad to U.S. citizens and replacing them with the "gender neutral"
designation of "parent."
Childhood Poverty's Low-Hanging Fruit. What
if there was a proven way to instantly and dramatically reduce the statistic of 1-in-5 American children now living under
the federal poverty line, as reported in the September 2010 U.S. Census figures? Better still, what if this economic
remedy cost taxpayers zero dollars and simultaneously curbed generational poverty to boot? Surely people of all
ideological stripes could agree that such "low-hanging fruit" ought be plucked for the betterment of those who have
little say in their economic flourishing — children. Such a solution exists. It's called
marriage.
No-Fathers Day.
Why is it so important for liberal-progressives to reduce or eliminate loyalty to the family unit?
The Abolition of the Family:
The top priority of Marxism was the abolition of the family; Marx laid down the strategy for its destruction.
His thesis was simple: Eliminate capital — exterminate the family. More and more empirical
evidence is piling up to show that this is exactly what is happening in America.
It's the Culture, Stupid.
In the 1950 census, "families" made up 89 percent of all American households. By 2000, that figure had dropped
to 68 percent. But even this does not tell the whole story. "Family" figures include single-parent
households, and this had proved the fastest-growing of family cohorts, from 10 percent of all households in
1970 to 16 percent in 2000. In that same period, the "traditional" family took the biggest hit. By
century's end, married couples with their own children made up only 24 percent of all households, down
from 40 percent just thirty years earlier.
The Fraud of Progressive
Nobility: Forty years of Great Society-inspired welfarism have brought a 70 percent illegitimate
birthrate among Blacks — a 218 percent explosion since the LBJ years. The non-Hispanic white
illegitimacy rate hovers below 12 percent.
On the other hand...
Utah's rate of
births to unwed moms lowest in U.S.. While a new census report says that nearly one in every
three American women who now give birth isn't married, Utah is far different. Only one of every eight
Utah women having babies is unmarried — the lowest rate in the nation.
Understanding
Illegitimacy: The press has rushed to report a minuscule drop in "teen births" based on data
released Tuesday [4/6/2010] by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As usual, the mainstream media are focusing
on a trivial, politically correct story while ignoring the real story buried in the data. Here's the
real story: According to CDC, a record 40.6 percent of children born in 2008 were born outside
marriage — a total of 1.72 million children.
Michelle
Obama, Liberal Government and Obesity: Even holding steady for all other factors, research concludes
that poor black women and their children are the most disproportionately affected by skyrocketing obesity rates.
The largest single indicator for poverty and, later, dropping out of high school is birth to an unmarried mother.
Unmarried women and their children are the largest recipient group of welfare state entitlement programs and also the
group most rigidly trapped in failing government schools. In 2007, 72% of all black children born in the
USA, were born out of wedlock.
Caring for
Karine. So Canada sacrifices another victim on the altar of equality. Last week a young girl
dressed up as a soldier died in the increasingly futile and pointless war in Afghanistan. She was 21 years
old, had been in the country for two weeks on her first tour of duty and probably weighed a little over
100 pounds. ... What on earth was she doing in such a place and in such a job?
Media's Attack
on Fatherhood. Recently I saw a MasterCard commercial in which a pre-teen son arrogantly "teaches"
the father environmental lessons while grocery shopping. ... Such subtle messages about the supremacy of
children over their dads are now common. Turn on the television and watch just about any channel for one
evening and a particularly disgusting pattern begins to emerge: the "dad" is often portrayed as wimpy,
ignorant and doltish. Everyone is smarter and more mature. Nearly everyone else is also more
attractive and physically fit. ... The unmistakable message behind such carefully crafted ads and images
is that dads are disposable — they don't really contribute much to the family other than being
the brunt of jokes.
Federal
incentives exist to make children fatherless. Why has Congress appropriated
taxpayer money to give perverse incentives that break up families and deprive children of
their fathers? The built-in financial incentives in the current child-support system
have expanded the tragedy of fatherless children from the welfare class to millions
of non-welfare divorced couples.
Liberalism: Cruel,
Corrupt, Unjust, Wasteful, Deluded. The reason we are seeing a lot of young children being
abused is not the incompetence of social services. The problem is that so many children these days,
especially in the underclass, don't live with their natural parents. There's even a book about it,
The Truth about Cinderella by Martin Daly and Margot Wilson. It points out the rather obvious fact
that step-parents don't tend to love their stepchildren. From that fact all kinds of evils flow.
Out-of-Wedlock Birthrates Are
Soaring, U.S. Reports. Unmarried mothers gave birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the
United States in 2007, a share that is increasing rapidly both here and abroad, according to government figures
released Wednesday [5/13/2009]. Much of the increase in unmarried births has occurred among parents who
are living together but are not married, cohabitation arrangements that tend to be less stable than marriages,
studies show.
This will put a knot in the family tree...
Another
blow to fatherhood: IVF mothers can name ANYONE as 'father' on birth certificate. Family
values were under attack again last night with the news that single women having IVF will be able to name
anyone they like as their baby's father on the birth certificate. New regulations mean that a mother
could nominate another woman to be her child's 'father'. The 'father' does not need to be genetically
related to the baby, nor be in any sort of romantic relationship with the mother.
Re: Holder's Shame. The elephant
in the room in discussions of race isn't white prejudice; it's the breakdown of the black family and all the attendant
social pathologies that emanate from it. When 7-out-of-10 black babies are born to single women and more than half
of black children spend most of their childhood without a father at home, there are consequences: lower academic
performance, more juvenile delinquency and adult crime, more dependence on government assistance, and a greater likelihood
to repeat the cycle again by having more children born out of wedlock to the next generation. Yet virtually no one
in the black community in any position of authority and responsibility is willing to talk about this issue.
Modern Feminists and their
Folly: It was this underlying tone of hypocrisy that disenchanted me. ... By the early 70's the deceit
level had escalated to borderline criminal when it came to the issue of abortion. Jane Roe had never been raped
as alleged before the U.S. Supreme Court. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL has admitted that the 10,000 deaths
he alleged by illegal abortion were closer to under a hundred. ... The modern politically powerful National Organization
for Women has shamefully championed only women whose cases fit their agenda. Nowhere was that more evident than
during the Clinton administration when legitimate cases of rape and sexual assault against the President were denigrated
to "bimbo eruptions."
Destruction
in black America is self-inflicted. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that
the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many
as 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock and 60 percent are raised in fatherless
households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable
families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.
US births break record; 40 percent
are out-of-wedlock. More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any year in the nation's history,
topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier, federal researchers reported Wednesday. There is both
good and bad news from the more than 4.3 million births: The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a
healthy trend. However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.
Moms Make Lousy
Dads. In her new book, "Guilty," Ann Coulter committed the major heresy of suggesting that
children should ideally be raised by a mother and a father, not by two men or two women or even by one woman.
... The fact is, she's right. That's not to say that a great many women aren't forced by the circumstance
of being divorced or widowed to be single mothers. But, more and more women, thanks to Hollywood role
models, are choosing to be single mothers, and that's a terrible trend, leading as it inevitably will to
more and more criminals, druggies and psychopaths.
How Obama Stimulates Feminists.
Since 1969, when Richard Nixon foolishly imploded America's prospects for equality by turning the concept of
affirmative action into a reality, the country's race shysters and guilt peddlers have come a long way, baby!
They polarized the nation and discern disproportionate treatment out of every difference between individuals.
This is true for minority hustlers of every stripe. Foremost among the con artists to cash in on a
once-proud nation's guilt are the radical feminists. Gender feminists are a virulent strain of
far-leftist whose power has exponentially grown over the past four decades.
Left Attacks Female Conservative
Calendar. Not content with having won the White House and expanded its majorities in the House
and Senate, the Left is now training its vitriol on ... a calendar. No joke. The same
tolerance-worshiping Obama supporters who demanded change and got it are now suffering brain aneurisms
from the mere existence of calendar celebrating (gasp!) conservative women.
Why
only 'modern' feminists hate Sarah Palin: Sarah Palin has become the most historic feminist icon
in a decade. For this honor she has been subjected to derision, ridicule, and endless sexist contempt by
not just the Obama/Biden presidential campaign, but other "modern" feminist voices to boot.
Feminist
Army Aims Its Cannons at Palin. Whether or not Sarah Palin helps John McCain win the election,
her greatest work may already be behind her. She's exposed the feminist con job. Don't take my
word for it. Feminists have been screaming like stuck pigs 24/7 since Palin was announced as McCain's
running mate.
The
Democratic Party's Stealth War On Black Americans: Democrats cooked up the great society, welfare,
food stamps, and all other manner of government goodies because they said they wanted to "help" people.
What was the result of that "help?" The Democrats did something that they hadn't managed to do when they
enslaved black Americans, persecuted them with Jim Crow laws, or terrorized them with the Ku Klux Klan:
they managed to nearly destroy the black family.
Lifestyles
of the poor and anonymous: Few people today think divorce and single parenthood are
equal-opportunity misfortunes in a house on the beach of Malibu or a trailer camp in West Virginia, but we're
still slow in finding solutions for the disastrous consequences of single parenthood in the underclass, which
more than any other single ingredient contributes to a caste system in America.
Why Shakir Can't Read:
Shakir's family situation is a significant part of his problem. He is one of four children to a twenty-something
mother who has three other children by three different men, and she might well be pregnant again by her current
boyfriend. Shakir's mother is unemployed and on welfare.
The
John Edwards evasion on poverty. In a major speech on poverty last year, he referred to the
social ills besetting young mothers who "aren't married." But his prescription for this problem is to
excoriate teen parenthood and say that people should be expected "to hold off having kids until they're
ready." He refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage. This
is because the word "marriage" is something of a taboo in the Democratic Party unless it is prefaced
by "gay."
Talking Back
to a Black Man: A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio talk show when a black man called
in to take Barack Obama to task for suggesting that black men were sloughing off their responsibility as
fathers. The caller didn't deny recent data that indicated that 80% of black babies were being born
to unwed mothers. Instead, he said that this dire situation wasn't the fault of irresponsible young
men and women, but, instead, was the logical result of rampant racism in our country.
'Marriage
Is for White People'. I grew up in a time when two-parent families were still the norm, in
both black and white America. Then, as an adult, I saw divorce become more commonplace, then almost
a rite of passage. Today it would appear that many — particularly in the black
community — have dispensed with marriage altogether.
A government program is a lousy substitute
for a dad. Robin Morgan, former editor of Ms. Magazine, chillingly predicted, "We can't destroy the inequities
between men and women until we destroy marriage." And Andrea Dworkin compared marriage to legalized prostitution.
Most laughed at the hyperbole. But the hairy-legged hags were dead serious.
Deleting
Dad: When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked, "Are Men Necessary?" in the title
of her funny book critiquing today's gender-confused culture, I took the question to be a rhetorical
play on E.B. White and James Thurber's "Is Sex Necessary?"
White Looters in
Iowa. For some forty years now the government has been providing incentives for (predominantly
minority) men not to work and for women not to keep them around to care for their children. This idea
that they are not needed as workers or as fathers cuts against their nature as men. It is a very
dangerous pair of ideas with a very dangerous pair of consequences….
The Incredible Shrinking
Father. Here's a Delphic riddle for our times: When is your father not your father?
Answer: when he's a sperm donor. Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. … What
does the contemporary Solomon do? Well, in a Kansas trial court, Solomon rules that without a contract
the twins have no father.
The Problem with Obama's
Father's Day Speech: The problem of fatherless families is the problem of mothers as well as
absent fathers. Children born out of wedlock, after all, are born because a woman decides that a good
father is not that important. The prior irresponsibility is not these young men, but the young woman who
decides to have sex with them, intending or assuming that society, rather than a husband, bear the costs of
her pregnancy.
Fatherhood Jesse-style:
The statistics are staggering. In 2001, 66 percent of black children were living in a home absent a
father (more recent figures now put the number closer to 70 percent). That's double what it was in
1960. Compare that to 27 percent of white children living without a father. Aside from
apparent Obama-envy, this was the point missed by the mainstream media in the post-analysis of Jesse Jackson's
"off-camera" quip heard around the world last week. The irony can't be lost on the fact that
Mr. Jackson, who himself has fathered an illegitimate child, wanted to emasculate the senator and
married father of two.
Ex-gangster
turns life around, now he's on a mission with a message. T.J. spent a lot of years trying to be
the man, but he turned out to be the wrong man. "When I was recruiting for the gang, my first question
was, 'Does his father stay with him?' 'Cause I don't need that," said Terrell 'T.J.' Johnson, a product of
what he calls the North Memphis DNA — Daddy Not Around. "Give me a single mama with four boys
by four different men, you know what I'm saying? You know they need money, protection, status,
power. They need a strong man in their life. I'm going to supply them, even if I'm the
wrong man."
Feds Hurt Families. We now have the
first state-level report to recognize that federal programs may have a negative impact on the family, by the
State of New Hampshire in its First Biennial Report Of The New Hampshire Commission On the Status of
Men. The Commission's report is a watershed event in politics because it is the first official
recognition that men are part of the family too.
Love, honour and… no
way! Why get married? [In England,] tax incentives [have] been stripped away so that
people who cohabit are often better off. Add record levels of divorce and its cost, the outlay for a
wedding and the erosion of social stigma to having children outside marriage and really, is it worth it?
Births to
Unmarried U.S. Women Set Record. Among teens, more than 80 percent of mothers
were unmarried. There were 1,470,152 babies born to single women in 2004, 35.7 percent
of all births in the country, NCHS said. That was up from 1,415,995 a year earlier.
One
in two babies by unwed mothers soon. Half of all babies in Britain will be born to unmarried
mothers by 2012 if trends continue, says new research that suggests a rapid erosion of moral and
religious constraints is responsible.
All
in the family. According to Census Bureau data, the relative levels of
poverty in America are best predicted not by race, but by family makeup. Want to
find a relatively poor person in this country? Look for a broken family. Want
to find a child growing up in financial adversity? Look for a family where one parent
has been left to raise a child without the help of the other parent. You will
especially find poor children in families where the father is not around.
Welfare reform
meets the law of unintended consequences. The Great Society welfare system was recognized by
the 1990s as a social disaster that created fatherless children, illegitimacy and women's dependency on
government. Channeling taxpayer handouts to mothers provided a powerful financial incentive for
fathers to depart; they were not needed anymore.
Conservative Baby Boom, Liberal
Baby Bust. Phillip Longman, a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes in an essay
in USA Today, "Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive
secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are
descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large
families."
Father
Is the Best. The proportion of out-of-wedlock births rose 600 percent
from 1960 to 2000, and the divorce rate more than doubled between 1965 and 1980. Roughly
24 million children now live in homes where the biological father is absent — about one
out of every three children. This is a social disaster. Children need their
fathers, and they need them in the home, which, as a practical matter, means their fathers
have to be married to their mothers.
Fatherless
in America. Many families will celebrate Father's Day this Sunday, but the
tragic reality is that some 35-million children live absent or apart from their biological
fathers. One in two children — and only one in five inner-city
children — are in homes with their fathers.
Victories in the
marriage debate: Faced with an unprecedented increase in family fragmentation and fatherlessness,
widely celebrated by elites at the time as an example of human progress and liberation, Americans took a hard
look at the evidence, scientific and personal, and asked: Is this good for children?
Forging
a healthy BOND: "Each year government spends over $200 billion on means-tested
aid to families with children; three-quarters of this aid flows to single-parent families," [Robert] Rector
testified before Congress last February. "Children raised without a father in the home are more
likely to experience: emotional and behavioral problems, school failure, drug and alcohol abuse,
crime and incarceration."
The Breakdown of the Family:
Marriage is a sacred institution — the most basic and essential building block of a healthy
society. … Since the end of World War II, the institution of marriage has declined, and social
conventions that depend upon strong families, from child-bearing to the preservation of vital
communities, have suffered grave harm.
It's No Party. A
bizarre, damaging mini-trend in love and marriage (or hate and divorce) is currently being highlighted
by big media, needlessly sending out harmful messages about marriage — playing with children's
emotions in a poisonous way. As recently seen on The Today Show and Good Morning America, "divorce
parties" are all the rage.
The Black
Family: 40 Years of Lies. Almost 70 percent of black children
are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married
mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They
are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children.
NAACP
stoops still lower. As if it isn't enough that decades ago vast numbers
of black men opted to absent themselves from the lives of the sons they fathered, thereby
consigning these boys to undisciplined and rootless childhoods; and as if it isn't enough
that such boys feel compelled to seek out their own peculiar forms of power within their
fatherless worlds, we now have the Great Black Leader confirming the rule of boys over men.
California Supreme
Court Redefines the Family. In three separate cases raising fundamental
issues as to what makes a family and who qualifies as a parent, the California
Supreme Court today [8/22/2005] ruled in each case that a child may legally have two mothers.
California Court
Declares One Child Can Have Two Moms. A spokesman for a leading West
Coast pro-family organization says his group is shocked and saddened over an
August 22 ruling by the California Supreme Court abolishing the traditional
definition of parenthood. In three separate cases that raised fundamental issues as to the
definition of family and parent, the court decided in each case that a child may legally
have two mothers.
More Television, More Crime? In the fight
against senseless violence, Hollywood remains a tempting target. But don't blame the remote
control. Blame a remote dad.
Shifting Demographics: Changing family structures
and women's increasing labor force participation rates have contributed to a society vastly different from the
one that existed in the first part of the 20th century. According to the U.S. Census Bureau and
Department of Labor Statistics:
• In 1940, 67 percent of households were "traditional" family structures in which the father
was the main earner and the mother remained at home full time; today only 17 percent of families are
"traditional," while a majority of families are dual-earner.
• In 1950, single mothers were less than 3 percent of families; today they make up more than
12 percent of family households.
• Sixty-one percent of women age 20 and over work, and women make up 46 percent of the workforce.
Fatherhood
faces stacked deck in family court. It's not just gay adoptions that threaten
the right of children to be raised in traditional two-parent, mother-father homes. A
threat also comes from father-phobic family courts that deprive children of their fathers.
The
Positive Effects of Marriage: A Book of Charts. Statistical
evidence of the serious social problems arising from the decline
of marriage. [PDF]
Judging Michael Jackson and
ourselves: Do you think we have gone too far? Not far enough, some say. Yesterday's
unacceptable (divorce, premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, group sex, domestic partnerships and, soon,
same-sex marriage) are today's acceptable. It's just a matter of conditioning.
Bad Schools, Immigration, And The Great Middle-Class
Massacre. Huge numbers of mothers entered the labor force over the last few decades. And
the inflation-adjusted price of food, clothing, appliances, electronics etc. dropped sharply. So how come
we don't feel like we've got a lot more discretionary income than our single-income parents had?
Family Portrait: After
four decades of unwed childbearing, no-fault divorce and single-parent families, the
institutions of marriage and family have been battered and weakened. In order for
marriage and family to be restored, we must first understand the current condition of
these vital institutions.
It Takes a
Snow Job. It doesn't take a socialistic village to raise a child; it
takes a traditional family. It only takes the state to raise a child if feminists
like Hillary Clinton have overthrown the family. No children's activist who opposes
the traditional family and the moral laws that support it is worth listening to.
Day Care Deception: What the Child
Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us. The vast majority of parents are
hostile to the notion of group day care for preschoolers as a social norm. Why,
then, does public policy exclusively favor commercial day care?
Daycare Can Be Risky for Kids, Researcher
Says: A conservative author and researcher says by sending your child to daycare, you may be
impairing their physical, emotional, and intellectually development.
Authors say dating prepares teens for
divorce, not marriage: Phil Phillips says a series of short-term relationships that end poorly
can have a negative effect on young teens.
The Economic
Assault of the Welfare State on the Traditional American Family: An
unmarried mother, with or without a job, receives far higher total income
entitlement than if married to a lower income husband. AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid,
housing, utilities, and WIC subsidies allow comfort without work. Most of these benefits
remain in whole or in part, even if she goes to work, along with the added entitlements
of earned income tax credit, plus transportation and child care subsidies.
Synopsis
of the above report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation: In effect
each traditional family unit which productively supports itself is required to support the
equivalent of another whole family in the form of government. Under this burden,
the percentage of individuals living in traditional family units is in a continuing
and alarming decline, in favor of government subsidized "alternative lifestyles."
Renewing the Social Fabric: First,
the secular dogma guiding social-welfare policy must be overturned. This is the hardest task facing the
White House, yet the failure of government programs to face the moral and spiritual dimensions of poverty,
drug use and family disintegration can no longer be ignored.
Breakdown of the Family: Many
other social problems, from illegitimacy to drug abuse, and from child poverty
to welfare dependency, trace their roots to the breakdown of the family.
Losing
the Ties That Bind: Whatever became of marriage? Cultural
conservatives blame the decline of marriage on the sexual revolution, which
destroyed the chastity of women. Men don't marry, say the
conservatives, because sex is available outside marriage. There is,
of course, something to this view, but it is hardly the whole story.
Family Law and the
Collapse of Culture: Creeping statism is destroying family law and the protections granted
families to raise their children. In their stead, the state is seen increasingly as the primary
care giver. Welfare agencies thus gain the upper hand to take children from families and profit
from adoption and foster home systems.
In a recent editorial called
Happy Dependence Day, Joseph
Farah refers back to "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," written in 1788 by Edward Gibbon:
"The book set forth five basic reasons why great civilizations wither and die:
The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis for human society;
Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populace;
The mad craze for pleasure — sports becoming every year more exciting, more brutal, more immoral;
The building of great armaments when the real enemy is within — the decay of individual responsibility;
The decay of religion — with faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, losing power to guide people;"
Grandma Gets Stuck Raising the
Children: The high rates of teen pregnancy and cohabitation among young couples are the main
reasons why nearly 2.5 million Americans are raising their grandchildren, according to conservative
pro-family groups. The cohabitation rate has increased by 73 percent in the past decade.
Illegitimacy
is the Major Cause of Child Poverty.
Family
Goes Boom, Community Goes Boom: Our parents are our early models of
God. Their unconditional love teaches a child about the world around him,
about emotional needs, about basic values and norms. From such interactions, a
child's personality is formed.
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