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.
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.
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.
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
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?"
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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