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Saturday, November 17, 2007
Decline of the American Dream: the marriage gap!
I have just finished reading a good and thought-provoking commentary by Maggie Gallagher, Marriage gap threatens dream. That is the title in The Washington Times today. The actual title at http://www.townhall.com is “The Marriage Gap threatens the Black American dream.”
So, the article brought me to some “fantasy” ideas of “how great it would be if...”
According to data, here, in 2004-2005, 4.14 million babies were born in the United States with 37% or more than 1.5 million born to unmarried mothers. In a time beset with values and legal standards, these 1.5 million babies are born with their mother’s last name and are therefore, even in polite society, bastards - fatherless children.
Gallagher writes to income gaps and declining salaries for both white and black men. Some of the slack for the white men is that they have wives whose salaries off-set the decline in earning power of their husbands.
Gallagher continues about earning gaps and the role the “marriage gap” plays in that over-all decline of various elements of attaining the American Dream. She includes a startling bit of data that goes a long way to explaining a fundamental cause for declining access to the American Dream for white and black children.
“When 25 percent of children in a community are born outside of marriage (bastards with no legal claims) as among whites today, that’s a serious problem. When almost 70 percent of children in a given community today are born outside of marriage (as among Black Americans today) that’s a tsunami blocking the intergenerational accumulation of human and social capital.
So far, the silence about the issue among our leaders is deafening… Who will take up the challenge of reducing the marriage gap written so starkly in black and white? Who wants to rebuild the American Dream for all our children?”
A friend of mine once said, “Life is a do it to yourself project.” His words somehow ring true in this underlying epidemic of bastard children, fatherless children for whom the government has skillfully replaced the father by giving someone else’s hard earned money to support at a subsistence level, the generations of bastard children we have - through welfare - created. Senator Daniel Moynihan - a Democrat - wrote at length about the Great Society and how the government handouts would destroy the black family in America.
Well, if 2 of every 3 black youth you see today are born to unwed mothers with no man legally claiming them - I mean legally on the printed page, no man stepping up to the plate and marrying the mother so that he can take pride and responsibility in his family - the family he claims, then Senator Moynihan was right.
Consider also that once shame and responsibility were components of our mores, no more. And the white children are being affected as well with 1 in 4 that you see falling under the not so politically correct rubric of “bastards”.
This is the disintegration of American society writ large. Writers/researchers have even posited that government incentives for unwed mothers NOT to marry has created a climate of no responsibility or accountability among many young men so that they almost naturally turn to gangs - not so much to engage in the criminal behavior as much at first as to have a place to be or practice being what they see as “manhood”.
How different would the lives of these bastard children be if their fathers were encouraged and lifted-up as good community role-models by becoming heads-of-households, responsible, accountable fathers in the very best sense of the term?
To find how the destruction of the black family and the slide of the white family into tenuous status, look no farther than the policies of the Democrat Party and its Leninist leanings - from each according to their means to each according to their need. And if that need did not exist, the policies of the Democrats for a good 40 years created the “need” by making it easier for women to receive all sorts of handouts IF and only IF the man were not in the house.
I have two views on the decline of the American Dream and whether this decline can be attributed to racism or behavioral? I believe it is both.
I believe the racism comes from the policies of the Democrats, the Liberal Democrats, who have touted policies of “ending poverty” but have fulfilled their goal of destroying the black family and turned many black as well as white Americans - mostly unwed mothers and their bastard children - into governmental dependents. Behavioral - in so far as black and white American unwed mothers have bought into the government programs designed to keep fathers/husbands out of the home. This dissolution of marriage, creating the “marriage gap”, also leads to low self-esteem for the welfare recipient and for the father who is robbed of his manhood, robbed of his place. But MEN can change that. Men can stand up and take responsibility and refuse to allow their children to be born without a legal father.
I call upon black (70%) and white (25%) American men who father children and then, for whatever reason, do not marry the moms, to step up to the plate, flash the middle finger at the government give-aways and say, ”We are men and we will take responsibility for our children. These children are our future - the future of our nation. I want my children to carry my last name by law.”
I know American men can do this. And clearly 75% of white fathers and 30% of black fathers are being fathers in the most legal and legitimate ways possible. Cut down on the unwed mother population, cut down on the bastard population. Since the women seem not to want to be responsible, then American men must become a dominant force again and say, “No babies UNLESS we are married!”
In other words, men saying to the women, “You can’t use me as a sex object to give you a child and keys to the welfare trough then kick me to the curb. No marriage, no babies!”
Now, wouldn’t that be a great switch? Male dominance, birth control (not abortion), and the men putting their foot down - No marriage, no baby!
But the issue goes to more core values and to extremely disheartening statistics. Children - bastards - with no paternal legitimacy in the courts - generally do not do well in school, tend toward crime at an early age, and ultimately have no parent in the home when the mom is forced to work at low pay.
Think about it, American men; reclaim your role in this society. Only you can keep this nation really great through individual effort and responsibility for the children you produce. And even sending childcare checks - although important - does not replace the importance of you in the life and development and future of your children. And the future of America.
Comments
Excellently well put. Yet I fear that if everything you’ve proposed here were implemented at once, there would still be an element missing: marriages that cannot be dissolved in the twinkling of an eye.
Stephen Baskerville’s recent book Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family is both eloquent and terrifying on this subject. He delineates the rise of the disposable marriage, which either party can dissolve against the wishes of the other, and its deleterious effects upon fathers, children, and society in general with unflinching accuracy. I recommend it highly.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 11/17/2007 at 12:06 PMYou have some great thoughts here, Beach Girl. I am afraid, however, that some of them are not entirely realistic. Somehow, I just don’t think it is a part of black culture to say: ”We are men and we will take responsibility for our children. These children are our future - the future of our nation. I want my children to carry my last name by law.” I cannot envision a black man saying those words, not in a million years.
The other problem is one that Fran has already identified, the matter of readily disposable marriages. The divorce culture we have today, and the family law that has developed around it that essentially wipes out most men caught in a divorce, is highly detrimental to what you are proposing. It takes a man with a lot of confidence that he knows what he is doing to get married today, given the risk that he may be ruined in a divorce if he has misjudged the situation.
There is no doubt but that rebuilding families is an essential element in the building up of our society. It cannot be done on one front alone, but rather several different sides must all be addressed simultaneously.
Posted by on 11/17/2007 at 09:59 PMI don’t think it can happen like that now. There’s no way a man could step up to the plate like that if he has six or more children with four or more women. The bad boys get to burn through a Lot of women now. If they stopped running from responsibility, the weight would break them. Since fathers are no longer allowed to beat dirt bags into the ground, if they are still part of the family, the women must act as their own gatekeepers. The women you are talking about were not raped. They choose. If they favor the 10% of men who rut like bunnies, there’s not much the other men can do about it.
Posted by on 11/17/2007 at 11:46 PMThere’s an added dimension to this. The Democrats have—from the days of slavery—parsed people racially so that one drop of black blood makes you black. (Or so they’d have it.) Their purpose wasn’t originally to accomplish this (it was to sharpen the line between “Us” and “Them"), but it did. It created a dependant class defined in racist terms.
But—I suspect this is an unintended consequence—over the years, the fight for integration has lead to miscegenation. There are a LOT of kids out there who are “half-white” or more.
Why is it these children are adjudged to be black? Why are Barack Obama and Halle Barry—to name two who practically grew up “white” claimed as black by the left?
(And I always want to add, “Why does it matter?” but that’s for a different discussion.)
So now, the so-called “progressives” have painted themselves into this corner—their own relatives (some of them) are now being defined as members of a subject—er, I mean, oppressed grievance group.
Given their manifest proclivities in this arena, that’s gotta sting.
(Me, I revel in it, but that’s also another discussion.)
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 11/18/2007 at 01:43 AMThank you for your excellent comments. And Francis, yes, the book you mentioned and the subject it addresses is horrifying. But lawyers generally being in search of clients, we have many issues to contend with.
I know the concepts may be beyond our reach but we have to start anew someplace. I’ll be back to address this more and have just posted, Promise Keepers - An Open Letter here with the permission of Francis, I hope.
Have a good day…
Posted by Beach Girl on 11/18/2007 at 10:28 AM
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