Whats Wrong With Single Moms - Road to the Middle Class

THE BRITS ARE having a media frenzy over a family of single moms. Julie, single mother of three girls is now the proud grandmother of three grandchildren, one each from her daughters, who became single mothers at age 12, 14, and 16. What´s wrong with that, asks aging feminist Germaine Greer?

What indeed? Apart from the trifling $50,000 a year in various government benefits.

Let us leave aside the merely aesthetic and the economic, the culturally determined distate for bastardy, and the probability that the children of “lone parents” are less likely to get a good education and contribute to society. Let us think about safety.

Did you know, Ms Greer, that the child of a woman who is living unmarried with a man who is not the child´s father is 33 times more likely to suffer physical harm than a child living with its married, natural parents? You can find the numbers in James Bartholomew´s The Welfare State We´re In, page 271. Not impressed?

Well, let us put the argument in another way. Suppose that a social scientist published a study showing that the children of fundamentalist Christians were 33 times more likely to suffer physical abuse during childhood than average. Who can doubt that the author of the study would be on the Today show the very next day and that Katie Couric would be interviewing her with deeply furrowed brow? And who can doubt that Democrats would be sponsoring legislation within days to “make our children safe?”

Yet here we have data that show that children being raised outside of marriage are significantly less safe, and that children in a house with a man not their father face an increased risk of 3,300 percent. Yet the liberal experts and the liberal activists and the liberal legislators and the liberal media celebrities are strangely silent. What is going on?

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

mysql close 0