Who cares about BLM?  A jury found Daniel Penny innocent of Alvin Bragg's ridiculous charges related to subduing a homeless man who threatened passengers in a subway car.  The exoneration demolished a media narrative that Penny was a white supremacist stalking black men.  AP said, "A Marine veteran who used a chokehold on an agitated subway rider was acquitted on Monday in a death that became a prism for differing views about public safety, valor and vigilantism."  Penny held the man, Jordan Neely, until authorities could take him into custody.  A drug called K2 likely killed him.  AP quoted Andre Zachery as "his father," a man who apparently was never in the Neely's life.  An ABC post-mortem profile of Neely did not mention a father.  It said he was raised by his mother.  When he was 14, her boyfriend, Shawn Southerland, murdered her in their bed.  ABC said, "Jordan Neely briefly lived with his great aunt and other family members in his youth."  He died at 30 after living homeless on the streets.  Zachery popped up when he died.  He filed a wrongful death suit against Penny during jury deliberations.  AP quoted daddy dearest's response to the verdict: "It really, really hurts.  I had enough of this.  The system is rigged."

Here is an example of what 60 years of Great Society anti-poverty programs can yield.  For the last 60 years, Democrats have claimed that their war on poverty and all their handouts helped lift people up.  Instead, it encouraged single parenthood and single parenthood is the greatest indicator of who will end up in poverty.  The result of these supposedly empathetic policies is generational poverty. [...] There is nothing compassionate or generous about encouraging single parenthood.  There is nothing compassionate or generous about giving away subsidies on everything to make people dependent on the government.  There is nothing compassionate or generous about refusing to enforce border laws and flooding towns with more people who will be dependent on the government.  There is nothing compassionate and generous when Democrats block poor and minority children from opportunities to go to better schools.  And there is nothing compassionate, generous or smart in destroying companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  That destroys the poor and middle class.

The Illusion of Hood Life.  The "hood" is not a location; it's a state of mind of instant gratification, quick emotions, continual quest for more bling, rejection of education, defiance of authority, and a demand for respect while disrespecting their opponent.  Who is the opponent?  It's everyone but one's mother and grandmother because the hood is a matriarchal society largely devoid of adult men either because the men are in prison or long ago abandoned their families.  Mothers and grandmothers are the only ones who provide any sort of stability, continuity, guidance, and love in the lives of the hood dwellers.  Despite the love from single mothers and grandmothers, those fatherless homes are the genesis of the hood.

The Government Is Not Your Daddy.  It's no secret that many Democrat voters have "daddy" issues.  They grew up in homes without strong, loving fathers and desperately seek from government what they never found in their youths:  a protective authority figure and lifelong role model.  When Democrats with "daddy" issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace.  Why?  Because they try to play "father" to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave.  They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity.  They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl.  They demand that male "allies" relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children.  Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous "patriarchy" — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!

Markets and Miracles.  Government handouts changed people's thinking.  They taught millions of Americans:  You are entitled to a check.  No longer was it individuals' responsibility to help families, neighbors and ourselves; now it was clearly government's job.  The result is that people became dependent on handouts.  Government rarely teaches people to be self-sufficient; handouts encourage you to be helpless.  Welfare created something never seen before in America:  a near-permanent "underclass."  Welfare told parents:  don't get married; you'll lose benefits.  Don't work; your check will be reduced.  Above all, make sure the father isn't home when a welfare worker comes.  If he is, your check may be reduced or eliminated.  This changed incentives that motivated parents for generations.  The result has been ruinous for millions of children.

'60s Denialism: Affirmative Action's Last Ditch Defense.  [Scroll down]  Almost unnoticed, a labyrinth of soul-crushing social programs was taking root and would soon be institutionalized by the Lyndon Johnson administration under the rubric of "The Great Society."  At the time, the only person brave enough — or crazy enough — to call attention to the damage done by these programs was Johnson's undersecretary of labor (and later U.S. senator), Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  In his remarkably prescient report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1965, the same year the Great Society was launched.  "The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling," Moynihan warned.  Causing the dissolution were the sundry social programs that promised women financial security on the real but rarely spoken condition that there be no married father in the household.  Until about 1960, the income gap between backs and whites was narrowing.  After 1960, with the surge in single-parent households, it began to reverse itself.

SCOTUS Affirmative Action Decision Ignores Elephant in the Room.  Anyone who examines the condition of black Americans objectively will see what I see — a culture that has departed from its roots of faith, family, and education.  Since the 1960s, we have gone from 80% of black children being born into two-parent homes to 80% of black children being born to single mothers in 2017.  Affirmative action programs cannot and will not make up for the decline of two-parent families over the last 50 years and its effects on generations of black children.  Research reveals that children from two-parent families, regardless of race, experience high levels of academic success compared to children from fatherless homes.  A 2021 study from The Institute for Family Studies found that "Black children in single-parent homes were 3.5 times more likely to live in poverty."  The same study found that black children raised by two parents had a 70% higher chance of graduating from college, while those raised by single parents were "twice as likely to be incarcerated by their late 20s."

The Real Status of Black Students.  [Scroll down]  First, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty began to cripple the Black family.  African American women could get more money from Uncle Sam than they could from their working husbands.  Actually, if these husbands were working, their families could not have access to government benefits.  Fathers left the home, leaving the raising of children to mothers and grandparents.  By 2021, over four million African American kids live with only their mothers.  Second, overwhelmingly Democrat-led cities promised hope, but ran down their cities creating increasing crime and slums: environments of hopelessness.  Third, for the past several years schools have been teaching Critical Race Theory, in which Black students are told they are systemically inferior and will never be able to compete fairly with White students.  Liberals and Black activists hate the removal of affirmative action for racial purposes.

A Look at Society Shows an Orchestrated Decline.  Is there a correlation between the conundrum of divorce and being a good parent?  Maybe.  The divorce rate in America is actually down, but so is the rate of marriage. [...] Another telling point is that about a third of children live in single-parent households.  Progressives don't see anything wrong with that statistic, but I do.  Worldwide, that number is only 7%.  What has happened here?  I believe we have forgotten the importance of children, focusing instead on perpetual immaturity and instant gratification.  We are all paying for that hubris.  Having a father is still very important.

In my opinion, the actual number is closer to 50 percent.
Research: 1-in-4 U.S. Children Live in Fatherless Homes, Spurring Mental Health and Behavioral Issues.  About one in four children in the United States are living in fatherless homes, making them far more likely to suffer from mental health and behavioral issues, research details.  An issue brief published by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) finds clear correlations between children raised in fatherless homes and developmental challenges such as anger problems, violent tendencies, and overall lower educational scores.

It's Now or Never.  The problem for the Left is that the family is a traditional dynamic that transcends the authority of the political state, not only because it encourages a prior allegiance, but because it allows for inheritance and property rights.  This is anathema to the Marxist vision of the centralized, property-owning and all-encompassing state.  The Marxist offensive against the monogamous union of a man and a woman is seen as the means by which to destabilize the family, and thus to destroy the democratic state root and branch.  In the Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology, Karl Marx defined marriage as legalized prostitution and a form of female slavery.  He was undoubtedly the most instrumental figure in the campaign to demolish the scaffolding of customary society, including marriage, the family and the concept of fatherhood.

The Nuclear Family is Key to Democracy.  The decline of the two-parent household since around 1990 has ushered in a marked deterioration in the decency and ethical principles of American life.  Proponents of the so-called "enlightenment" and "tolerance" of current social norms and behaviors may scoff at the attitudes and practices of the 1960s or 1980s, but the nuclear two-parent families of a few decades ago did, in fact, impart a structured, widely accepted and absolute sense of "right and wrong" that today's youth simply don't have.  The rules of right and wrong transcended racial and demographic boundaries and were independent of income or social class.  Everyone knew what was "right" and what was "wrong."  That certainly doesn't mean everyone adhered to the rules; they didn't.  But everyone knew the rules.  Kids were taught by their families that you went to school, respected your elders, behaved properly in public, showed up for work on time and gave it a good effort, kept your word, didn't steal or cheat, and so on.  These were the rules.  We all knew them.

Twelve reasons things are not going well in America.  [#10] The family is the core institution of society and the republic, and marriage is the core of the family.  When American states in the 1970s adopted the Uniform Dissolution of Marriage Act, they required only one ground for divorce:  A husband's or wife's sworn oath that "the marriage is irretrievably broken."  Hence marriage, once defined as "one man, one woman, for life," ceased to exist because the vow "until death do us part" was replaced by "until I change my mind."  The law was billed as "no-fault divorce," but was, in reality, the repeal of the institution of marriage.  The result is that the American family is fractured.

A Therapist's Notes on the Decline of Marriage.  [Scroll down] We've gone from the scarlet letter to a badge of honor, where baby mamas are celebrated, from the wealthy glitterati to the poorest of the poor.  The implicit message is, don't you dare judge, you dinosaur.  Or who needs a piece of paper for commitment?  Recently, a famous actor revealed that he and his partner want to have another child.  According to the report, he has no interest in marriage, taking the European style of parenting.  At one time, such behavior would've been scandalous.  In these so-called enlightened times, marriage and children are no longer entwined.  Mind your own business.

The Real Problem with Memphis.  So are we going to have that discussion now?  Are we going to ask why the fathers are gone from the black households?  Are we going to get a real discussion, an honest discussion this time?  Because an honest discussion will inevitably lead us to the corrupt, feminist-driven welfare machinery, which systematically drives black fathers out of their families and destroys the lives of black children by handing control of them and their communities to single mothers and gangs.  An honest discussion will also lead us to the corrupt family courts, which routinely steal the children of black men (and white men, Hispanic men, Asian men...) and throw the fathers in prison without trial.  An honest discussion will also ask why Republicans and conservatives steadfastly refuse to challenge any of this.

Let Criminal Faces Be Shown.  [Scroll down] The real solution is for blacks to become assimilated into middle-class American society, as large numbers already are.  The great impediment to assimilation is liberal support for identity politics as manifested in affirmative action, BLM, woke politics, and other policies based on racial distinctions.  Only when blacks are treated exactly like white, Asians, and other successful groups will they develop the qualities of those groups.  And only when the media and general culture admit and widely proclaim that bourgeois culture is superior to so-called black culture will this change really take place.  In fact, bourgeois culture is superior.  It produces a more stable home life (though not stable enough, what with white divorce rates of 46%), suppression of violence, emphasis on education and work and material benefits accruing from that higher level of education and work, church attendance and civic involvement, refinement of manners, healthier behavior and environment, and in general a higher quality of life.  Surely, that bourgeois lifestyle is superior to childhood in substandard housing, participation in gang violence and crime at an early age, a marriage rate of only 30% for blacks (in contrast to 52% of whites and 58% of Asians), and a popular culture of rap music that glorifies violence and raw sexuality.

Out-of-wedlock birth, not poverty, is the key to high crime rates.  The data indicate that out-of-wedlock births in a given year correlate with higher crime rates roughly 20 years later.  An increase of 10 out-of-wedlock births for 1000 live births is associated with up to a 5% increase in future murder rates.  Children born out of wedlock are more likely to drop out of high school, more likely to be influenced by negative adult role models, and more likely to experience stress.  Extreme stress in childhood inhibits the development of higher-order emotional intelligence.  The disintegration of the institution of marriage drives violent crime.  Poverty does not drive crime.  Real poverty in the United States has essentially been eradicated.  Top line:  reduce out-of-wedlock births, and crime will fall.

America Has a 'Pandemic of Fatherlessness' Contributing to Gender Confusion, Suicide, and More, Author Says.  America is suffering from a pandemic that is not a virus, it "is a pandemic of fatherlessness."  That's according to Pastor Kris Vallotton, author of the new book "Uprising: The Epic Battle for the Most Fatherless Generation in History."  "Fifty-one percent of all children in America right now are born out of wedlock, 51%," Vallotton, the senior associate leader of Bethel Church in Redding, California, says.  "In 1950, 4% of Americans were born out of wedlock."  The results of children growing up without fathers in the home are devastating, Vallotton says, with data revealing that "75% of all inmates grew up without a father," and "63% of all youth suicides come from fatherless homes."  Vallotton also points to a rise in transgenderism and gay marriage as a side effect of fatherlessness, because "when we embrace gay marriage ... what we said is that you can have two mommies and two daddies, because mommies and daddies are interchangeable."

Writer for Mother Jones says all children should eat for 'free'.  The inability to afford food is not simply a crisis of job losses and school closures, rather it is a crisis leftist policies in action — namely, an ever-expanding and intervening Big Government, and a move away from the Judeo-Christian ethic set.  The"pandemic" era job losses and school closures can be almost entirely attributed to authoritarian government shutdowns; and impoverished children in need of food can exclusively be attributed to a breakdown in a moral society with the myriad of assaults against the nuclear family in calculated efforts to remove fathers from homes. [...] [H]ere's a novel idea, how about we stop encouraging the victimhood mentality, and instead, return to an ethos of self-responsibility?  How about, the parents who laid down and created those children, bear the responsibility of being the providers for those little ones?

The Editor says...
Awww... It's for the children!  How could you oppose that?  Of course, if you start buying free food for all children, then pretty soon the program will be expanded to include all women, all minorities, all immigrants, all gender-confused freaks, and all homeless bums.  And the only people left to pay for it will be white males.

The Premeditated Murder of the American Family.  The enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy this fledgling experiment.  It was clear to them that America's strength was a function of three phenomena:
  •   A fervent belief in the God who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire's armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
  •   An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of Freedom.  Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
  •   The most passionate was the embrace, belief, and allegiance to family, its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.
If we destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government.  And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists among us are employing — as their predecessors did — every malevolent, criminal, and vicious tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.

Can the United States Stop the March to Self-Destruction?  In an attempt to relive the early success of the Civil Rights Movement, gay rights were brought to the fore in the United States in the 1980-90's.  While there were overtly discriminatory laws that needed to be changed and societal status normalized, the cause was soon hijacked by the left and effectively recast as anti-Christian evangelism.  Since the accusation of racism was so successful in intimidating the citizenry, a new term was coined: homophobia[.]  In demanding equal marital status, they effectively began the war against the nuclear family.  The purging of Christianity and Judaism from the public square and the elimination of the family have always been major tenets of the radical Marxists.  By wrapping the cause in the cloak of the civil rights movement, far too many obliviously and willingly fell into the trap set by the left.

[The] Majority of Babies [are] Born Out of Wedlock for [the] First Time in History.  The majority of babies were born to unmarried mothers in Britain for the first time in recorded history, the Office for National Statistics revealed on Tuesday.  ONS figures showed that there of the 624,828 live births recorded in England and Wales last year, over 320,000 were born out of wedlock, compared to 320,713 that were born to married parents or those in a civil partnership.

Panned Parenthood.  First of all, none of you are required to become parents.  Some people should never, ever be parents.  The shrieking ogres bawling and fainting in front of the Supreme Court recently look like they'd make terrible mothers.  Gals, on this we can agree — you are not fit to raise a baby.  Without resorting to infanticide, please do what you can to avoid inflicting yourself on a small child! [...] Planning your future parenthood is fine.  Sure, you should definitely do some planning.  The best plan you can make is to wait until you are married to a good and decent person who is committed to supporting you and any children you create together.  That's a solid plan, write that down!  Waiting until conditions are perfect, however, is a bad idea.  It's a trap that will leave you high and dried up.  Life tip:  You will never have a big enough house, enough money, the perfect amount of maternity leave, the ideal and affordable childcare situation lined up, the will, the energy, and the stamina to do what will be required of you as a new or repeat parent.

Fatherless Homes Linked to Mental Illness, Mass Shootings:  Author Warren Farrell.  Warren Farrell, author of the book "The Boy Crisis:  Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It," has found that being "dad deprived" is a leading factor in males' increased mental illness, addiction, and suicide.  He links the mass shootings in 53 developed countries to boys and men who lacked a father figure, and he specifically mentioned six mass shootings that have occurred in the United States in the 21st century.  "All six of those mass school shootings that have killed more than 10 people have been done by boys, and all six of them have been done by boys who have been 'dad deprived,' from Sandy Hook right on through to the Texas shooting," Farrell said during a recent interview for EpochTV's "American Thought Leaders" program.

We Are Witnessing What Happens When Unrestrained Youth Gets Power.  When most of us think of the worst emperors in Roman history we think of names like Commodus, Nero, Caligula, and Elagabalus.  To a man they were vain, self-centered, bloodthirsty hedonists who took what they wanted and tortured and killed many thousands of Romans and provincials. [...] Every day in America we see modern-day Commoduses or Caligulas wreaking havoc on our streets and in our stores, restaurants, schools, and more.  Instead of a single entitled Emperor, America in 2022 is being ravaged by a generation of young men — many of whom have grown up fatherless — who have been told that they can do and say anything they want and that, regardless of what they do, there will be no consequences for them.  Just as Elagabalus et al brought nothing but blood, despair, and dysfunction to the Empire, these 21st-century youth are bringing blood, despair, and destruction to America.  A generation of Americans has grown up being given "time outs", "participation trophies," and grades that have nothing to do with actual academic success, while at the same time they've been told that all inequality is due to racism, sexism, homophobia, or anything other than individual choices or actions.  The consequence of this indoctrination is that far too many young Americans think they can do anything with impunity.  If they want something they take it.

Gay Agenda activists cruise towards desecration of the family unit.  Pride Month.  Thirty whole days devoted to aberrant sexual lifestyles and the fetishization of the perverse.  With the normalization and extravagant celebration of this deviation, the inevitable arrives: the sexualization and grooming of children.  We see grown men jiggling enormous  — and exposed — prosthetic breasts in a young child's face; school districts shelling out hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to introduce elementary-aged children to men, dressed as women, and behaving in a hypersexual way; and the promotion of the BDSM kink by permitting students to pull others around with leashes and collars.  This is the reality of the radical Gay Agenda — it corrupts wholly, destroying the traditional family unit, and directly echoes a repugnant scheme conceived in the 19th Century and dubbed, "the most infamous proposal of the Communists" — "Abolition of the family!"

Guns Are Not the Problem.  The family is the core institution of human society.  Why don't we hear more about the fact that it is in shambles?  We almost never hear about marriage and family in our politics, and if we do, it is in tones of derision. [...] It's the height of folly that we spend so much time shouting about a handful of mass murders, and almost no time talking about the collapse of our society, about the dysfunction that Americans live with every single day.  We seldom hear about shootings in inner cities, where the vast majority of gun violence actually occurs and where the average kid is raised by a single mother.  Nor do our politicians seem to care about the opioid crisis, which is killing Americans in record numbers as deadly drugs pour into the country uninterrupted.

The Real Reason Why Mass Shooters Kill.  Tucker Carlson almost said it. [...] Carlson almost blurted out the most taboo truth in Washington, the unutterable heresy that the political class suppresses more ruthlessly than any other.  He asked us to consider — after eliminating all the standard leftist cliches and a few rightist ones — why do these young shooters keep committing mass murder?  What characteristic do they all share?  What is going on here, and why can we not even discuss it?  Carlson knows the answer. [...] The shooters, the mass murderers, even most of the terrorists, and essentially all violent criminals (plus many drugs addicts and a majority of the homeless) share this one quality:  they are all fatherless.

For the left, children are either obstacles or tools.  To the Left, children in the womb are utterly disposable; at best, women may choose to preserve their lives, but if not, they have no separate interests to be considered.  In fact, children are to be treated as potential obstacles: as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week, "access to reproductive health care, including abortion, helped lead to increased labor force participation; it enabled many women to finish school.  That increased their earning potential."  This explains why the Left has now embraced the language of "forced birth" to describe laws protecting the unborn: pregnancy is no longer seen as the possible biological outgrowth of sexual activity, but as a dramatic foreign imposition on women.  The default, for the Left, is childlessness; pregnancy is somehow unnatural.  Thus, the entire Democratic Party apparatus now refuses to countenance even the mildest restrictions on even late-term abortion.

The World Does Not Run on Magic.  If you call a plumber to deal with a sewer pipe that has backed up into your basement, it is a practical certainty that it is going to be a man, because the sheer strength required to deal with the valve rusted shut, or with a section of pipe that has to be cut or muscled into place, is like a threshold.  If you cannot reach the threshold (and if you are a teenage boy or an old man, you are likely to fail) you cannot do that job.  You cannot, as our women soldiers apparently do, ask the man next to you to give you a hand.  All kinds of tasks involve such thresholds.  All right, then.  Now suppose that you do not want to raise boys to be those men.  How can you ensure that you fail at this basic task?  First, you deny millions of boys a married father in the home; you pursue policies perversely designed to reward family breakdown.  I am speaking of the preponderant case:  boys are not going to learn how to wield a sledgehammer from their mothers.

Stay Home With Your Babies.  My mother is a Baby Boomer.  She came from a culture in which mothers staying home with children was the norm (which it is in most parts of the world, by the way) and mothers going to work while their children went to babysitters seemed very out of place.  Her generation fought that notion.  They wanted the right to be seen as equal partners in financially providing for their families.  They wanted the right to go make a career and conquer their chosen professions without being saddled with supposedly archaic notions of motherhood.  We're all beneficiaries of that time.

Unapologetic Tony Dungy Smokes Out Obama's Betrayal of Black America.  Tony Dungy, the first black coach ever to win a Super Bowl, might have escaped notice this week had he merely supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's "Responsible Fatherhood Initiative."  His real sin was to explain why.  Dungy, a Christian father of eleven, recounted a conversation he had years back with the Rev. Abe Brown about Brown's prison ministry.  At Brown's request, Dungy accompanied him to prison.  Expecting to find hardened criminals, Dungy found instead "19- and 20- and 21-year-old kids who looked like my boys."  When Dungy asked what accounted for the young men's incarceration, Brown told him, "It's not socioeconomic.  It's not racial.  It's not education.  It's none of that.  Ninety-five percent of these boys did not grow up with their dad."  Said Dungy, "That hit me."  Predictably, Dungy's truth-telling stirred the woke beehive.

Imagine if Both Your Parents Were Hard-Left Democrats.  Democrats have done a great job destroying the concepts of marriage, family, and personal responsibility.  So you may grow up with two parents, or one, or none, or even a gay secretary of transportation out on extended leave during a supply-chain crisis as your daddy.  Who knows?  But let's make our imaginary Democrat couple a man and a woman for simplicity's sake.  They've had sex, after signing the necessary consent forms, and conception has occurred.  Now you are a zygote, the tiniest human possible, just hanging around (literally) in your liberal mother's womb.  In today's shout-your-abortion Democrat party, Mom or Dad may be seriously thinking about terminating you.  You just may be a major inconvenience to them and have to go bye-bye. [...] But let's say you're one of the lucky ones, and you're spared the abortionist's tender mercies.  Now the liberal dunderheads who spawned you saddle you with some idiotic name, like Kayden, Macy, Apple, or Zarathustra.  And before you're even walking or talking, your parents leave you alone with a total stranger because Mommy and Daddy both work.  Staunch Democrats, as we know, hate stay-at-home moms (and dads).  They'd prefer you miss out on one of life's purest pleasures:  growing up with a dedicated parent as your primary caregiver.  Let's assume that the stranger your lib parents chose doesn't do anything horrible to you.  You've survived the first couple of years, and as a bonus, you're bilingual.  The next thing you know, your folks are dumping you off at daycare, where you have to deal with another set of complete strangers.

AWOL Black Fathers.  Most devastating for me was the psychological impact of my father's absence.  The most miserable moments of my childhood were when other kids asked me where my father was.  In the days before we understood conception, I could just tell them that I just didn't have one.  But after we all learned a bit of biology, the question became so upsetting that on a few occasions I had to walk away from play activities.  I didn't know what to tell them because my mother refused to speak of this man, even when I asked.  He was a forbidden topic in her house, and so I learned to keep my mouth shut.  I found out later from an uncle that my father regularly beat my mother which is why she divorced him when I was born.  This shows her grit and gumption, for in those days, women could scarcely fend for themselves economically, and so battered wives were condemned to suffer as punching bags.  But not my mother.

A 40% Fatherless Nation?  In 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II, there were 2,515,427 babies born in this country.  Of those babies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 95,700 — or 3.8% — were born to unmarried mothers.  The traditional family led by a mother and father was a foundational fact of American culture.  In 1945, the percentage of babies born to unmarried mothers rose to 4.3%. But, by 1946, the first full year after the war, it dropped back down to 3.8%.  The traditional family survived.  Then in the 1950s, the percentage of American babies born to unmarried mothers began to slowly tick upward, hitting 5.2% by the end of that decade.  By 1969, as this column has noted in reviewing these numbers before, 10% of American babies were born to unmarried mothers.  In 2008, it surpassed 40%.

The Death of Muscular American Social Life.  All my life, I have encountered people who scoff at the notion that the American family was far healthier in the 1950s than it is now.  They cannot, of course, point to any strong evidence of widespread unhappiness and dysfunction in that time.  Divorces were rare, and so were out-of-wedlock births.  American men and women after the war were eager to resume real life.  Rosie the Riveter usually wanted children and a home, not a new sweatband and more rivets.  We don't have to assert that it was a "golden age," any more than we have to assert that all of the founders were geniuses of political acumen and farsightedness.  All we need to assert is that in certain important respects, there are good reasons to say that family life was richer than it is now, in part because people assumed that the common good both depended upon family life and was meant to foster that life.

Ten Statistics to Ruin Your Day.  Let's start with:  [#1] The nuclear family fades in the USA:  According to a Pew Research study, the United States has the highest number of children living in single-parent households.  Almost one fourth (23%) of children in the U.S. under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adult, which is the highest in the world. [...] [#6] And those of us who do have kids are often the poorest:  In 2017, the birth rate in the United States was highest in families that had under 10,000 U.S. dollars in income per year, at 66.44 births per 1,000 women.  As the income scale increases, the birth rate decreases, with families making 200,000 U.S. dollars or more per year having the lowest birth rate, at 43.92 births per 1,000 women.

9 Shocking Signs Of The Staggering Decline Of The Traditional American Family.  Traditional family units are at the foundation of any successful society, and that was certainly true for the United States during our formative years.  But now a decline that has stretched on for decades has left the traditional American family in worse shape than ever before.  Our entertainment is anti-family, our culture is anti-family and many of our politicians are openly anti-family.

The Census Bureau released appalling information about the American family.  Leftists have been waging relentless war on the nuclear family for decades in ways big and small.  The big ways began in the 1960s with women's liberation and no-fault divorce.  While both of those may have relieved women from desperately bad marriages and dead-end jobs, they also served to take women out of their role as homemaker and the child's primary teacher, often transferring those roles to immigrant women when the children were small and public schools when the children were older.  The welfare state also struck a blow at the nuclear family. [...] Having a regular "paycheck" without the man attached can be a real blessing.  Even worse, welfare is structured so that having a father in the family can depress the woman's income, and so that, the more children a woman has out of wedlock, the more money she gets.  This isn't money that would sustain the middle-class comforts many of us like but, as I happen to know from acquaintances, not everyone wants the middle-class lifestyle.  Many people just want a check that will pay for rudimentary shelter, food, and drugs.

The War Against the Family.  According to Pew Research, America has now displaced Iceland and Sweden as the place where children are most likely to live in single-parent homes.  What does this mean for our social and political structures?  What does this portend for our mental and emotional well-being?  [Video clip]

Death of Marriage:  We're Hurtling Down the Slippery Slope the Left Swore Didn't Exist.  "Till death do us part" is being heard less and less now because America is parting with marriage.  This is fine with too many today, even though some form of marriage has been the norm in every civilization we know of.  Thus may those not irredeemably libertine want to consider how it has been said — with respect to the universality of sex differences, for example — that when a phenomenon is witnessed worldwide in every time and place, it's a strong indication it has a biological component.  Oh, this isn't to say marriage is in our DNA, yet a social and psychological need it satisfies may be.  Speaking of social phenomena, among adults, married people will shortly be a minority in the United States.  This is not, as some may say, just because of faux ("same-sex") marriage.  But that phenomenon is a major exacerbating factor and, quite significantly, is a deadly symptom of the underlying problem.

The father has no place in today's Democratic Party.  In yet another desperate attempt to sell the public on his failing multitrillion-dollar spending agenda, President Joe Biden released a slideshow Thursday [10/28/2021] that inadvertently betrays how the modern Democratic Party views the family.  And the news isn't good for fathers, mothers, children, communities, or the nation.  In Biden's slideshow, we meet a cartoon "Linda" from Peoria, Illinois.  Linda, we are told, is pregnant with her son "Leo," but we are never told where exactly Leo's father is.  We see one slide in which Linda and Leo benefit from Biden's direct payments to parents.  We see another slide that shows the government helping Linda pay to put Leo in daycare.  And we see another slide in which Leo is placed in government-run pre-K.  But again, at no point do we see Linda or Leo with the father.  It is as if he doesn't exist.

Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?  Throughout history, the two-parent nuclear family has been viewed as the cornerstone of a healthy society.  However, the contemporary state-sponsored vision rejects the two-parent household.  Yet when the social justice gatekeepers attribute "privilege" to an individual, one of the more common questions is whether they grew up in a household with two parents.  The Black Lives Matter movement rejects the nuclear family as "white supremacy," when the fundamental structure of household authority and covenantal family relationships are clearly seen as advantageous to the well-being and future success of our children.  Without them, souls are adrift and caught in a treacherous spiral.  They diminish the nuclear family, and the result is more crime as young men and women grow up without a sense of who they are, without the role models and mentors who exemplify what is good and honorable, who teach their children to have a future story and to set goals and work hard to achieve those goals.  All this has resulted in a tragic, predictable cycle that leads to generational dependence, poverty, hopelessness, crime, imprisonment, and an impregnable attitude of injustice.

National Council on Family Relations:  Two-Parent Families are Racist.  You'd think that an organization called the "National Council on Family Relations" would be pro-family, or at least not actively anti-family.  You'd be wrong.  As The Federalist reports, "Despite its name, the National Council on Family Relations is looking to destroy American families.  It claims that the nuclear family — consisting of father, mother, and children — is merely an extension of white supremacy."  Such a dire claim is, in fact, mostly substantiated by NCFR's own words.

Now Two-Parent Families Are Racist Too.  Despite its name, the National Council on Family Relations is looking to destroy American families.  It claims that the nuclear family — consisting of father, mother, and children — is merely an extension of white supremacy.  NCFR has joined with critical race theorists and Black Lives Matter in this outright attack on the foundational values and norms of American culture.

Critical father theory.  America's crime problem is a father problem.  This is one of our country's deepest and most denied family secrets.  Everybody knows it, and everybody has known it for a very long time.  Never mind anecdotes.  Social science has confirmed as much at least since the fabled Moynihan Report of 1965, whose ignominious fate proves the rule that a document will be publicly reviled in exact proportion to the truths it tells.  As the Minnesota Psychological Association lately summarized just a bit of the massive research on fatherless homes and crime:  'Family structure and the lack of paternal involvement are predictive of juvenile delinquency.  The more opportunities a child has to interact with his or her biological father, the less likely he or she is to commit a crime or have contact with the juvenile justice system... Youths who never had a father living with them have the highest incarceration rates ... while youths in father-only households display no difference in the rate of incarceration from that of children coming from two-parent households.'

Family has baby shower for pregnant 12-year-old, her accused rapist, Oklahoma cops say.  The family of a 12-year-old girl impregnated by a man twice her age "permitted" the relationship and even celebrated her pregnancy with a baby shower, according to Oklahoma police.  Police arrested 24-year-old Juan Miranda-Jara on a charge of first degree rape of a minor earlier this month, according to the Tulsa Police Department[.]  Shortly after the young girl showed up to an area hospital pregnant, police said they were told she had possibly been raped.  Investigators took Miranda-Jara into questioning and, as the girl was in labor, he admitted that the child was his, police say, and that he had been "in a relationship" with the girl since October 2020.  But a question lingered, police said:  "Where were the parents?"  Apparently, they were present and well-aware of what was happening, according to police.

Calling Out Black Juvenile Delinquency from a Place of Loving Concern.  The most hostile work environments I ever experienced were public schools in Washington, D.C. and in Cleveland.  I interned in DCPS (District of Columbia Public Schools) and crisscrossed CMSD (Cleveland Municipal School District) as a substitute teacher.  On several occasions, a teenager got in my face and "bucked" at me as if he were going to punch me.  Many more kids, some as young as seven or eight, cussed me out.  I knew better than to take these almost daily attacks personally.  Still, no one should have to endure such a hostile work environment.  I find Black juvenile delinquency alarming.  As a six-foot-two Black man from Anacostia in Southeast D.C., I don't speak from fear.  I'm calling out Black juvenile delinquency from a place of loving concern.

Fatherless Children:  The Progressive-Democrat Nightmare.  So many children in America now live in single-parent, mother-only households that fatherlessness is, like the crisis at our southern border, a disaster progressive Democrats ignore, deny and avoid.  Fatherlessness is one of the most debilitating domestic issues confronting our country.  Almost 20 million children in America live in fatherless households.  Approximately 40 percent of all live births in our country are to single mothers, and 90 percent of welfare recipients are single mothers.  To make matters worse, children of single mothers are five times more likely to grow up in poverty than those of married couples.  Fatherlessness is a major contributing factor in significant domestic problems including drug abuse, gun violence, child abuse, sexual abuse, chronic unemployment, homelessness and suicide.

The Consequences of Fatherlessness.  [#1] Poverty:  Children in father-absent homes are almost four times more likely to be poor.  In 2011, 12 percent of children in married-couple families were living in poverty, compared to 44 percent of children in mother-only families. [... #4] Educational Achievement:  Children in grades 7-12 who have lived with at least one biological parent, youth that experienced divorce, separation, or nonunion birth reported lower grade point averages than those who have always lived with both biological parents.

Fatherlessness Is America's Top Domestic Problem.  A powerful new documentary called "The Streets Were My Father" features three Chicago men, two Hispanics and one Black, who grew up without fathers.  All three did hard time for serious offenses, including murder.  The film, with no narrator, just lets the men talk.  None blames "systemic racism."  All concede they made bad choices, but choices nonetheless.  All talked about the pain they felt growing up without a father figure to instruct, scold, guide, motivate and instill confidence and direction.  I highly recommend it.

Six Ways the Black Community Is Hurt By Democrat Policies.  [#4]  Disregard for Fathers:  The absence of fathers on its own is horrific, but coupled with the silence from black Democrat leaders, it is downright genocidal.  Here is a depressing rundown of some stats regarding fatherless homes:
  •   85% of youth who are currently in prison grew up in a fatherless home.
  •   Girls who live in a fatherless home have a 100% higher risk of suffering from obesity than girls who have their father present.  Teen girls from fatherless homes are also 4 times more likely to become mothers before the age of 20.
  •   In 2011, 44% of children in homes headed by a single mother were living in poverty.  Just 12% of children in married-couple families were living in poverty.
  •   Living in a fatherless home is a contributing factor to substance abuse, with children from such homes accounting for 75% of adolescent patients being treated in substance abuse centers.

Five Things to Know About Biden's $1.8 Trillion American Families Plan.  Strong families and hard work have formed the foundation for healthy development, meaningful relationships, and economic well-being ever since America's inception.  Now, President Joe Biden has a new vision:  one in which progressive politicians and government bureaucrats sit at the helm of American families, financed through $1.8 trillion in new taxpayer spending. [...] While private sector employers have already made enormous strides in providing employees with paid family leave — doubling the provisions of both maternity leave and paternity leave benefits since the 2017 tax cuts and reduced regulations — Biden's plan would create a nationwide paid family leave program.  A one-size-fits-all government program would be restrictive, unresponsive, and less generous than existing employer-provided programs.

'Things Fall Apart' With No End in Sight.  The American birthrate has now fallen for six years in a row, to a record-low 1.64 babies per woman.  Some blame this on the dreaded COVID, but it would make more sense for births to rise, given that couples have had more than a year of snuggle time while riding out the "pandemic" and collecting government checks.  A more likely reason is the non-stop barrage of propaganda from the anti-human Left, whose refrain has long been "how can you bring a child into this world?" — a world, by the way, they've been doing their best to ruin for more than half a century with abortion, divorce, and latterly, child sex-change operations.

Joe Biden's Plan For Government To Replace The Family.  The American family is in a state of crisis.  Nobody in Washington really disagrees with this, Republican or Democrat.  Marriage rates are cratering.  Birth rates are in a total tailspin, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.  This is unsustainable.  America can't function if the most basic building block of our society is collapsing.  Clearly something needs to be done.  Last week, the Biden White House released what it called the "American Families Plan," a $1.8 trillion spending package that includes a laundry list of woke leftist priorities, including major giveaways to the education establishment, which has become perhaps the most favored Democrat constituency.  Many conservatives are understandably concerned about the price tag.  But even if the package were something we thought America could afford, the details of the plan should make conservatives extremely worried.  Rather than help the family, the Biden administration has something more disturbing in mind:  a big government takeover of the family.

Median household income and share of births to unwed mothers.  The chart [left] shows graphically the relationship in 2017 between:  a) US median household income by race (blue bars) and b) the share of US births to unmarried women by race (gray bars).  As James Quigley suggests, there is an obvious and pretty clear pattern of a statistically significant inverse relationship between median household income and the share of births to unwed mothers by race (correlation coefficient = -0.998).  Next, it would interesting to compare median household income by race for married couples with both spouses working.

The Ties That Bind And The Anguished Cries Of Slavery.  [Scroll down]  Now to the heart of this paper, if slavery had been able to destroy the Black family, then Blacks in the West would be a lost cause.  However, this is not the case.  Many slaves survived slavery with their families intact; likewise, many Blacks survived Jim Crow with their families intact.  This was a powerful point made in Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and is often overlooked by many.  Slavery was unable to disfigure and dehumanize the slaves.  Why?  Because they held tight and fought to keep their families together.  For instance, some men and women, given the opportunity for freedom, chose bondage rather than to separate their families.  This showed the slavers that slavery could not detach humans from their humanity and their sense of duty to family.

The Top 1% Are Not Causing the USA's Problems.  [Scroll down]  In today's world, unlike the USA at the turn of the 20th century, there are hundreds of thousands of big city residents who want their kids to be in "daycare" until 9:00 p.m. (many people who work in daycare centers encounter many parents who complain that they have to pick up their kids at 6:30 pm or 7:00 pm when they would prefer more downtime by themselves).  So, we may be moving towards a system of compulsory education to age 20 or 22, or perhaps a Spartan model where children are raised by the state 24/7 from the age of 6 onwards.

US Media Makes Heroes of Teens Who Betray Their Family Members and GoFundMe Makes It Profitable.  One of the elements in the Communist Manifesto, right before the abolition of the nation-state, is the abolition of the family.  We've seen a gradual chipping away at the health of the family under the guise of good intentions.  We've created a society where out-of-wedlock births are the norm rather than the exception.  Where state provided daycare and before- and after-school programs act in place of parents.  We have a school system that actually believes it knows best, and so you, the parent, can't send your kid to school with aspirin without the royal assent of school administrators, but school officials can arrange for your child to have access to birth control devices.  The hostility of the public school mafia to homeschooling is often packaged as one of competition for resources.  It isn't.  It is about control of what your child learns and what they imprint as values.

Progressives aim to sink America.  At the same time, most progressives ridiculed the concept of "family", as in "nuclear family", because it is a threat to loyalty to the state.  As a result, 40% of births in the U.S. are to unmarried mothers; and among blacks, its 72%.  That's OK to the diehard progressive because it means such mothers are obliged to rely on the state for money and sustenance.  At the same time, the nation was subjected to a progressive educational elite which implored students to give up the values of their parents.

Democrats' Version of Unity Means 'Us against Them'.  The real problem in America is not racism, but political corruption by the ruling elites from both parties.  It's not about economic or racial injustice deliberately designed by a certain racial background to exploit other people of different racial backgrounds.  It's true that some portions of the population are still struggling socioeconomically.  However, it's due to a combination of various factors, not the least of which is the failure of the most sacred institution in human life:  family.  Socioeconomic malaise in our society generally stems from the failure of families as a fundamental institution that is supposed to inculcate constructive values and traits in our and future generations.

Fatherless Households:  A National Crisis.  In a recent television appearance, I discussed my appointment to a presidential commission called "The Social Status of Black Men and Black Boys."  I called fatherless households America's top domestic problem, a particularly severe phenomenon in the Black community where nearly 70% of kids begin their lives in households with unmarried mothers. [...] If protesters are truly concerned about the condition of Black and Hispanic urban Americans in particular, why the pathetic silence over the fatherless households, the principal reason for the very conditions they complain about?

An Open Letter by Liberty and Justice for All.  [Scroll down]  An affirmation of the traditional family — the belief that men and women should be encouraged to marry and have sons and daughters — cannot be thought a crime.  Civilization perishes unless such unions are encouraged.  The noble longing for a plural society, in which not all are cast in the same mold, must not be realized by belittling the family.  Strong families headed by married couples have been the key to success in black America ever since slavery was abolished a century and a half ago, and this remains the key today for all Americans.

The Black Lives Matter Movement and America's Founding Principles.  [Scroll down]  The destruction of the black nuclear family and missing black fathers, for instance, are arguably the single most detrimental societal change America has witnessed over the past 100 years.  Out-of-wedlock births are a corollary.  Worse, these changes have too often been incentivized by government policies.  Every weekend in major inner-city neighborhoods, the death toll from black-on-black murders is staggering.  Black lives do not seem to matter to the BLM organization under these circumstances.  The young perpetrators are more often than not from fatherless homes.  Not only are BLM activists silent on this issue, but they say on their website:  "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement[.]"

The Racism of the 'Anti-Racist' Movement.  The biggest problem facing the black community today, says [Larry] Elder, is the absence of fathers.  In the 1960s, most black children were raised in two-parent households.  That changed when our government's war on poverty began.  The handouts sent the message that it's the government's job, not your responsibility, to take care of you and your kids.  "A mother with two children makes more money than she would make on minimum wage because of all the goodies she gets through the welfare state!"  Now, he says, Black Lives Matter actually encourages the breakup of families.  Their website does say, "disrupt the Western-prescribed, nuclear family."  That's a Karl Marx idea straight from "The Communist Manifesto."  Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors proudly describes herself as a "trained Marxist."

What 'Systemic Liberalism' Has Wrought.  Why is it that certain parts of America — whether cities, towns, or schools — require very little policing and see almost no crime (certainly little to no violent crime)? I believe the answer is quite simple:  Wherever one sees intact, God-fearing families — families with a married mother and father who regularly attend religious services — crime is virtually nonexistent.  Of course, sound morality has long revealed this to be the case, but, if you require it, multiple studies have also shown that children raised by a married mother and father are better citizens; e.g., less likely to commit crimes, more likely to perform well in school, and so on. [...] Modern liberalism's war on the family and faith has been particularly devastating to fathers, and this has been particularly devastating to America's youth and the communities that must deal with the consequences of fatherless children.  Among many other sad outcomes, fatherlessness is one of the leading predictors of future criminal activity.

Black Lives Matter, Just Not To Democrat Politicians:  Part IV.  [Scroll down]  The Welfare State, ie Government, has replaced many Black fathers in the home.  It's just that simple.  Public assistance discourages marriage or even the presence of the father in the home.  The structure of Public Assistance pits poorer fathers against Government's deep pockets.  Married couples have a lower income threshold to receive public assistance than unmarried couples who live apart.  If one or both of them are unemployed, the threshold is very low.  For many, it's easier to not have a job (or to work cash jobs) and not live in the home.  That kind of "easy money" discourages the father from getting a job with a real W2, the kind it takes to get ahead and discourages him from marrying the mother of his children.  Without a father in the home to teach, coach and model correct behavior, young men, especially in the inner cities, turn to other role models.  Even if the father is surreptitiously living in the home, what kind of positive model is it for a young man when he see's "Dad," hiding in the closet from the Welfare Inspector?

The Police, Patriarchy and Feminism.  Substituting husbands for a government check has especially hurt low-income women.  After decades of promoting the matriarchal family, especially in the inner city, neither children nor women prospered.  Boys especially developed impulsive reactions to emotions, sought instantaneous gratification, held a twisted view of manhood, and an inability to self-control with no respect for any authority including their own mothers.  The end results of chaotic homes produced chaotic inner city streets and high-crime neighborhoods.  Even though the fatherless home experiment failed miserably, the progressive left refuses to change course even for the sake of these poor women and children.  And instead, they doubled down on hating fathers and chose to blame the obvious inner city tragedy on racism.

Real American Privilege.  I was born privileged.  That privilege has nothing to do with race or gender.  My privilege was to be born surrounded by intact families.  My parents, both sets of grandparents, and all four sets of great-grandparents kept their families intact.  That's seven couples who raised their children to adulthood and stayed together until one of them died.  They weren't all great marriages, but to their great credit and my great fortune, they all stuck it out.  What's more, though my childhood coincided with the divorce boom of the 1960s and 70s, I knew only a handful of kids with divorced parents.  I knew another handful with parents who died young.  I knew a sizable number whose grandparents had been exterminated, and whose parents suffered in the concentration camps.  When I visited their homes, however, what I saw were intact families.

Black Lives Matter Does Not Care about Black Youth.  [Scroll down]  When asked why they don't want to marry the fathers of their children, the mothers indicated that they didn't trust the young men, that the men didn't work steadily or earn enough money, and that they were too often violent."  What does this have to do with BLM?  Consider that over 70% of black children now grow up fatherless.  This past Father's Day meant little to them except possibly provoking indifference or hatred, as there is no father figure present in their lives.  My own students write of this continually.  Two themes repeatedly emerge:  (a) women who were raised by their single mothers adamantly assert that they don't need a man; they can get along perfectly well without any men, and, furthermore, they don't trust any man; (b) women and men raised without their fathers often feel guilty that they may have been responsible for their fathers abandoning them.  These feelings hardly result in positive self-esteem or future solid relationships.  This is certainly a perfect opening for a group like BLM, who can be the stand-in for the missing parental units.  Then combine this with the endless indoctrination of left-wing ideology in schools, and it is a witch's brew for all.

The Father's Day Obama Betrayed Black America.  On Father's Day 2008, candidate Barack Obama made his most honest speech on race, maybe his only halfway honest speech on race.  The media barely noticed.  The site was the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.  From the pulpit Obama spoke to the gathered voters — excuse me, congregants — with uncharacteristic audacity.  He reminded his audience that too many black fathers were missing from "too many homes."  He knew something of the phenomenon himself given that his father "left us when I was two years old."  Yes, that con again.  Putting aside for a moment his personal story, however fictitious, Obama made the traditionally conservative argument that fatherless children were five times more likely to grow up poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to get into serious trouble than children who grow up with both parents.

'Systemic Racism' Is Not What Ails Black America.  [Scroll down]  Peaceful protests in reaction to Mr. Floyd's death and against police brutality in general are completely justified.  But why is there no vocal outrage, no call to action, in the black community over the fact that only 30.8 percent of black children, according to the latest dataset in the 2018 American Community Survey, live in a married, two-parent household?  The vast majority of black children are raised in single, female-headed households.  Despite the valiant effort that single black mothers show in raising their children, they can't be both good mothers and good fathers, and they shouldn't have to be. [...] If anything is systemic, it is the failure within the black community to see that the breakdown of the black family is the root cause of so many of the social ills that confront the community, and black males in particular.

A Deliberately Bankrupted America.  In 1990, one of every three African-American men under 29 were in prison or on parole.  Already stressed family bonds broke under this strain.  Currently 77% percent of African Americans are born into unmarried families.  The family pictures of son, father, and grandson is almost unknown in our poorest communities.  The anger and pain of sons abandoned by their fathers is a lifelong wound.  The consequences of numerous short-term disposable relationships is abusive stepparents and the loss of positive male role models.  When the patriarchy is smashed, there are no fathers to guide boys to manhood, and the masculinity that remains is too often toxic.

The Indispensable American Family.  In August 1884, Washington Gladden, possibly the most famous Christian preacher in the America of his day, wrote an article in The Century Magazine on "Three Dangers" besetting the welfare of the nation he loved. [...] Gladden was a liberal churchman, one of the fathers of the Social Gospel, and it is as such that he speaks.  "The monogamous family," he says, "formed by the union of one woman with one man, and by the increase of children born to them, is the structural unit of modern society."  He is deliberate about every word.  Society is like a physical organism, which is composed not of separate particles, but of organized cells.  So, too, "the modern social organism is composed not of individuals, but of households."  Far from being primitive and atavistic, the family, he says, is "a late product of the social evolution," and "it is by most philosophers admitted to characterize that society whose type is the highest and whose foundations are the firmest."

America is awash in overmothered men.  Growing up fatherless, or with a father a son rarely sees due to divorce or workaholism (yes, that's a thing), almost invariably stunts a boy's growth.  The end result is almost always too much mother, which means boys will absorb all so much femininity and none of the masculinity they need.  Ergo, he will spend years trying to figure out what it means to be a man.  It's a tough subject, and thus taboo.  But at some point, we will have to answer why there are so few strong, grounded, purposeful men among us when they used to be a dime a dozen.  Video games have nothing to do with it.

U.S. has world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.  For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage.  A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.  Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%).  The study, which analyzed how people's living arrangements differ by religion, also found that U.S. children from Christian and religiously unaffiliated families are about equally likely to live in this type of arrangement.  In comparison, 3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households.  In neighboring Canada, the share is 15%.

America Has World's Highest Rate of Single-Parent Households.  The United States has a higher share of single-parent households than 129 other countries, a recent analysis from the Pew Research Center reveals.  Twenty-three percent of U.S. children live with a single adult, Pew found, compared with an average of just 7 percent around the world.  Of the 130 countries from which Pew obtained survey data, rates of single-parent households ranged from the low 20s in the United States and United Kingdom to as low as 1 or 2 percent in countries like Turkey and Afghanistan.

The Derangement Syndromes of Our Time.  Who doesn't feel compassion?  Who wouldn't do whatever they can to help someone in need?  But there are intractable problems with compassion gone wild.  In practice, misguided compassion breeds debauchery and dependence.  Anyone wishing to see the former is invited to drive the streets of San Francisco, where they may smell human excrement, tons of which are deposited each week on the sidewalks and gutters by the city's nearly 10,000 homeless.  They may witness thousands of intravenous drug addicts buying and injecting this poison in state-sanctioned acts of slow-motion suicide.  Anyone wishing to see the latter is invited to tour pretty much any legacy housing project in America, where welfare checks and free rent made the presence of a father not merely unnecessary but economically disadvantageous.

The NBA and the Elephant on the Court — Unwed Fathers.  In 1998, Sports Illustrated published a cover story called "Where's Daddy?": "Although there have been no studies on athletes and their out-of-wedlock kids, those who are familiar with the issue say the numbers are staggering.  'I'd say that there might be more kids out of wedlock than there are players in the NBA,' estimates one of the league's top agents, who says he spends more time dealing with paternity claims than he does negotiating contracts.  "Len Elmore, an ESPN broadcaster and former NBA player, worked as an agent but says he quit in part because of a 'lack of responsibility' among his clients.  'For numbers, I would guess that one (out-of-wedlock child) for every player is a good ballpark figure.  For every player with none, there's a guy with two or three.'"

Social and Political Disintegration Is Accelerating.  In 1960, 5% of the nation's children were born out of wedlock; but in the last few years, the percentage is hovering around 40%.  Sexual immorality is further intensified by promotion of sexual activity in our public schools.  Free condoms are regularly distributed in our educational institutions.  Some states have clinics where, after a ten-minute interview, young girls are given referrals to get an abortion (no parental or caregiver consent, for example, is needed in New York State as well as other states).  In many states, at least one parent must be informed, but consent is not required.  Little children are sitting on the laps of drag queens in library "readings" and some of those drag queens have records of pedophilia.  Homosexual marriage is now the law of the land.  Trashy exhibitionists are singing on youtube.com and throughout the media.  A million babies are aborted a year, not for "women's health" in 90+% of the cases, but because of women's priorities.  These changes in our sexual mores have led to the disintegration of the family.

Hudson: Affirmative Action Has 'Destroyed People's Lives'.  [Scroll down]  [Jerome] Hudson also reflected on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson's left-wing Great Society vision and the "welfare state."  "One of the more searing points is that the poverty line in America had been decreasing 20 years before President Lyndon Johnson launched his quote-unquote 'War on Poverty,' and if you have the book, you can see the chart — poverty was taking a nosedive, and leave it to Democrats to create a situation where there is actually no crisis of poverty in America, and in fact, something amazing happens — particularly with black people — between 1910 and about 1955.  You had, on scale, more blacks being married and having kids than whites for about four or five decades.  I'm not the first person to argue that welfare has basically replaced the father in the black home."

How Trump Can Use Racial Resentment to Get Reelected.  [Scroll down]  Still, such policies don't explain why other racial groups, living under the same policies, have lower incidences of violence and of cultural dysfunction than blacks.  Whether the liberal city is Baltimore, New York, or Portland, Oregon, Asians and Jews have very low incidences of violence and of cultural dysfunction, while blacks abound in each.  The problem, then, is black culture, and the family in particular.

Researchers: Crumbling family structures are contributing to mass shootings.  A study by the Family Research Council says that crumbling traditional family structures are contributing to a wave of mental health issues that often lead people to commit mass shootings and other violence.  "The fact that we have an epidemic of absentee fathers in the home and that we have a disintegrating family structure in America, which is brought about by a variety of things, is a major issue and a major cause for what we see happening in these mass shootings," Ret. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Vice President of the FRC, told The Epoch Times.

Of the 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters, 26 of Them Had One Thing in Common.  Suzanne Venker's recent opinion piece on FoxNews is very, very important, because she points out that almost all of the most recent deadly mass shooters have one thing in common:  fatherlessness.

How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society and Family Life.  The welfare state is another significant driver of the decline of the nuclear family.  Unsurprisingly, the black family is massively impacted.  In 1965, 25 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock.  In 2016, that rate had increased to 70 percent and even topped 80 percent in certain urban areas.  In the 1940s, this number was five percent, which was comparable to that of white children.  The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate in 2016 was 52 percent, while for whites it was 30 percent.  The rise in children born out of wedlock cannot be separated from the massive expansion of the welfare state under Johnson's Great Society.

The American Left Is Racist, Not President Trump.  Does anyone truly believe there isn't a causal relationship between 50 years of welfare spending and the destruction of the black family, where only one-third of black households with children have a father and mother?  Ah, but the "traditional family" is oppressive, patriarchal, and obsolete! [...] It is not racist to point out that the reason for disparate educational outcomes, where whites and Asians outperform blacks and Latinos, is more likely caused by the destruction of the traditional two-parent family than by racism.

Fathers Matter — A Lot.  The truth of the title is obvious to all but the most fanatically anti-natural-family ideologues, and yet, our culture is drowning in fatherlessness and seems unable to get this most elemental requirement of healthy families right.  So, our society suffers.

America's Detour from Sanity.  Up until about 1960, children that were not orphans had fathers and mothers living together in a nest secured with bonds of love and civil rules inspired by God.  That life is sacred was taken as fact, not opinion.  Women were cherished and respected by men who were brought up to be gentlemen.  You did not require a high IQ to know that a man could never be the equal of a woman, and vice-versa.  Respecting each other's real differences, both sexes would laugh at the ridiculous notion that male and female are interchangeable, either in function or psyche.  Such a claim, as made by post-Friedan feminists, reveal a mind tangled in abstractions and lost in wish lists.

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.  Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness.  The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof.  A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: "Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions."  Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking.

Facebook Suspends Candace Owens For Saying Liberal Policies Incentivize Fatherless Homes.  The social media monopoly has suspended activist and commentator Candace Owens for the crime of claiming that liberal policies incentivize fatherless homes in the black community.  Owens was hit with a 7 day ban for posting, "Black America must wake up to the great liberal hoax.  White supremacy is not a threat.  Liberal supremacy is."  She then included a screenshot of a tweet which pointed out that the poverty rate amongst married blacks is 7 percent, compared to 22 percent for blacks generally.

Thank you, Michelle Obama!  As a mother of a divorced dad who's been fighting for shared parenting legislation, I'd like to thank our former first lady for her insensitive and cavalier remarks concerning divorced dads and parenting when she compared the Trump era to "living with divorced dad."  In just one riveting sound bite, Michelle Obama brought to light the dangerous misperceptions that our family courts and legislators have about parenting and divorce.  Maybe some divorced dads (and moms) are terrible parents, as Michelle depicts.  But that's not relevant when it comes to shared parenting and family court reform.  There's a bigger issue, and that's about how much time and responsibility each fit, able, and willing parent of divorce gets to have with their children.

Leftism Threatens American Family Life.  The main problem with their socialism (communism relabeled) is that it will weaken or even give the coup de grace to the family.  Government will pretend it can take care of people and give sufficient womb to tomb nurturance, and can do what no family can do in terms of assuring security, purpose, and even love.  Undoubtedly under any new federal takeover of day-to-day life there will be new "love laws."  Virtue signaling will become passé, and persons will be open to public contempt and fines if they do not participate in state-defined love signaling.  These assumptions and promotions are gaining momentum among our obsessed, depressed, and possessed fellow citizens as they experience lovelessness to an extreme.

Your Family Can Save Our Civilization.  Everybody has mentors, of course, or one hopes everyone may be so blessed.  But for the majority of human beings who have ever lived on God's green Earth, their values come from their parents.  It's incontrovertible.  Parents are our primary role models.  And for men, you always — always — try to live up to your father's example.

Tucker Carlson's Firebell.  Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated.  In it, he fingered long-standing economic policies pushed by Swamp residents and their donors for the benefit of a rootless elite class and an establishment about whom we might be tempted to say, "They hate normal Americans," except that it is not clear at all whether they know normal Americans exist.  The latter is the best construction.  Factories closed, jobs shipped overseas, Midwestern wasteland towns, stagnant wages for men in what jobs remain, illegal aliens winked at in order to depress wages and increase the bottom line:  These are major factors contributing to the decline of marriage rates, the delay of marriage, and the increase in bastardy and single-parenthood, and Carlson risked a great deal in saying so, on a program that depends on the advertising dollars of major corporations.

The Worst Enemy of Black People.  Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems.  The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination.  Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.  In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.  Actually, "breakdown" is the wrong term; the black family doesn't form in the first place.  This is entirely new among blacks.

Macy's holiday pajama pics prompt backlash for perceived 'racist' photo.  Macy's product images for its holiday pajamas feature a number of families decked out in festive gear, but some on social media are calling one photo in particular racist.  The collected images shared on social media depict a white couple with children twice, an interracial LGBTQ couple with biracial children, and a black mother with three black children.  Naturally, social media users — in particular, a Cincinnati city councilman, Jeff Pastor — wondered why the family that did not feature a father was black.

The Editor says...
The only thing unusual about this ad is that it it NOT an inversion of the truth, as most advertising is.  Most advertising depicts abnormal relationships as normal, good things as bad, bad things as good, chronic illness as inevitable, and $50,000 as a reasonable price for a new car.  In practically all television ads, the criminals are white males, and all blacks are either the heroes, the experts, or the victims of those evil white people.  In the advertisement discussed in the article above, the black family has no father.  That is not an exceptional situation.  Such a depiction is not something to get upset about. 

The World Needs Fathers.  America needs more good men.  America needs fathers to be present and there.  America needs men to work, earn, protect and provide for their families.  America needs men to treat women and children with a higher regard than society seems to currently favor.  American needs fathers to be an example of true manhood and success.  I know it's not politically correct to say this — but it seems like a major problem with violence, abuse, mass shootings and attacks is fatherlessness.  What do the Parkland, Newtown, Thousand Oaks and the racist SC murderers all have in common?  Single motherhood and absent fathers.

Almost Half of U.S. Births Happen Outside Marriage, Signaling Cultural Shift.  An increasing number of births happen outside of marriage, signaling cultural and economic shifts that are here to stay, according to a new report from the United Nations.  Forty percent of all births in the U.S. now occur outside of wedlock, up from 10 percent in 1970, according to an annual report released on Wednesday by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the largest international provider of sexual and reproductive health services.  That number is even higher in the European Union.

The Consequences of Fatherlessness.  Some fathering advocates would say that almost every social ill faced by America's children is related to fatherlessness.  Six are noted here.  As supported by the data [in this article], children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems.  Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.

Ten Inconvenient Facts.  [#6] The traditional family is best.  Just this week a study came out showing that being a child of divorce cuts in half the likelihood of that child earning a college degree.  That's just one of hundreds of studies demonstrating worse outcomes for children from broken homes.  The infamous "Life of Julia" ad for the Obama 2012 campaign peddled a feminist myth contrary to this mountain of evidence, showing that a woman needn't worry about finding a man to help raise her child.  She can do it just fine all by herself.

The Real Reasons for Chicago's Deadly Crime Wave.  If you were somehow to identify and arrest every single one of the shooters involved in the weekend violence, you would no doubt discover that nearly all of them came from homes with absent fathers, and that nearly all of them had been previously arrested for violent crime.  As Rahm Emanuel knows, to take a stand against hit-and-run fatherhood is to cast blame on a significant portion of the Chicago electorate.  What's more, to do so would also cast blame on the leftist policies that gave rise to the welfare state and to which he owes his political career.  The vast government apparatus that over the years has come to make fathers unnecessary, at least in a financial sense, lies at the very heart of Democratic politics.  Single mothers may do their best, but the research is consistent and irrefutable:  boys raised without fathers are far more likely to become involved in crime.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#29] Stupid Fathers:  Fatherhood is constantly looked upon as either a needless cultural habit or an outright joke.  A 2008 study by a fatherhood advocacy group noted that fathers are all too often portrayed negatively on TV sitcoms.  And Rebecca Hagelin noted in 2009 that commercials, TV shows, and the media often portray fathers as hateful, uninterested in their families, or not nearly as smart as the kids in the family.

The Left and Children.  Even longer than they have ignored the right to life, American liberals have worked to build a massive welfare state that has played a terrible role in the destruction of the family — especially the black family.  Yesterday [6/20/2018], Rush Limbaugh again reminded Americans which political party enabled generations of children — again, especially black children — to be separated from their parents.  The Democrat Party exists on dependency, and people that escape it pose a problem.  So don't buy that the Democrats care about separated families.  Because, after all, the Democrat Party literally subsidized single motherhood in the black community for decades.  It was called AFDC.  The Democrat Party promoted a welfare policy that gave single women additional money for every child they had.  The father need not ever be around.  In many cases, the father was not even known, the father was not even identified because the Democrat Party assumed the role.

Fewer Americans are celebrating Father's Day, because more kids are growing up without fathers.  Fewer people are celebrating Father's Day than ever before, a fact that may have less to do with the nature of the holiday than it does with the nature of American families.  A U.S. Census Bureau study found that the percentage of children living in single-parent households increased from 12 percent in 1960 to 31 percent in 2016.  During that same timeframe, "the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled."

Fathers Deserve More Than Stuff For Father's Day.  They Deserve Respect.  An Internet search for "Father's Day 2018" brings up a top hit:  "20 Last-Minute Father's Day Gifts That Are Amazon Prime-Eligible."  Now, like most dads, I'm not one to complain about receiving gifts (especially when they involve a good weekend of fishing), but something is wrong when popular culture understands the obligations of Father's Day as nothing more than a 30-minute phone call and shipping your dad something Amazon's website said were "Dad's Favorites."  Like so many other things in our culture today, the commercialization of this holiday obscures its true meaning.  Father's Day is about so much more than store sales and cheesy coffee mugs.  It is, to borrow the words a resolution President Calvin Coolidge once signed on its celebration, a day "to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations," and remind ourselves of the importance of fatherhood to our country.

Government removal of children from their parents didn't start with Trump.  The government has routinely taken children from their parents for the past 50 years; not in increments of 2,000 as indicated in the tabloid, but by the millions.  It began with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which included sex on it its list of categories to receive discrimination protection.  This law neutered the American male in general, but the African-American community experienced its immediate implementation.  The government fostered unwed motherhood through financial inducements made possible by the welfare system, which gave women incentives to have children if they weren't married.  Even well-meaning young couples who planned to get married opted for the welfare system because it meant tens of thousands of dollars in increased income over the life of the young family.  Fathers lived with parents, other family members and friends, for if welfare workers found even a pair of pants hanging in the closet of the mother, she would lose her welfare payments.  This was the first step in separating children from parents.  The father was removed from the home.

Going Fatherless on Father's Day.  Gay Pride Month, if you somehow haven't noticed, is this June.  It happens to coincide with the Obergefell decision, June 26, 2015, when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and a handful of robed liberals rendered unto themselves the ability to redefine the multi-millennial, Western, Judeo-Christian, human, Biblical, biological, natural conception of marriage between a man and a woman.  Obergefell is celebrated at the website of the official Gay Pride Calendar by the unforgettable image of President Barack Obama's White House illuminated in rainbow colors.  It's ironic that liberals at Google and the Obama White House would, without any sense of contradiction, celebrate both things; that is, Father's Day and Obergefell.  What's the irony?  The irony is that by redefining marriage in America, and forcibly imposing that redefinition upon all 50 states via judicial fiat, leftists from Barack Obama to Google's anonymous powers have pioneered a form of family that is, flatly, fatherless.  Think about it:  a family of two married women is a family without a father.  Why purposely create fatherless families?

Black America Walking Off the Cliff.  The pre-welfare black society understood the necessity for respect and responsibility.  From slavery until LBJ's War on Poverty programs, intact black American families were the norm.  The church was the glue that sealed biblical bindings in the hearts and minds of the family.  Fathers governed their households, and young men were less likely to become criminals.  Fornicators and adulterers were unwelcomed parasites.  Premarital pregnancies were a rarity, as they were a cause for shame and reproach.  In 1950, eighty-five years after slavery, the two-parent black household was 78%.  By the mid-sixties, black lives started to matter much less under LBJ's Great Society.  Now, just fifty-three years after the War on Poverty began, the once stable two-parent black household has disintegrated to an abysmal 27%, and the black church is all but silent!  The roots of this catastrophe were sown the minute the black church started trusting in government instead of God.

Target to remove 'Baby Daddy' cards that features a black couple.  Customer ire has pushed Target to remove its ' Baby Daddy' greeting cards from stores ahead of Father's Day.  Frustration with the cards first started approximately 2 weeks ago when Facebook user Takeisha Saunders posted a photo of the card.

Company slammed for 'Baby Daddy' Father's Day card.  You can't judge a book by its cover — but a Father's Day card, that's a different story.  Just ask American Greetings, which caught plenty of grief on Thursday for its tone-deaf "Baby Daddy" card.  The card, which was quickly removed from the greeting card company's website — as well as from Target, where it was being sold — featured a silhouetted black couple on the cover behind the two-word greeting.

The More Young Men Are Bathed in Femininity, the More 'Toxic Masculinity' You Will See.  One of the most ironic things about the constant "toxic masculinity" complaints that we hear these days is that we live in an overly feminized culture where most of the "toxic" males seem to have either been raised without fathers or claim to be adherents of feminism. [...] We take a young man and kick his father out of his life, send him to school where he has mostly women teachers, barrage him with negative messages about masculinity, then turn him loose at college where we treat him like a guilty-until-proven-innocent rapist, and after all that, we blame "masculinity" when he goes off the rails despite the fact that he spent a lifetime bathed in femininity.  Unsurprisingly, the more women try to change masculinity, the more negative and toxic it actually becomes.  Yet, articles explaining how masculinity needs to be changed and rewired — written by women or feminized males — are practically a cottage industry these days.

Before and After Welfare Handouts.  What we have in our nation is not material poverty but dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives, aided and abetted by the welfare state.  Part of this pathological lifestyle is reflected in family structure.  According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers.  Today it's respectively 75 percent and 30 percent.

Project Freedom.  The vagaries of human nature guarantee that we'll always have ne'er-do-wells.  But in the 1960s, American elite culture multiplied them, by stripping the stigma from a wide swath of misbehavior, partly because elites hankered for their own fling with sex, drugs, and dropping out, and partly because they came to think that centuries of racial victimization made society, not the individual, responsible for dysfunctional black behavior.  Society, the new orthodoxy claimed, was to blame for the supposed lack of opportunity that discouraged black Americans from working and learning, for the rage and resentment that fueled disproportionate black criminality, and for the despair that heroin and crack served to dull.  Moreover, once out-of-wedlock sex lost its shame in the elite worldview, so did out-of-wedlock childbearing, widespread enough among black Americans a century ago to trouble W. E. B. Du Bois deeply, but astronomically higher after the cultural changes of the 1960s.  As public opinion normalized single-parent families, the elites' belief that America owed some cash reparation for 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow found an outlet in the hefty enrichment of a Depression-era program meant to aid widows and orphans, for which unwed mothers were also eligible.  No longer stigmatized, and financially enabled by fattened welfare benefits, illegitimate births in inner-city neighborhoods soon soared above 80 percent.

The Four Terrible Things That Are Destroying Boys In Our Culture.  Let's imagine the world the average 13-year-old boy inhabits. [...] The boy cannot escape sex.  It is all over his computer.  All over his phone.  All over social media.  All over the TV.  All over the music he listens to.  He goes to school and his female classmates are dressed like strippers.  He goes anywhere and that's how the women are dressed.  It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand that he control himself.

The Surreal World of Teaching.  [D]id you know that in the inverted world of education today, if a student has a baby, then more financial aid is available?  Indeed!  Consequently, students are being told by their college advisers that they should get pregnant.  Even some of the students are appalled at this suggestion.  But then there are those who proclaim that "the money comes from the government," implying that it is not really problematic.  Deliberately unschooled in how things actually work, and already the recipients of financial assistance, these students see government as the ultimate security blanket.  There is no connection to the idea that government comprises taxpayers.  What a wonderful idea — to have a money tree somewhere pumping out financial aid ad infinitum!

Of Course Children Prefer Liberalism.  Liberals knew well what they were doing as they worked for decades at destroying the family.  As generations of Americans have been raised in broken homes — often by broken people — it makes it easier to make them wards of the state.  After all, if you don't have parents who care much or provide much for you, why not look to Uncle Sam and his trillions?  One of the great lies of modern liberalism — perhaps the great lie — is that the world owes us something, and it's up to us to do whatever it takes to get it.  If one has the "right" to do whatever one wishes in the sexual realm, why take responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy?  And if we don't have to worry about sex leading to children, why get married at all?  And if we want to get married, why can't we define what is marriage?

Another Inconvenient Truth.  The nuclear family unit has been desecrated, belittled and devalued by a people in a secular world that have developed their own morals, ignoring the eternal Author of morality.

Professor Says Men [are] Taught There's Something Wrong With Masculinity.  In the first installment of a weekly series on Men In America, Tucker Carlson discussed the disparagement of masculinity with University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson.  Carlson said many middle-aged men know people who have committed suicide, and that younger women may seem more "on the ball" than young men.  He added that in the recent rash of mass shootings, all culprits were men.

The vast majority of mass shooters come from broken homes.  To point out that boys need their fathers is to shine a spotlight on divorce and single mothers; and that is, admittedly, uncomfortable.  But there's no way to address fatherlessness comfortably.  The fact is, divorce and family breakdown — which, to answer my emailer's question, is the root of fatherlessness — is catastrophic for children.  There's more than one reason why, but an obvious one is that in the majority of cases, divorce separates children from their fathers.  This is destructive to both boys and girls, but each sex suffers differently.  Girls who grow up deprived of their father are more likely to become depressed, more likely to self-harm, and more likely to be promiscuous.  But they still have their mothers, with whom they clearly identify.  Boys do not have a comparable identification and thus suffer more from father absence.

America's inexorable decline continues.  [The Florida shooter], age 19, was a young man who had no male role model in his life.  Whatever underlying mental illness he had, it is dangerous to ignore the fact that [he], like so many young American men today, lacked positive male role models.  This is important because, until the rise of modern Feminism, virtues that were considered decidedly masculine, such as "fatherly instinct, loyalty, fraternity and camaraderie, constancy, courage, chivalry, patriotism, protector, laborer, and responsibility" were highly valued by society.  Thus, men — and the need for positive male role models — were cherished.  Unfortunately, we do not live in a society that believes men can or should be the exclusive proprietors of these virtues or a society that wants these virtues to be distilled at all.  Just look at how society has reacted since the terrible Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting last week.  The Left's anti-gun and pernicious "toxic masculinity" agendas have fused, and become a widely popular belief.  But, neither guns nor masculinity were the cause of Parkland high school shooting.  In fact, it was the lack of masculinity — or the toxicity of what modern American Liberalism defines as worthwhile male behavior today — that spurred [the shooter] on in his dastardly deeds last week.

When Will We Have the Guts to Link Fatherlessness to School Shootings?  Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen minutes of fame, let's start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999.  Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge:  fatherlessness.  Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.

Marriage is a great anti-poverty program.  So why does government discourage it?  For example, let's say a couple is living together, unmarried, with their two children.  Each partner has a low-wage job and a poverty-level income.  The single mother and her two children get payments through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program run by the federal government and their state.  But if the mother marries the father, their combined income is just a bit too high to quality for government assistance — so they lose their monthly payment.  To avoid that, the two don't get married.  Abruptly ending assistance to couples when they marry is a shortsighted policy that acts as a powerful disincentive to marry.  That's bad for the couples, their children and our country.

The Real Gender Gap:  Family Breakdown and Black Males.  Data from the state of Virginia shows a strong association between single parent households and violent crime. [...] According to the Heritage Foundation, black illegitimacy rose exponentially halfway through the 1960s.  This is precisely when the perverse incentives of Johnson's "War on Poverty" were being implemented.

Infidelity rates by ethnicity.  The following table, constructed from GSS data, shows self-admitted cheating rates among those who were married when they were fooling around, sorted in descending order by female creeping: [...]

Transgenderism Is an Intellectual Disease.  Like sex itself, having children out of wedlock used to be a matter of shame.  It is no longer so.  Marriage used to be understood as a partnership that people undertook for fundamentally practical reasons centered around survival.  Now it embodies a strange expectation:  "emotional fulfillment."  Like a bottomless soft drink, one's spouse is to keep one perpetually satisfied and refreshed.  This sentimental notion of marriage, so representative of our time, is terribly wrongheaded — indeed, it is mere egotism — and the result is a culture of children, many of them unintended, who are poorly raised products of transient encounters. [...] For me, the end of the family signals the end of civilization itself.  But in trying to make the family normal again, we encounter the most formidable of obstacles:  human pride and its desire for absolute sovereignty.

40 Percent Of Kids Now Born To Single Moms — Up 700 Percent Since 1960.  A recent report from the Social Capital Project reveals that the American family is disintegrating, fast.  Fully 40 percent of mothers are currently unmarried.  This is bad news, because good families depend on good marriages.  Marriage is the moral glue that binds them.  It's the stabilizing agent.  There's a reason that children from married couples do better in school, and are less likely to end up in jail as compared to children of unmarried mothers, known as "fragile families."  Lavar Young, civil rights activist, thinks marriage is a powerful tool for fighting against racial inequality.

CDC: Black men better fathers than white men.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which I affectionately refer to as the Diseased Centers of Control, have conducted a study showing that black men make better parents than white men.  The study, conducted in 2013, came to light in a recent Washington Post article on the Post's favorite topic — you guessed it! — of racism.  The study was conducted by the CDC's Division of Vital Statistics, centering on how involved fathers are in the lives of their children. [...] We have to thank the CDC for bringing this to our attention.  The CDC are funded to fight diseases, but it's great how they take taxpayer money and do all sorts of creative things with it — like this study!

The Profound Value of 'Merry Christmas'.  The words "Merry Christmas" are the tip of the iceberg of our longing to go back to a more normal America.  The words are not merely about elevating a Christian celebration or an earlier period of exclusive white dominance. [...] "Merry Christmas" instead has a cluster of meanings that include the birth of Christ, of course, but also are linked through nostalgia and through the facticity of history to a time where more families were intact, where a more positive view of our heritage as a Christian society was held, where sexual mores frowned upon premarital and non-marital sex, where the USA itself was seen as a beacon and a haven in a world of poverty, heathen belief systems, and dictatorial governments.  The words "Merry Christmas" resonate with a dominant belief in the worth of the individual as being greater than the needs or consciousness of the "collective."  Yes, "Merry Christmas" is about shopping at Macy's or Saks or Amazon, but it implicitly and nostalgically reminds us that the family, not the "global village," is the building block of society.

Moral Values and Customs vs.  Laws.  It has always been considered a good idea to refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage or at least adulthood.  During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passe and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortion.  Out-of-wedlock childbirths are no longer seen as shameful and a disgrace.  As a result, the rate of illegitimate births among whites is over 30 percent, and among blacks, it's over 70 percent.  For over a half-century, the nation's liberals — along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts — have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values.  Many in today's generation have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes.  Instead, what's moral or immoral, right or wrong, is a matter of convenience, personal opinion or what is or is not criminal.

The Wealth Gap Between White and Black in America.  On average, as persons near retirement age, black families and individuals have about one fifth as much in the way of assets as white families. Even when black incomes start to approach white incomes, the wealth gap remains immense.  Economists have long been trying to figure out exactly why this is.  Part is because blacks do not own their own homes as much as whites do.  Plus, there is considerably less inheritance between and among generations in black families and with regard to individuals.  But even correcting for these factors, as statisticians can do, the gap between blacks and whites in terms of wealth remains immense.  There do seem to be three factors that do explain it:  One is that married couples pool their incomes and thus can find the wherewithal to save.  Whites marry at a rate about three times that of blacks.  By itself, that explains a lot.  Pooling of income is a serious step towards financial security.  Next, families that stay together and do not disperse their savings tend to have more money available to save and invest.  White families tend not only to marry more often but also to stay together more than black families and that, too, is an explanation for a lot.

Out of Wedlock Birth Rates High in America; End of Shotgun Weddings Partially to Blame.  The Social Capital Project (SCP), spearheaded by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) is an ongoing project of Congress's Joint Economic Committee to measure the breakdown in what Lee and others talk about as "associational life" in America.  That refers to the institutions — churches, schools, teams, and other civic organizations — which connect Americans and mediate between the individual and the state.  Preeminent among these institutions, the new report argues, is the family, which it calls "the most intimate and central form of associational life."  "A healthy family life is the foundation for a healthy associational life... weakened family life portends a diminished ability of a people to promote and nurture the civil society and pro-social norms that facilitate happiness and prosperity," the report notes.  The weakening of family life, the report contends, is signalled and determined by the shocking rise in unmarried birth rates over the past half a century.  This matters in part because the children of single mothers, whether the parents nominally "stay together" or split up, do worse across a number of dimensions when compared to their peers from intact homes.

Denzel Washington:  Prison system not to blame for crime in black communities.  Actor Denzel Washington stressed the prison system was not to blame for crime in black communities, stressing the importance of properly raising children at home, during his tour promoting his new movie at an advanced screening last week.  "It starts in the home," the two-time Oscar-winner told The Grio.  "If the father is not in the home, the boy will find a father in the streets.  I saw it in my generation and every generation before me, and every one since."  "If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home," 62-year-old Washington added.

Liberal Author Says She's Being Blackballed for Warning about Dangers of Early Daycare.  Erica Komisar describes herself as a political liberal.  But, when it came to getting her book Being There:  Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters published, let alone publicized, she was roundly rejected by liberal media outlets.  Why?  Because the social worker and psychoanalyst chose to stand with fact instead of political fiction in the ongoing mommy wars.

Has Promoting Mother Absence Spawned Campus Crybabies?  The reflective Mary Eberstadt has the latest Weekly Standard cover story, asserting that the late rise of identity politics especially among the young descends from the decline in family, despite myriad other theories. [...] She touches on some of the research that has become well-known among child psychologists and sociologists, referencing the dramatic increase in, for example, mental health problems, at a high point now on campuses and in the public at large.  Mental health problems are linked with family instability, as are reductions in the resources that can help alleviate them, such as church attendance and deeper, broader community relationships.  Divorce and failure to marry before bearing children also harm nearby families that do not themselves experience these maladies.  Private choices are in fact not private choices, after all.

Having 'white nuclear family' promotes white supremacy, says New York professor, report says.  A City University of New York sociology professor reportedly said in a tweetstorm last week that "the white-nuclear family" promotes racism, prompting a backlash on social media.  Jessie Daniels, described as an expert on "the Internet manifestations of racism" on her CUNY page, infuriated social media users after reportedly saying that white families promote racism by default.

Motherhood Before Marriage.  A fascinating, in-depth study published in 2005 — Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage — explores the views of low-income single mothers whose children are illegitimate.  Its insights on out-of-wedlock births shatter the paradigms of poverty warriors left and right.  The harmful effects of growing up without a father in the home are depressingly well documented.  Children raised in single-parent homes are more likely than children raised in intact families to have emotional and behavioral problems, to engage in crime, to fail in school, to abuse drugs, and to be on welfare as adults.

Census: More Americans 18-to-34 Now Live With Parents Than With Spouse.  Four decades ago, in the mid-1970s, young American adults — in the 18-to-34 age bracket — were far more likely to be married and living with a spouse than living in their parents' home.  But that is no longer the case, according to a new study by the U.S. Census Bureau.  "There are now more young people living with their parents than in any other arrangement," says the Census Bureau study.

The American Dream Hinges on Family.  The American family has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last 50 years.  The number of single parents in America has increased threefold since 1960.  Nearly one-third of households are now headed by single parents, most of whom are mothers, although the number of single fathers is on the rise.  [S]ignificantly, this transformation hasn't occurred across the whole population; instead, it has disproportionately affected the low and middle-income households who can least afford to take an economic hit.  According to [Raj] Chetty, the number of single parents in a community is the single biggest predictor of social mobility.  More than four in ten single mothers live at or below the poverty line compared with one in ten married mothers.

Why Are Black College Graduates Less Wealthy than Other Grads?  [Scroll down]  Now consider the demographics of black college graduates.  The overwhelming majority are women.  Females now account for 66 percent of all bachelor's degrees earned by blacks, 70 percent of master's degrees, and 60 percent of doctorates.  Women tend to desire husbands who are as educated or more educated than they are, which makes marriage more difficult for black women with higher education degrees.  According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the percentage of black women college graduates aged 25 to 35 who have never married is 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women.  Further, only 2 percent of highly-educated white women had children out of wedlock, whereas 26 percent of black women with four-year degrees did. [...] Oh, and black couples are more likely to divorce than others.

Parents, quit caring more about the White House than your own house.  Right now in America our greatest strength and weakness is the family unit.  What happens in the American cornerstone, our house, will be the foremost factor that determines our nation's ascent or decline.  Divorce rates hover around 50 percent.  The United States pornography industry brings in more money than the NFL, NBA and MLB combined and has infiltrated the institution of marriage, morality and adolescent minds.  Children raised in single-parent homes are on the rise.  Many of our inner cities are becoming the dens of crime due to lack of discipline and leadership from parents.  Absentee fathers are the norm.

Black History (aka Demonize White America) Month.  Clarence Thomas describes Myers, his grandfather, as "the greatest man I have ever known."  Where are such strong, wise, character-driven, and masculine mentors for black males today?  The number-one mission of high-profile blacks (actors, politicians and preachers) appears to be getting blacks to embrace same-sex marriage, men using little girl's restrooms, and blaming white America.  Myers' Godly principles and values are only echoes of a distant past in the black community today.

LBJ vs. the Nuclear Family.  Fifty years ago, in 1966, a political revolution emerged in America that would have a massive impact on millions of families and marriages.  The man behind it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who reached the White House amid a national tragedy but grabbed the reins of power quickly and purposefully, bent on transforming the country.  Though he is lionized in popular culture these days, it is worth asking whether the celebratory tone accurately reflects the results of his revolution, at least in terms of his massive Great Society.

Report: Only 16% of Baltimore Teens Raised With Married Parents.  A new report released by the Family Research Council's Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family.  The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is "one of the five least intact counties of America," along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn.

Blacks and Politicians.  The overall welfare of black people requires attention to devastating problems that can be solved only at the family and community levels.  Mountains of evidence demonstrates that outcomes are not favorable for children raised in female-headed households.  Criminal behavior is greater, and academic achievement is much less for such children.  This is a devastating problem, but it is beyond the reach of a president or any other politician to solve.  If there is a solution, it will come from churches and local community organizations.

All the Queen's Men.  [Scroll down]  Lest we forget:  It was at a Manhattan LGBT Gala in September where Hillary Clinton proclaimed half of her opponent's supporters to be a basket of deplorables — a declaration met with resounding cheers from those whose lives stand for anti-complementary, anti-conjugal marriage.  Beyond that, these are the urbane pro-motherlessness and pro-fatherlessness elites.  Progressive elites — especially the males among them — are untroubled by motherlessness and fatherlessness.  This would have been horrifying ten years ago.  Today it is a badge of sophistication.  More troubling, it is an act of compliance with our new laws.  In the religion of the sexual revolution, adult access to sexual pleasure trumps everything else, including the best interests of children.  And leading the charge to destroy the American family and faith — dragging us deeper into the dark pit of chaos of the sexual revolution — are all the Queen's men.  Why are we deplorable to them?  Because we strive to maintain a degree of self control over our appetites.  And more than that, we have a conscience, especially concerning the loving care of children, and they have none.  They cannot bear our presence.

'Favors' to Blacks.  A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.  In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent.  By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.

Corrupt Academics and the Media.  Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination.  They ignore the following facts.  In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married.  Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it's close to 70 percent.  Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites.  During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.  According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers.  Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income.  As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women.  Today over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers.  Again, so much for the "legacy of slavery" argument.

Princeton dives into the deep end of the political correctness pool.  [Scroll down]  Though Princeton insists this is not policy, merely guidelines, and no words are banned, it encourages the use of a vocabulary that is more gender neutral.  So, instead of man and wife use spouses or partners.  Instead of man made, use artificial, handmade, manufactured, synthetic.  Gone is the verb to man, as in to work something, instead use to operate or to staff.  Throw out workmanlike and replace it with skillful.  No more actresses, only actors.  Coed?  Out.  Replaced by student.  Forefathers?  Gone.  Ancestors is the preferred word.  Forget freshman.  It's now first-year student or frosh.

Lifelike baby dolls not effective birth control, study finds.  A weekend spent mothering a robot baby to mirror the "real experience" of parenting is meant to discourage teenage girls from getting pregnant.  But so-called Baby Think it Over dolls don't cut teen pregnancy rates and in fact increase the risk, Australian research has found.  In a study published in The Lancet medical journal Friday, researchers found teenage girls who used the lifelike computerized dolls as part of a pregnancy-prevention program were more likely to become pregnant compared with girls receiving a less high-tech sex education.

The Anti-Cop President.  [The 1960s] sexual revolution removed the stigma from out-of-wedlock pregnancy.  An explosion of inner-city illegitimacy ensued, with between 70 and 90 percent of black children born to single mothers, depending on the city. [...] So by the early 1990s, murders in New York, for example — mostly by young black men killing other blacks — were occurring on average every four hours, every day.  The same spirit of elite racial contrition made generous welfare payments, with virtually no questions asked, seem like appropriate reparations for the long mistreatment of African Americans.  In this way, government ended up enabling the spread of out-of-wedlock childbearing, which the culture had legitimated.  But those fatherless welfare families proved far from ideal for raising successful, law-abiding children.  What came to be called the cycle of poverty — single parenthood, school dropout, drug use, crime, non-work, welfare dependency — went into overdrive.

Obama Is The Last Person To Turn To For Healing And Peace.  [Scroll down]  The Democrats have established their future voting block and re-election efforts on poor people, disproportionately black under the Obama administration, whose population is also disproportionately unemployed and poorly educated with no fathers in the home and whose mothers are swamped with too many welfare children to raise alone on a barely existent welfare budget and living in crime-ridden areas.

We Have a 'War on Cops' because of the War on the Family.  [Scroll down]  It has been widely reported for years now that the out-of-wedlock birth rate among American blacks is over 70 percent.  Almost always, mothers are left to raise their children alone.  In U.S. cities, where the violence and poverty among U.S. blacks is most pronounced, the out-of-wedlock birth rate is even worse.  For example, in Chicago about 80 percent of black children are born to single mothers.  Today, only 17 percent of American black teenagers reach age 17 in a family with their biological parents married to each other.  In no state in the U.S does black family intactness exceed 30 percent.  Social science is finally revealing what sound morality and good common sense always told us:  Children of single mothers do worse in almost every metric measured:  school achievement, poverty, crime, emotional well-being, drug use, delinquency, violent behavior, and so on.  These negative outcomes are even worse for black children born to single mothers.

CDC: 40%+ of U.S. Babies Born to Unmarried Women for 8th Straight Year.  Of the 3,977,745 babies born in the United States of America in 2015, 1,600,208 of them — or 40.2 percent — were born to unmarried mothers, according to data released this month by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  That makes 2015 the eighth straight year that 40 percent or more of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers, according to CDC data.

Welfare: The Hand-Basket Road of Good Intentions.  "More 18 to 34 year-olds are living at home than any other living arrangement" because the government has supplanted the husband in the American nuclear family.  Wednesday's [5/25/2016] AT featured a blog by Rick Moran titled "More 18 to 34-year-olds are living at home than any other living arrangement," which speculated attribution of the phenomenon to later marriages in the demographic, a poor economy, and few available jobs.  But the later marriages are not a cause; they are an effect.  The cause of the later marriages is the War on Poverty, as amply illustrated in a report by The Heritage Foundation titled "How Welfare Undermines Marriage and What to Do About It."

Sheriff Clarke:  Democrats 'decimated the black family'.  Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Sunday accused the Democratic Party of "bigotry" that has "decimated the black family."  Clarke, who has become a leading conservative black voice on gun rights and other issues, was responding to Hillary Clinton's charge Saturday evening that a Trump presidency would put "more kids at risk of violence and bigotry."  "If black kids are at risk from anybody, it's from other black kids in black-on-black crime," Clarke said.

America's Addiction to Pleasure Harms Marriage and Family.  Granted, many factors have contributed to the decline of marriage and family in the U.S, but one underlying factor is frequently overlooked:  America's obsession with pleasurable indulgence.  Marriage and family will inevitably decline in a society of too many self-absorbed pleasure junkies, which is basically what we've become.  The selfless, sacrificial love that's necessary to sustain marriage and families involves doing the difficult — whether one feels like it or not:  foregoing one's self-interest for others; compromising with others; and putting children's interests ahead of one's own.  But pleasure junkies have conditioned themselves to do the opposite.

Why the War on Poverty Is So Unwinnable.  Any assault on poverty collides with powerful social and economic forces that are undermining marriage and families.  The report lays out the bleak facts, which include:
  •   Out-of-wedlock births are soaring among all major racial and ethnic groups.  Among whites, the percentage of births to unmarried women went from 5.7% in 1970 to 35.9% in 2010; among Hispanics, the rise was 36.7% (in 1980) to 53.4%; and among blacks, the increase was from 37.8% to 72.1%.
  •   Low-income men, especially blacks, are working less, and wages have stagnated for those with jobs.  For black men aged 20 to 24, only half had jobs in 2013, down from a high of about 65% in the late 1980s.
  •   Meanwhile, the wages of the poorer 50% of all men are "more or less what they had been in 1979."  By contrast, wages for the poorer half of women rose 35% in the same period.
  •   As a result, family structure has changed dramatically.  In 1970, nearly four-fifths of women at age 35 were married with children, while slightly less than 10% were single with children — a ratio of 8-to-1.
By 2010, the ratio was roughly 2.5-to-1, with about half of women married with children and 20% single with children.

Feminization of America Is Bad for the World.  Unfortunately, more and more American women are single.  Meanwhile American boys are increasingly raised by single women and taught almost only by female teachers.  In addition, they are often taught to be ashamed of their masculine natures and to reject traditional masculine virtues.  As a result of the above two trends, the amount spent on national defense will continue to decline (while the amount spent on welfare will continue to increase), and America will confront the world's evils less and less.  The consequences will be disastrous for millions of people around the globe.  When America retreats from killing bad guys, bad guys kill more innocent people.

Fatherless Black Males and Same-Sex Parenting.  [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan's word taken in the present context of same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting casts a light on black lesbians as a new matriarchal structure within the black community that is being acknowledged.  However, what is rarely mentioned is that the African American community already has many years of experience with female same-sex parenting in the forms of structures such as mother/grandmother, mother/aunt, and mother/female family-friend co-parenting.  I argue that all forms of female same-sex parenting in the black community have been incomplete in general for raising black males, and adding another female same-sex parenting structure (lesbian couples) as a new accepted norm further distracts from the importance of black men as fathers in the black community.

Why Family Structure is So Important.  Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution released a study that reported "most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes."  Why this is so is still hotly contested.  Another study, co-authored by Wilcox, found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty.

Marriage And Economic Growth — A Match Made In Heaven.  [A recent] study, published by the American Enterprise Institute, looked at the relationship between marriage rates and economic growth at the state level.  It found that high levels of marriage and higher levels of intact families "are strongly associated with more economic growth, more economic mobility, less child poverty, and higher median family income."  States with the highest marriage rates, it found, had a $1,451 higher per-capita GDP than those at the bottom of the marriage pile.  This relationship is actually a stronger predictor of these measures of well-being than commonly measured variables like the educational, racial, and age compositions of states, the study concluded.

The Ivory Tower Continues to Crumble.  [Scroll down]  Apart from these breathtaking displays of ignorance, another serious problem is the preponderance of single-mother families.  Many of these students are caring individuals who are shouldering enormous responsibilities that used to be the purview of a husband; thus, when their mothers become sick, they need to stay at home to tend to the mother.  Sometimes it involves helping with bathing or medication.  Other times, they are the only ones who can provide transportation for the mother to go to the hospital.  And then there was the young woman who has been absent because she had "to take care of her boyfriend's mother."  Such absences create serious gaps in an already fractured learning background.

100 Facts About The Moral Collapse Of America That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe: 
[#25] In the United States today, more than half of all couples "move in together" before they get married.
[#26] Not surprisingly, an all-time low 44.2 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34-year-old age bracket are married at this point.
[#27] America has the highest divorce rate in the world by a good margin.
[#28] America has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.
[#29] 100 years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.
[#30] According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all American adults are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all adults in the United States were married.
[#31] For women under the age of 30 in the United States, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.
[#32] At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.
[#33] In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old.  Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old.

If you're an absentee father, you probably don't have any idea what your kids are up to.
Death of Gunman in Oregon College Shootings Is Ruled Suicide.  The father of the gunman who killed nine people at a community college here called on the nation to change its gun laws on Saturday [10/3/2015], saying the massacre "would not have happened" if his son had not been able to buy so many handguns and rifles.  "How was he able to compile that kind of arsenal?" the father, Ian Mercer, said in an interview with CNN at his home in Tarzana, Calif.  He said he had no idea that his son owned more than a dozen firearms.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal Defends Comments Blaming Oregon School Shooter's Father for Massacre.  In a blog post on his campaign website, Jindal said the father of Chris Harper-Mercer should be embarrassed to show his face in public.  Ian Mercer, the shooter's father, told CNN last weekend he was surprised to learn his son had gotten so many guns.  "The killer's father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns," Jindal wrote.  "Of course he doesn't know.  You know why he doesn't know?  Because he is not, and has never been in his son's life.  He is a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public.  He's the problem here."

Reality Therapy for Liberals.  Look at what has happened to our black urban communities since the father was made irrelevant by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society policies.  Here we are now, nearly a half century later and the ghettos are worse than ever, over 70% of black mothers are single moms, in New York City 69% of black pregnancies end in abortion.  High school graduation for blacks is only 69%.  Unemployment especially amongst young black males peaked in 2009 at 49%, drug use and incarceration rates are off the charts.  Obviously, a society cannot function without strong families headed by strong fathers; it takes no leap of faith to reach that conclusion.  Yet people still contend that family is merely a human construct and can be redefined willy-nilly.

Rep. DeLauro Pushes for Gov't Assisted 24/7 Child Care.  Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) has been promoting federal government child care assistance "that expands with need," focusing on 24 hour availability and pay of at least $15 an hour for child care workers.  DeLauro was part of an event last week at Sleeping Giant Day Care in Connecticut, where she discussed her support for a resolution on universal child care.  "I'm proud to add my name to a resolution supported by SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and the Congressional Progressive Caucus," DeLauro says in a video released Monday [8/24/2015] by the SEIU.

The Editor says...
Once the government takes 24-hour control of the lower-class children, the government will be the head of the household, unionized workers will dispense all meals, and the kids will be immersed in all-day indoctrination.  This can only result in cradle-to-prison socialism.

Also posted under Politicians and unions exchange favors constantly.

Obama's "Community Schools" Aim to Replace the Family.  Lawmakers and the Obama administration are plotting to unconstitutionally commandeer local schools and turn them into "full-service community schools" — government centers that will usurp vast new responsibilities over children that have traditionally been handled by parents and families.  Under the plan, adopted in the Senate last month as part of a massive "education bill" solidifying federal control over children and schools, federally funded so-called community schools will "target" families and children for "services" covering their "academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health, and other needs."  If Congress and the Obama administration get their way, these full-service parent-replacement centers will soon be coming to a community near you, along with the swarms of government workers in charge of "home visitation" and "parenting education" under the program.  In fact, even without legislation to authorize it, Obama's education bureaucracy has already started using tax funds to create the "community schools" nationwide.

The Butchers of Planned Parenthood.  Mitchelle Blair, not knowing what to do with the bodies of two of her children, whom she had murdered, stuffed them in her freezer.  She'd tortured them for months first — strangling them, suffocating them with plastic bags until they passed out, starving them, burning them with boiling water.  She said she killed her son by accident; she'd intended to torture him further.  Her daughter she killed on purpose.  "If I had the chance to do it again, I would," the mother said.  Pleading guilty, she asked the court to impose the death penalty on her.  Prosecutors regretfully informed her that Michigan has no death penalty.  Of course the children had different fathers.  Of course this was in Detroit.  Of course they all resided in a beyond-dismal housing project called the Martin Luther King Homes, a pit of despair that those of us whose faith is less than unshakeable might in our weakness suspect has been abandoned by the One of Whom the Reverend King was a minister.

The Big Gay Lie.  Even a cursory examination shows it's absurd to think that gays are born gay, that there is a "gay" gene.  Evolution teaches that genes that help an organism survive and reproduce endure and genes that hinder survival or reproduction disappear.  Yet what gene could possibly be worse for reproduction than a "gay" gene?  Clearly any person with a "gay" gene wouldn't have had kids and hence the gene would disappear from the gene pool.  Further many studies have shown that being gay is not genetic.  Eight major studies of identical twins prove that being gay is not due to genetics.  Identical twins have the same DNA and hence, if being gay is purely genetic, if one twin is gay the odds of the other being gay would be 100%.  Yet the reality is on average the chance of the other twin being gay is around 12%.  This does not mean that gays wake up one morning and decide to be gay.  Studies have shown that gays are very likely to come from families with detached or absent fathers.  That makes sense; gays turn to sex with men to replace the love they never had from their fathers.

Muslim Marine murderer's father 'sexually assaulted wife and beat his son' -- and wanted to take second wife 'because it was allowed under Islamic law'.  The Muslim murderer of four US Marines came from an abusive and violent home where his mother was physically and verbally abused by her husband.  Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Online reveal that Muhammad Youssuf Abdulazeez was also victim of beatings by his father that were carried out 'without provocation or justification.'

America Had More Married Couples With Kids in 1963 Than in 2014.  Fifty-two years ago, there were 24,321,000 married couples in this country who had at least one child under 18 living in their home, according the bureau's Table FM-1.  Last year, despite a significantly larger national population, there were only 23,933,000.  The Census Bureau numbers dramatically demonstrate America's abandonment of the traditional family.

The Hidden Message of Same-Sex Marriage.  The road to gay marriage began with feminism.  Feminists argued that there were no important differences between the sexes.  Thus, mothering and fathering were interchangeable.  The word "parent" became a verb.  If mothers and fathers bring nothing unique or complementary to their roles, then it logically follows that two mothers or two fathers should be just as good.  Talk of three or more parents misses the mark.  The relevant number is one.  If fathers are no different from mothers, then single women needn't pause before embarking on "parenthood" solo — and they aren't.  Along with feminism, the past few decades have featured a widespread retreat from the idea of family duty. [...] Marriage today is treated as optional by many parents, just one of many available paths.  As Alito noted in his dissent, fully 40 percent of American births are now to unmarried women.  Additionally, more than half of all children will spend some part of their childhoods in a non-nuclear family.

Getting Government Out of the Marriage Business.  It seems surreal a single unelected lifetime judge could decide that the nation's supreme law requires its unwilling states to derail human history's central social institution.  The bad news is that's likely to happen this month.  The good news is that unwilling states can sidestep it.

I Don't Need No Daddy.  [Scroll down]  No, it's been a sad and sometimes heartbreaking semester because many college students' assorted troubles are related to the fact that they are bereft of wholesome father figures.  The combination of resentment, hurt, anger, and defiant pride run through their writings.  It affects everything they do, from having trust issues with the opposite sex to taking direction from anyone they view as an authority figure.  Most carry an enormous chip on their shoulders and take offense at the slightest thing.

Obama: Society Must Deal Honestly with Issues of Race.  Monday at the Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center in Camden, NJ, President Barack Obama commented on community policing and said we as a society must deal honestly with issues of race. [...] "Our kids are growing up without intact households," Obama added.

The Editor says...
That's because the welfare state that was set up by John F. Kennedy and implemented by Lyndon B. Johnson is a system that rewards illegitimacy, encourages dependence and punishes work.

45.4% of American Moms in Their Twenties Have Never Been Married.  Forty-five percent of American mothers in their twenties have never been married, according to data that the Census Bureau released leading into the Mother's Day weekend.  As of June 2014, according to the Census Bureau, there were 8,118,000 American women who were mothers and were from 20 to 29 years of age.  Of these 8,118,000 American mothers in their twenties, 3,689,000 had never been married.  That is 45.4 percent.

Prospects for Black America.  [Scroll down]  America has made no real, concerted effort to promote fatherhood, and part of the problem is feminism, with its refrain that "strong women" can rear children without men.  "Fathers," [Heather Mac Donald] said, "should not be seen as an optional add-on or frill."  Illegitimacy, she added, is such a disadvantage to children that we should come to grips with the idea that "it is not true that everybody has the right have a child."  [John] McWhorter agreed that it would be marvelous if blacks would marry each other, but noted that "after 50 years, there is no way to create a movement in black America to rebuild the family."  If even half the black leaders and columnists and preachers came out with a strong endorsement of fatherhood, the other half would call them vicious names for letting "institutional racism" off the hook.

Time for the Welfare State to Stand Trial.  As of 1950, "only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent."  Between 1940 and 1960, "the black poverty rate had been cut in half." [...] By 2012, the black illegitimacy rate was at 73%, starkly high in contrast to other demographic segments.  And the moral decay that came with this trend is not obscure.  "According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes."  In light of these facts, these statistics may be less surprising:  In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of all arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery.  It was by design that the social structure provided by government supplanted the social structure of the family.

Po-Po and the Missing Papas.  With the moral code destroyed, the po-po are the most important group still acting as if young people there are capable of obeying a legal code.  Police do the work of behavioral control that should be done by fathers.  They are the ghost of fatherhood lost, the last group of public workers who don't have to submit to the vast victimization hoax that whitey hasn't sent enough money for you to learn how to read; whitey hasn't come across enough for you to control your own breeding; and especially, that in your downtrodden state you can't be expected to obey the law.

Report: Only 16% of Baltimore Teens Raised With Married Parents.  [A] report, released Wednesday [5/6/2015] and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is "one of the five least intact counties of America," along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn.  The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are least likely to experience poverty during their youth, because married families generally earn higher incomes than stepfamilies, cohabiting families, divorced families, separated families, and single-parent families.

In Baltimore and Elsewhere, It's the Culture that Can Make or Break a Cycle of Poverty.  Some social scientists argue that peers are more important than parents in determining how kids turn out.  Others argue that parents, particularly married parents, are the crucial factor.  And everyone agrees that schools, criminal-justice policies, and racial attitudes are important variables.  The debates are about how much weight we should give them.  All of these factors influence each other.  In very poor neighborhoods they combine to compound problems.  In middle-class neighborhoods, they reinforce each other in positive ways.

Yes, "black culture" is to blame for the riots in Baltimore.  It absolutely is black culture that's responsible for what's going on in Baltimore, that's plain to see for anyone who's willing to look at the situation objectively.  Why do you think there's so many young black men on the streets rioting?  It's mainly because young black men and women decided to have out of wedlock births, which is the fault of both the men and women in the black community.  The men usually leave and the moms have to work and rarely teach their kids any values or how to be decent, productive, and law-abiding members of society.  Furthermore, the young boys have no male influence to show them how to be good men and respect women and authority figures, and they also have a lot of anger built up subconsciously from being neglected, usually by both parents.  The rioting isn't about their economic situation or police brutality, at it's core it's about the breakdown of the black family and the lack of parenting in the black community.

'Lord of the Flies' comes to Baltimore.  We hear about the absence of black men from families, but what happens when they disappear from an entire community?  West Baltimore delivered the answer to that question this week.  It's no accident that one of the most enduring images from the riot was a young mother spanking her son as she dragged him away from the protests.  Where were the men in his life?  As I walked through my old streets, it was filled with nothing but black young women, children and teenage boys.  It was as if an alien spaceship had come in the night and spirited all the older black men away.

Baltimore: Where the Progressives Get It All Wrong.  [D]espite all the hand-wringing by liberals that the problems in the inner city black community come from the evil police, or lack of jobs, or poor schools, or lack of 'activities' for youth — or that time-worn canard, the "legacy of slavery" — I believe the source for that community's dysfunction stem from the lack of marriage between the parents of these kids. [...] No amount of money thrown at the inner city, or youth programs, or education will bring the social pathology evidenced in Baltimore to a halt.  It must come from within the community itself, and it needs to start by fathers and mothers marrying and raising their offspring together.

Mom smacks, drags son from Baltimore violence.  One Baltimore mom took matters into her own hands Monday, furiously grabbing her would-be rioter son by the scruff of his neck and dragging him away from the violence.  The jaw-dropping encounter captured by WMAR-TV showed a teen boy clad from head to toe in black, including a scarf over his face, and ready to rumble — until Mom stepped in.  He had just thrown rocks, WMAR reported, when his mother jumped into action.  She grabbed him in the back of his head and smacked the rock thrower several times in the face with her open right palm.

Mom filmed berating her son at Baltimore riots didn't 'want him to be a Freddie Gray'.  A woman seen berating and hitting a black-clad teenager, later confirmed to be her son, has been hailed as "mom of the year" after her intervention on the streets of Baltimore was caught on video.  As violence flared up across the city on Monday [4/27/2015], the woman, who was identified as Toya Graham on Tuesday afternoon, was filmed telling her child to "take that f--- mask off."  Graham spoke to CBS News about the video, which initially went viral with little context.  In the interview, the single mother of six tells the network that she intervened out of concern for her 16-year-old son's safety.

The Editor says...
Three cheers for Mom, but if Junior had a father, he wouldn't have been anywhere near the riot.

Ben Carson Pleads With People Of Baltimore: 'Please Take Control Of Your Children'.  Ben Carson, the former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who is expected to run for president in 2016, issued a statement Tuesday [4/28/2015] condemning the violence and riots in Baltimore.  "I urge parents, grandparents and guardians to please take control of your children and do not allow them to be exposed to the dangers of uncontrolled agitators on the streets," Carson said in a statement to the media.

Income Inequality: Married Couples With Kids Make Average of $107,054.  Married couples with children under 18 years of age, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (Table HINC-04), made an average household income of $107,054 in 2013 and a median household income of $85,087.  "A married couple, as defined for census purposes, is a husband and wife enumerated as members of the same household," says the Census Bureau in its list of definitions used in the Current Population Survey.  How do a husband and wife with kids compare to Americans living in other social arrangements?

America's Decay Is Speeding Up.  Nearly half (48 percent) of American children are born to a mother who is not married.  Forty-three percent of American children live without a father in the home.  About 50 percent of Americans over 18 are married, compared to 72 percent in 1960.  Americans are having so few children that the fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women in 2013.  And in an increasing number of states, there are now more deaths than births.

Can Family Breakdown in Low-Education America Be Reversed? Maybe.  Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society.  About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated, who almost entirely raise their kids in Ozzie-and-Harriet style families today (except that Mom usually works outside the home).  Among the bottom third of Americans in education and income, however, the negative trend accelerated.  In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was alarmed that 26 percent of black births were to unmarried children.  The rate is about twice that for the least educated third of Americans of all races today.

33 Strange Facts About America That Most Americans Would Be Shocked To Learn.  [#10] In 1950, less than 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents.  Today, that number is over 40 percent.  [#11] The poverty rate for households that are led by a married couple is 6.8 percent.  For households that are led by a female single parent, the poverty rate is 37.1 percent.

New Honey Maid Commercial Celebrates Divorce as 'Wholesome'.  According to a Honey Maid commercial, divorce is now "wholesome."  "You know, I never thought I'd get divorced," says a dad, as pictures of a smiling, blended family flit across the screen.  "But the way I look at it, there are just more of us to love the kids now," he says.

End of the traditional familyin America.  Less than half of U.S children under the age of 18 live at home with two married, heterosexual parents in their first marriage, new research has revealed.  The figures reveal the ever-changing make-up of the family structure.  In the 1960's, 73 percent of children had what is considered a traditional family structure but by 1980 that figure had dropped to 61 percent.

Family fragmentation: Can anything be done?  The facts are easy to state.  About 40 percent of babies born in America these days are born outside of marriage.  That's true of about 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites, more than 50 percent of Hispanics and more than 70 percent of blacks.  Back in 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan was prompted to write his report on the black family when the out-of-wedlock birth rate of blacks was 25 percent.  He believed, correctly, that this spelled trouble ahead.  Half a century later that's the figure for supposedly privileged non-Hispanic whites.

Black Progression and Retrogression.  [Scroll down]  Black illegitimacy is 75 percent.  Close to 50 percent of marriage-age blacks never marry.  Close to 70 percent of black households are female-headed.  If one thinks family structure doesn't matter, consider that the poverty rate among black female-headed families is about 47 percent but among married families it has been in the single digits for more than two decades.  It's not just poverty.  Children raised by single parents are likelier to be physically abused; use drugs; engage in violent, delinquent and criminal behavior; have emotional and behavioral problems; and drop out of school.

When Black Lives Don't Matter.  Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and countless others like them grew up in broken families, their lives haunted by fathers and stepfathers with gang ties.  The only masculine culture they had was that of the thug and that culture eventually killed them.  Criminal culture is even more fatal to criminals than it is to their victims.  If you attack enough people, eventually one of them will fight back.  Eventually one of them will kill you.

GA:"We is teenagers, don't shoot me".  Has the use of the word "teenager" by the old media given criminal teens a sense of immunity?  You see it again and again.  Trayvon Martin is constantly referred to as a teenager, as though that somehow absolved him of his crimes.  Most male children, who are brought up in intact families, do not become predatory creatures in their teens.  But for those who do not have strong, moral, male role models in their lives, especially if this is the default position in their community, predation is a common role. [...] The "progressive" position seems to be that "children" are inherently good.  That is not true.  Children are inherently selfish and amoral.  In Christianity, this is recognized as original sin.  Each child is a wild animal that must be civilized and taught moral virtues.  This is much harder to do in a single parent home.

It's Time to Save the American Family; A Joyless Experiment Strained to the Limit.  Perhaps the most obvious, deleterious and heart-rending change in American culture of the last 50 years is the deterioration of the traditional nuclear family.  But why would this be the result of liberalism?  Since liberalism is the default pseudo-religion of the mass media, it goes without saying that these ideas are driven daily into the minds of the credulous, who simply act out what they are taught, like secular zombies.  For example, in 2012 the NY Times reported that amongst women under 30, more than half of the children are born to unmarried women.  The concern here is not just emotional.  For example, the number one cause of US poverty is female single parents. [...] The impact of fatherlessness on children is so epic that billions of dollars a year are lost dealing with the consequences, such as drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, sexual abuse, prosecutions and incarcerations, and other institutionalization.

The Leftist and Islamic War on the Family.  The unspoken truth of the War on Women is that the breakup of the family has made life more dangerous for women and men.  It's a statistical fact that crime rates increase for children from single parent households.  Sixty percent of rapists grew up in single parent households.  The real War on Women began with the War on the Family.  That is also where it ends.

Contraception Won't Fix Fatherlessness.  The institution of marriage among America's poor has been totally destroyed, and this has had devastating effects on our ability to fight poverty.  For 40 years after the family's breakdown in the 1960s and '70s, leftists have claimed that, as far as child-development and child-poverty are concerned, marriage matters little.  Further, according to the Left, if having a second parent in a child's life did make a difference, this was merely due to a second paycheck — a role government could easily fill.  To a point, the Left still makes the arguments outlined above.  Yet modern social science is heavily stacked against this decrepit statist worldview, especially when it comes to the importance of a father.

Marriage rates hit new, all-time low.  New data shows more young people are waiting to marry — and there's no shortage of opinions on why that's happening.  According to the latest available census data, the percentage of U.S. adults who have never been married has hit a new, all-time high.

More Americans than ever have never married: survey.  A record 20 percent of adult Americans, or 42 million people, have never married, marking a U.S. demographic and social shift, according to an analysis released on Wednesday [9/24/2014].

Single adults now outnumber married adults.  Unmarried American adults outnumber their married counterparts for the first time since the federal government began tracking that data in 1976, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  There were 124.6 million single Americans in August, accounting for 50.2 percent of the 16-and-over US population, BLS data showed.

Poverty Is Not The Cause of Criminal Behavior.  Liberals have all reached a consensus that Ferguson's rioting and looting are the results of poverty. [... but] According to the Heritage Foundation, the real cause of crime is the breakdown of the family:
  •   High-crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers.
  •   State-by-state analysis by Heritage scholars indicates that a 10 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes leads typically to a 17 percent increase in juvenile crime.
  •   The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers.
  •   The father's authority and involvement in raising his children are also a great buffer against a life of crime.
Anyone raised during the mid-1970s and before can agree with the Heritage Foundation's conclusion.  No politician or government program can replace fathers in the home.  In fact, laziness and idleness contribute more to crime than anything else does.

The absence of fathers matters.  We have evolved a society wherein we pretend the opposite is true.  The disappearance of fathers is now nearly the norm.  Almost one in four American children lives in a household without their biological dads.  For brown kids, that number stands at about 28 percent.  For black kids, it's a little better than half.  Mass incarceration and the War on Drugs have certainly played a role in this.  But just as surely, a role is also played by the new social more which says it's okay for a man or a woman to be feckless, for him to wander away because he is immature, selfish and young, for her to have a baby on her own because the clock is ticking and really, she doesn't need a man for anything more than sperm.  This is the new morality, the new American mindset.

Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families.  Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable.  Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something — ideology, tobacco money — other than science?  Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States:  the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

America in Decline.  [Scroll down]  Increasingly, America is becoming a nation of dysfunctional families.  41% of babies are born out of wedlock.  Under America's first black president, American blacks are increasingly unemployed, and 72% of black kids are born out of wedlock, a terrible indictment of American society.  The corrosive results of government hand-outs are now rampant in America.  A nanny-state produces a population of dependency, not independence or an entrepreneurial spirit.

In Defense of Normal.  Letters home to school kids now read, "Dear Parent," whereas they might have formerly read "Dear Parent(s)," and even further back, "Dear Parents."  Then again, as illegitimacy and broken homes become more frequent, we have to allow that non-nuclear families have become "more normal," if only statistically so."  But do they seem more normal because of the statistical fact, or has it become a statistical fact because they have been made to seem more normal by the left?  It's impossible to know whether the de-stigmatization occurred first, or whether this social pathology came about spontaneously.

Young Fatherless Elephants.  Thanks to the cold-blooded murders in Oklahoma and Washington, black teenage thugs have been much in the news lately.  But they've been newsworthy for quite a while now. [...] What's easy to forget, especially if you're a liberal, is that it's all an inevitable consequence of Lyndon Johnson's policies.  It was he and his stooges in Congress that made welfare to black women conditional on there not being a man on the premises.  With a swipe of his presidential pen, Johnson ended black families, as America had known them.  Until he put his welfare policy in place, the rate of marriages was higher among blacks than among whites.

The Breakdown of Family and the Degradation of Society.  Carmen Solomon-Fears, Specialist in Social Policy, reported that the percentage of non-marital births has remained steady at 41 percent for the past six years, a dramatic increase from 1940 when such births were a low 3.8 percent.  What changed?  Societal attitudes about fertility, contraception, abortion, and marriage driven by the "sexual revolution" made it acceptable and legal to use abortion as a contraceptive, while men evaded the responsibility of marrying the women they've impregnated.  More than half of non-marital births are of couples who live in a cohabiting relationship.  The shame of producing offspring out of wedlock disappeared when churches started celebrating pregnant teens on Mother's Day and the federal government became the Daddy and gave generous welfare and medical care to single mothers.

Census: Marriage rate at 93-year low, even including same-sex couples.  The Census Bureau reported Thursday [9/18/2014] that the nation's marriage rate is the lowest since 1920, and the first-time inclusion of same sex married couples did little to reverse the decline.  According to Pew Research Center analysis, the marriage rate of Americans 18 and older hit a bottom of 50.3 percent in 2013, down from 50.5 percent in 2012.

TV Reporter Suspended After Rant About Fatherless 'Young Black Men'.  News 12 reporter Sean Bergin made a controversial statement about "young black men" on TV Monday [7/14/2014] and now he has reportedly been suspended.  The regional News 12 Networks, which serve New York and New Jersey, ran a story (above) about Jersey City Police Officer Melvin Santiago, who was fatally wounded in a shootout at a Jersey City Walgreens on Sunday.  The network interviewed angry residents in the segment, many of whom weren't very sensitive to the police officer's death.

TV Reporter Suspended for On-Air Comment About 'Young Black Men'.  News 12 New Jersey reporter Sean Bergin has reportedly been suspended for comments he made on-the-air Sunday evening about the black community. [...] The segment itself has also apparently been scrubbed from the News 12 website.

Dissolving the Institution of Marriage.  For years, opponents of same-sex marriage fretted that the unleashing of gay nuptials would open the door for all types of sexual decadence.  Last presidential cycle, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was panned heavily for comparing gay marriage to polygamy at a New Hampshire stop on the campaign trail.  After a college student questioned his vigorous opposition to same sex couples being wed, Santorum responded in turn:  "If it makes three people happy to get married, based on what you just said, what makes that wrong?"  The remark was met with boos from students and condemnation from the liberal press.  Less than two years later, Santorum ran a victory lap after a federal judge struck down a ban on polygamy in Utah.

Senate Bill Would Allow Unmarried to Collect SS Spousal Survivor Benefits.  Two Senate Democrats want to change the way a valid marriage is determined under the Social Security Act so that same-sex couples living in states that do not recognize their unions can still collect spousal survivor benefits.  Senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) introduced the Social Security and Marriage Equality (SAME) Act on May 8th.  The bill aims to "ensure all same-sex spouses receive equal treatment under the Social Security Act when applying for Social Security benefits, regardless of where they live," according to Senator Murray's website.

California Bill Allows 'My Two Dads' on Birth Certificates.  In the most recent California effort to "modernize" family convention, the state Assembly on Thursday passed AB 1951, a new bill that would allow all California parents to list themselves as "mother," "father," or "parent" of a child in order to reflect same-sex marriages, according to a report from the Associated Press.  The bill passed by a vote of 51-13, with several Republicans voting in favor.  No Republicans spoke in opposition.

An iPad does not make a good babysitter.
Infants 'unable to use toy building blocks' due to iPad addiction.  Rising numbers of infants lack the motor skills needed to play with building blocks because of an "addiction" to tablet computers and smartphones, according to teachers.  Many children aged just three or four can "swipe a screen" but have little or no dexterity in their fingers after spending hours glued to iPads, it was claimed.  Members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers also warned how some older children were unable to complete traditional pen and paper exams because their memory had been eroded by overexposure to screen-based technology.

The Democrats Have a Marriage Problem.  Despite all the talk among Democrats and the media about the "gender gap" that has supposedly resulted from what they say are Republicans' anti-women policies, the real gap is between married and single women.  IBD/TIPP's monthly survey finds that, on issue after issue, single women are more liberal than their married counterparts — often by wide margins.  Single women are more content with the current state of affairs, more approving of Obama and far more likely to support his big-government policies.

The Decline of the African-American family.  In reaction and repentance sparked by Dr. King's nonviolent civil disobedience and the systemic introspection of social norms by whites, Americans overcompensated with sweeping entitlement programs under President Johnson's "War on Poverty," and by turning a blind eye to accountability on longstanding values and principled behavior within the African American community.  While affirmative action and desegregation jump-started social change, the unintended consequences of shifting the cultural incentives upside down were ignored. [...] And with Civil Rights Act of 1964 giving legal credence to making any sort of behavioral judgment toxic, the cultural glue that held together the African-American family was fundamentally changed.

Utah governor signs bill giving fathers new rights in adoption cases.  The bill, Adoption Act Amendments, was sponsored by Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler.  He told Fox News:  "It sends a strong message that Utah respects fathers' rights and will not allow its laws to be used to perpetuate fraudulent adoptions."  The bill would require a biological mother to live in Utah for at least 90 days or file information with the court about the birth father.  The court then may order the mother to notify the father, before she can put her baby up for adoption.

'My Brother's Keeper' Ignores the Collapse of the Black Family.  On Monday [3/3/2014], black conservative commentator Crystal Wright penned a column in The Guardian where she criticized President Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" plan he announced last week as part of an effort to lower crime in the black American community.  Wright immediately scolded Obama's plan as "offensive" for holding black Americans to a lower standard than white Americans, enshrining a further sense of entitlement.

Pelosi Dismisses Family Values: 'Why Would Anybody Get Married?'.  In an interview with Now This News, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) discussed marriage, whether it is traditional or same-sex, and seemed to dismiss the sacred tradition.

Why women still need husbands.  Over the past several decades, America has witnessed a profound change in the way women view men and marriage.  It began with the baby boomer adage "never depend on a man."  This message resulted in a generation of women who turned their attention away from the home and onto the workforce.  They did what their mothers told them to do:  they became financially independent so they'd never have to rely on a husband.  In time, "never depend on a man" turned into the full-blown belief that men are superfluous.

How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married.  If President Obama wants to reduce income inequality, he should focus less on redistributing income and more on fighting a major cause of modern poverty:  the breakdown of the family.  A man mostly raised by a single mother and his grandparents who defied the odds to become president of the United States is just the person to take up the cause.

Escape Poverty: Graduate, Work, Get Married, Have Kids.  Fifty years ago today, in his State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty in America."  Over the next two years, he massively expanded the federal government, creating Medicaid, Medicare and the food stamp program, and increasing federal involvement in public education.  What impact did this have on poverty?

Camille Paglia: War on Men Destroying American Culture.  In October of 2012, Salon veteran, art historian, culture critic, and provocateur Camille Paglia returned to Salon for an interview in which she raved about Bravo's Real Housewives series because, to her, the episodes were "authentic old-time soap opera," a television genre she once adored and has since pronounced "dead."

Christmastime and the Family Structure.  It's a subject that many people are uncomfortable with.  "Everyone either is or knows and has a deep personal connection to someone who is divorced, cohabiting, or gay," [Nick] Schulz writes.  "Great numbers of people simply want to avoid awkward talk of what are seen as primarily personal issues or issues of individual morality."  Nonetheless, it is an uncomfortable truth that children of divorce and children with unmarried parents tend to do much worse in life than children of two-parent families.

Sons of Divorce, School Shooters.  Another shooting, another son of divorce.  From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father.

Knock Out Black Self-Hatred.  The "knockout game" is a prime example of the demise of black families across America.  The goal of the "knockout game" is to catch someone off guard and try to knock him or her out in one punch.  Many media outlets initially highlighted youth as the common denominator among the attackers.  Other media outlets reported that the majority of the perpetrators were Black males. [...] How does an individual come to think it's fun to harm another human being, capture the attack on film, and share it with the world through social media?  One has to wonder what is (or is not) going on in the households of the attackers.

Brown signs bill to allow children more than two legal parents.  Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Friday that will allow children in California to have more than two legal parents, a measure opposed by some conservative groups as an attack on the traditional family.  Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said he authored the measure to address the changes in family structure in California, including situations in which same-sex couples have a child with an opposite-sex biological parent.

Bill Cosby Tells Don Lemon Black Men Need To Raise Their Kids.  CNN anchor Don Lemon has, of late, turned the focus of his frequent conversations on race to the idea of personal responsibility in the African American community.  On Saturday night's [9/14/2013] edition of CNN Newsroom, Lemon continued that controversial trend with comic legend Bill Cosby, who has also felt the heat of controversy on the subject.

The Hood Comes to Duncan, Oklahoma.  The nation's hoods and increasingly, barrios are modern-day reservations, where independence, initiative, self-worth, and self-respect have been stripped from residents.  Where family, community, and church have been debased in favor of the government handout machine... and minority leaders who pimp their own people for gain. [...] Gangs are replacements for families; they lend identity, security, and worth.

The Close Connections between the Economy and the Family.  [Scroll down]  Worse, we are discovering that ObamaCare really will "destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family — with financial incentives for staying single."  ObamaCare's marriage penalty could possibly cost couples over $10,000 a year.  This intentional disparity means that U.S. government policy will encourage singleness and create increased disincentives for marriage.

The Tales of Three Bankrupt Cities.  Why did so many people move out of Detroit?  The quick answer:  crime abetted by welfare.  During the decade from 1965 to 1975, crime and welfare dependency roughly tripled in the United States and rose even more in Detroit.  There was a connection between the two trends.  Welfare encouraged single parenthood; fatherless boys often grew up to commit violent crimes.  Most violent crimes were and are committed by (and against) blacks, whose numbers in Detroit during the great northward migration rose from 149,000 in 1940 to 660,000 in 1970.

Trayvon Martin, where's your daddy?  Last Friday [7/19/2013], President Obama made the comment again:  "If I had a son..."  We all know the story.  Only this time Obama in reference to the Zimmerman verdict went further:  "It could have been me."  This is not very tasteful, especially from a sitting president.  Chris took exception to what the president said; as he put it, "if Trayvon Martin had had a daddy in the family, he might not be dead today."

What Do You Do When the Oppressed Are Their Own Oppressors?  The leaders of what used to be a civil rights movement want to talk about everything but the main problem afflicting black people in the United States.  That is the breakdown of the black family.  Just 29% of black women over the age of 15 were married in 2010, according to the Census Bureau's comprehensive Current Population Survey.  That compares to 54% of white women.  At all ages, black women were about half as likely to be married as white women.  That is an astonishing number.

Family Disintegration In Freefall Since 1965 Report.  Nearly half a century after the 1965 Moynihan Report on black family disintegration, a prominent liberal think tank finds things "have only grown worse."  Its clueless recommendation:  more government.

'Sesame Street' to teach kids about when Mommy goes to prison.  It's brought to you by the letter P — for prison.  PBS's "Sesame Street" is moving from ABCs and counting numbers to offering its young viewers a bigger lesson in life:  how to cope when Mommy or Daddy lands behind bars.  Called "Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration," the program is distributing "tool kits" to schools, community centers and even jails in 10 states — including New York — starting today to help kids ages 3 to 8, organizers said.

The Editor says...
Apparently they presume that Daddy is either a complete unknown or he's already in prison.

Deadbeat dad has 22 kids with 14 women, sued for child support.  Orlando Shaw guessed he had fathered 18 children with 17 women, but he really has 22 children with 14 women, making him the "most expensive deadbeat dad" in Tennessee history.  Shaw appeared in court in Nashville when Child Support Services sued on behalf of the mothers for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid child support over the years.

Census Report Shocker.  It is depressing yet unsurprising that with median age of women at first marriage approaching 27 years of age, 62 percent of women ages 20-24 who gave birth in 2011 were unmarried.  Among new moms ages 25-29, 32 percent are unmarried, with 17 percent of those in their late 30s not married.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#29]  Stupid Fathers:  Fatherhood is constantly looked upon as either a needless cultural habit or an outright joke.  A 2008 study by a fatherhood advocacy group noted that fathers are all too often portrayed negatively on TV sitcoms.  And Rebecca Hagelin noted in 2009 that commercials, TV shows, and the media often portray fathers as hateful, uninterested in their families, or not nearly as smart as the kids in the family.

The War on the Family Enters a New Stage.  Welcome to a brave new "national conversation" that proposes not simply to redefine the family, but to eliminate it.  MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry recently shocked millions with her brazen TV promo spot urging us to get rid of the idea that kids belong to their parents or to "private" families.  She presses us to replace it with a "collective" notion of children:  "Kids belong to whole communities."

Whose children are they?  "The 'It takes a village to raise a child' crowd believes that all children are children of the village.  Any parental decision-making authority regarding education is a mere delegation of a core power from the government, and all prior claims over the development of the hearts and minds of children reside with the village and not with the family.

It Takes A Village Idiot To Say Kids Belong To State.  Collectivists throughout history have said that children do and should belong to the state and that if you control the children, you control the future.  One well-known collectivist echoed such sentiments when he said, "Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state.  The state will take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.  Your child belongs to us already... what are you?"  So said Adolf Hitler, who founded a sate-run youth group that bore his name.

M(arx)SNBC? Host: 'Kids Do Not Belong to Their Families'.  ["][W]e have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.["]

Family Breakdown Is At The Root Of Black America's Ills.  There is a direct link between no father in the home and an increased chance that the child will drop out of high school, go on welfare and have a criminal record.  This is particularly acute in the black community, where over 70% of black kids are born outside of wedlock.  In some communities, like Southeast Washington, D.C, a staggering 84% of children live in homes without a father.

State Grown Kids Always Fail.  According to a 2009 study, American students rank 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading among other nations.  More disturbing, however, is the widening gulf between higher and lower achieving American students.  A 2011 Stanford University study shows the achievement gap between lower and upper income students is 40% greater than it was 25 years ago.

Forget Gay Marriage: What About The Decline Of Marriage?  The disintegration of the nuclear family — particularly in the African-American community — and the rise in fatherless homes have greater societal implications than gay marriage, yet few pay attention.

Boys Hardest Hit.  Even in strictly economic terms, the life of a single mother is far from easy.  So while women who grew up fatherless may be considerably more successful at school or work than their male counterparts, they pay a concomitant price in the burdens of unassisted childrearing.

Not a pretty picture.  The numbers are staggering.  Out of 120,000 live births in New York City in 2010, more than 54,000 babies were born out of wedlock.  The human toll behind the numbers is devastating.  Children raised without two parents face much higher odds in every facet of life.  It's as if they are forced to swim with one hand tied behind their backs.  Some succeed, most don't.

The Welfare State and Manhood.  To the statists or to big-government ideologues and their supporters, the motivation behind the admission of women into combat is the reverse of the feminist's motivation, because the statist knows that for the social welfare state to succeed, it is a question not of women being elevated, but of men being degraded.  To the statist, the fundamental purpose of employing women in military combat is to destroy the unique virtues that define manhood.

Life without Father.  The research continues to affirm it.  The statistics highlight it.  But actually reading what young people have to say about the reality of missing dads and overworked but caring mothers confirms it.  There is no pretense, and the pain is evident.

Good Fathers Do More To Stem Violence Than Gun Control.  Obama, in Chicago, finally talked about the lack of fathers and the impact this has on crime rather than complain about the number of rounds in a magazine:  "For a lot of young boys and young men in particular, they don't see an example of fathers or grandfathers, uncles, who are in a position to support families and be held up in respect.  And so that means that this is not just a gun issue; it's also an issue of the kinds of communities that we're building. [...]"  He offers no alternative.  Why would he?  That would require a wholesale rethinking of the welfare state and of the perverse incentives that work against the interests of the very people the left claims to care about.

Repair the State of Our Unions.  Since 1960, the percentage of married Americans plunged from 72 percent to 51 percent last year, a record low.  Meanwhile, babies born to unwed mothers skyrocketed from 4 percent in 1960 to 41 percent in 2011, another ominous record considering that out-of-wedlock children are 82 percent more likely to suffer poverty and other social ills.

20 Reasons America Is Becoming An Increasingly Nonfunctional Society.  [#1]  Starting in the sixties there was an explosion of children born out-of-wedlock and kids who don't grow up in two parent families fare more poorly percentage wise on just about any and every scale imaginable including substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, suicide rates, criminality and homelessness.

Is Fatherhood Being Killed so the State Can Play God?  Is there a master plan for the subjugation of the human race?  If so, it must perforce include a strategy for the removal of the single most influential figure in history — the Father.  Complete sabotage of families and marriage would also be necessary to pull off this coup.  From a purely secular standpoint, the health of a society can be measured by the vitality of fatherhood, according to relevant statistics.  More importantly, the health of a society can be best measured from its ability to grasp the concept of God, the Father.  For example, a society which merely accepts the God concept without differentiating between the elements of the Trinity is devolving towards paganism.  But who would desire such a purge?

Florida judge approves birth certificate listing three parents.  A Florida judge has approved the adoption of a 22-month-old baby girl that will list three people as parents on her birth certificate — a married lesbian couple and a gay man.

The true causes of Chicago's insane orgy of violence.  Guns aren't the problem, folks.  Guns are merely the scapegoat.  Gangs are the primary problem, and they are prevalent and popular with the young men because of the urban dependency culture.  Uncle Sam is the absentee "father" and breadwinner for too many of these families in the inner cities and those young men have no role models aside from what they see on TV which is about as far from healthy and responsible as one could get.

Obama Ignores Dangers Of Father-Free Zones.  If gun-control worked, the president's hometown would be safe.  Instead, gangs of fatherless youths daily kill other fatherless youths.  How about an executive order endorsing marriage and intact families?

Fathers disappear from households across America.  In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade.  Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million.

Wisconsin Judge Orders Deadbeat Dad Of Nine (With Six Women) To Stop Procreating.  Meet Corey Curtis.  The Wisconsin man, who has fathered nine children with six women, was ordered yesterday [12/3/2012] to cease procreating until he can support his numerous offspring.  At Curtis's sentencing yesterday for bail jumping and failure to pay child support, Circuit Court Judge Tim Boyle told the 44-year-old Racine man that his frequent breeding was to be curbed as a condition of his three-year probation term.

Fighting the Good Conservative Fight.  [Scroll down]  Columnist Ann Coulter reveals exactly how elevated those risks are.  "Children raised by a single mothers commit 72 percent of juvenile murders, 60 percent of rapes, have 70 percent of teenaged births, commit 70 percent of suicides and are 70 percent of high school dropouts," she writes.  "Controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is being raised by a single parent."

Target: Old White Men.  While modern society prides itself on being unbiased, it's no exception to the rule that every age has its fashionable prejudices — and unfashionable people.  Among the latter today are white men, and the closer they are to "dead white male" status, to use a favored leftist descriptive, the greater the disdain in which they're held.

5 Signs Of Societal Degeneration In America.  [#5]  Marriage:  Between 1890-1950 black Americans had higher marriage rates than white Americans.  Since then, we've seen the unconscionable slaughter of more than 50 million innocent children since Roe v. Wade, an explosion of out-of-wedlock births and a deterioration of marriage.  In 1900 the divorce rate in America was 8.1% while in recent years, it has hovered between 40%-50%.  Additionally, the illegitimacy rate has gone up 300% just since 1970.

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2013 by Andrew K. Dart

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;"