Let's look at poverty in female-headed households. Divorce and death of the father might explain a small part of why there are so many female-headed households. But the bulk of it is explained by people having children and not getting married in the first place.
Having children is not an act of God. It's not like you're walking down the street and pregnancy strikes you; children are a result of a conscious decision. For the most part, female-headed households are the result of shortsighted, self-destructive behavior of one or two people. They might have bought into the nonsense of "experts" like John Hopkins University sociologist Professor Andrew Cherlin, who said, "It has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes." The real issue, according to Mr. Cherlin, "is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male income." That's a call for fathers to be replaced by a government welfare check. ***
A cry in the black education wilderness***The great disappointment of my ongoing crusade to foment a revolution in black education has been the lack of a response, and even hostility, from black leaders in this community. Naturally, I expected everyone to drop what they were doing and hop onto my education movement bandwagon. ***
Much was made by reporters and other Democrats, when Dan Quayle was named to the 1988 Republican ticket, of the fact that although Senator Quayle was hawkish he had joined the National Guard rather than upping for Vietnam. The apt rejoinder to that is, "But at the time, you told Mr. Quayle not to go to Vietnam, didn't you?"Well, the same principle holds here. Reporters are far too busy telling men to be irresponsible and telling women to have abortions to be have any moral authority to preach responsibility to anyone.
The under-emphasized factor in practically all the abuse deaths we see in the news - the most dangerous person in the world to a young child is the mother's live-in boyfriend.
Powerful commentary.
As I started reading it , it immediately reminded of me of several people that firmly believe that my daughter should be removed from my custody because her father and I are unfit parents. And then I saw this:
Hollywood has a role. If it's irresponsible to show adults smoking, then surely people of judgment would recognize the worse harm caused by depicting children as toys for adults.
Yes, that it why these people believe it is far better for her to be in state custody - her parents smoke.
My husband has a good job, we have a roof over our heads, food on the table, we are not alcoholics or drug addicts, we are not abusive and we are married and were married before we chose to become parents.
Any thinking person who looks at the numbers in this article will think twice about the removal of children from married two-parent families for frivolous reasons. The "state" has a pretty poor track record for being parents.