I practice criminal law, including defending juvenile delinquents.
Ann is right.
Instead of using this to beat Ann Coulter over the head, why not do an objective analysis of whether single-parent families are more dysfunctional? Or would that be “unfair”.
Now when anyone brings this correlation up, they will be denounced as mean and racist, which doesn’t accomplish anything.
According to a Secular Humanist, writing in 2003, we should Legitimize Bastardy!.
And here's a 1989 college sociological history essay also concluding that Bastardy be eliminated as a crime: Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England
The terms Bastardy and Bastard came to be seen as mean. Crude. Rude. "Bastard" was often applied as a most vile pejorative. By the 1970's the law establishment was swayed by the claims of heartlessness. Yet the remedy is worse. It is actual harm, massive harm, not just the sting of a nasty word.
Often the major concern of the Bastardy laws has been inheritance rights. Yet, as we have found -- by our generational experience in a society of wholesale rampant bastardy, those inheritance concerns are secondary.
The primary concern is in establishing cultural norms which encourage raising children in a stable home with BOTH a father and a mother. The fruit of alternative methods of childraising is risky, and the fate of those children born bastards to unmarried women is abysmal, they are lost, they tend to general immorality, theft and violence more readily. They have chips on their shoulders that won't come off , and ....
THEY are now, THEY are our future.
Much of the harm of any situation can be undone by seeing a situation for what it is and then acting in a proper thoughtful response. One can end up in a better place than ever before by so doing.
So it is I ask, having spoken my peace on the matter -- what see you in these bastards, what is the measure by you?