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Yeah I get where you're coming from. Somehow the code words "inner city" and "poverty" mitigate abuse and/or incompetent parenting. I'm just gonna go ahead and call your philosophy what it is: bigotry, on two counts. First, you employ the doctrinaire liberal kind... the kind we conservatives call "the soft bigoty of low expectations," with regard to poor women. Then you go and employ the hard, hateful kind of bigotry, the kind that assumes, with no data and no logic, that the numbers look better for men because they're somehow not affected by poverty, and that men would be lazy neglectful consumers of the public welfare if they suddenly became single parents in the same number as women.

You're wrong. The data says you're wrong. The data above says that 80% to 90% of the incarcerated criminal sociopaths out there were raised by single mothers. That cuts across all racial and socio-economic lines so you can stop with the bigoted "inner city" minority inferences. There's tons more data out there to back that up. Then there's the hard cold fact that less than 1% of the sociopathic population were raised by single fathers. This raises the spectre of an interesting missing piece of the puzzle. There's a 10% to 15% of the ner' do well types that were raised by two parent or "other" types of parenting systems (or lack thereof). That says that not only do single fathers, statistically, do better than single mothers, but they do better than two parent families. You wanna lay claim to any kind of conservative philosophy, then you can't excuse crime with poverty, and you can't hold one sex responsible for the failures of the other. The score is in, and its not looking good for the two legged team.

Your statistics still don't tell the whole story. Sorry. How many guys on crack do you know who seek custody of their kids?

And, yes, there is a link between crime and poverty. Poverty is not an excuse for crime, but there is a link, nonetheless. And "inner city" has everything to do with where the majority of poor people live.

Single fathers self-select from the best types of fathers--fathers who want to be involved in their children's lives. How many deadbeats do you know who fought for custody of their children? When you compare fathers with custody to mothers with custody, you are not making a fair comparison.

Again, the self-selection of the most dedicated fathers probably accounts for the difference in statistics when compared to married couples, as well.

Apparently, God had it all wrong. Kids don't need two parents.....just a father. Yeah, right.

"You wanna lay claim to any kind of conservative philosophy, then you can't excuse crime with poverty, and you can't hold one sex responsible for the failures of the other."

Sure....all the deadbeat dads get a pass in your book, because they aren't raising the kids. Every time a "single" irresponsible father allows his kids to be raised by a "single" irresponsible mother, you chalk that up as a penalty to mothers only. Laughable!