Illegitimacy in America: Avoiding Stupid is a Really Good Thing!

By Rich Kozlovich

An article entitled Bastard Nation appeared in Front Page Magazine discussing a New York Times report that “53 percent of babies delivered to women under the age of 30—the prime motherhood demographic—enter the world without their parents married to one another. This should seem startling to most, but they point out at the New York Times things are seen a bit differently as they go on to say;

But it’s not the rise of illegitimacy that scandalizes sex scribbler Katie Roiphe. It is the newspaper’s “peculiar moral undertone.’ “[M]arriage is very rapidly becoming only one way to raise children,” Roiphe explains at Slate, noting that “other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love, and the varieties of family life, into cultural attitudes toward unmarried parents.” The peculiar immoral undertone in Roiphe’s plea to deny children a two-parent home stems in part from her bringing two children into the world fathered by different men, neither of whom remains in a relationship with the writer. The personal is political.

So then, “other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States” in abandoning traditional values! Can we also conclude they also way ahead of the United States in stupid? Have we have lost our minds?  Historically, traditionally, biologically and rationally a family is made up of a man, a women and their children with the goal of forming a stable, reliable, lasting monogamous relationship. No matter how the left works to destroy this with their embrace of sexually irresponsible conduct that results in illegitimacy with multiple partners, and homosexuals adopting and becoming a “family” this conduct is not conducive to a sable society. It is however conducive to destroying the foundational structure of American cultural thinking; Judaic/Christian principles.

“In 1963, as Pres. Lyndon Johnson was launching the War on Poverty, 7 percent of American children were born outside marriage. White House staffer Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Senator from New York, warned the nation of the calamities associated with the growing number of out-of-wedlock births. For more than 40 years, our society has ignored Moynihan’s warnings. Despite the transparent linkages among poverty, social problems, and disintegration of the family, the liberal intelligentsia has watched the steady collapse of marriage in low-income communities with silent indifference. “

George Will wrote about him in 2003 saying;

"forty years ago he called attention "to the crisis of the African-American family--26 percent of children were being born out of wedlock--he was denounced as a racist by lesser liberals. Today the percentage among all Americans is 33, among African-Americans 69, and family disintegration, meaning absent fathers, is recognized as the most powerful predictor of most social pathologies."

Out-of-wedlock births comprised 5.3% of total births in 1960, including 2.3% of white births and 23 percent of black births. Today illegitimate births are now around 40% with approximately 25% among whites and 70% in the black community and Hispanic rate of 48% in 2005.

The left works at destroying the traditional nuclear family. Why? This forces more and more people to need government assistance; all of which grows government, putting more power into the hands of unelected bureaucrats, destroying individual freedom because nothing grows the “welfare state like the disappearance of marriage.”

What is the solution to this growing problem from the left. More public sex education, free condoms and absolutely no moralizing about their conduct! That has been their solution for decades and the problem grows.

This continuing trend in illegitimacy for the last fifty years is startling. The reality is this: “The statist Left is not content to merely watch marriage die; it seeks to nail the coffin lid tightly shut.” The left is always at the front of the line to point out any minor misstep in their demands for perfection, but their claim of being able to deliver utopian freedom is lie. What they ultimately deliver is dystopia. They demand "perfection but the best we can hope for is the most acceptable imperfection". We really do need to get that!

I have another suggestion. Perhaps we could start to read some history and maybe….just maybe….we wouldn’t so easily gulled by so many smooth talkers.