Illegitimacy: Gun to America's Head

Were it not enough that the mainstream media glorifies casual sex without consequences, to make things even better your elected government is doing its part by indoctrinating your children into a similar mindset via the public school system. Your tax dollars are going to the effort of creating arguably society's largest source of its problems: illegitimacy and single motherhood.

Even liberals are starting to notice how devastating single motherhood is to our society. Though they maddeningly refer to as divorcees and widowers as "single mothers" to try to "class up" the term (much like they want to call the US Military a successful government program), the true issue are those who are unable to keep from getting pregnant until marriage. Social science has shown that the most accurate indicator of a person living in poverty or in crime is whether or not they were illegitimate. The very liberal Progressive Policy Institute, in a study that lasted ten years, demonstrated that the children of single mothers constitute: 90% of adolescent runaways, 85% of pre-graduation substance abuse, 60% of rapists, 70% of murderers, 65% of high school drop-outs, and 65% of teen pregnancies. And this study ended ten years ago- there are a lot more illegitimate children now. One in four children today are born without fathers.

Consider this: when you control for illegitimacy in prison populations, the population proportion difference of race vanishes (for those of you who went to public school, that means there are as many white people as black people).

This epidemic has been caused by three major factors- welfare, media glorification, and public "education".

Welfare making the illegitimacy problem worse has been so often talked about I don't feel the need to go into it in huge detail here, and the other two factors aren't talked about as much in any case. But, just so its covered: whoever came up with the idea that paying people to do something wouldn't cause them to do more of it was probably "educated" in a public school.

Media glorification is probably the smallest contributing factor of the three, but by no means is it a small matter in and of itself. Americans have been conditioned to believe that two classes of people must be held above all others as selfless and put-upon victims: single mothers, and public school teachers.

How often have you read a news report about some public policy proposal and the reporter mentions "the effect on single mothers"? How often have you seen single mothers introduced to speak at political events? Kerry, Obama, and Bush all had single mothers speak at an event meant to promote an inane policy proposal of theirs. There are events for single mothers, they're mentioned in just about every liberal plea to expand welfare, called the "victims" of Bush's tax cuts about four thousand times a day in the New York Times. The question is: why? Why are we told to respect these women? Why are they allowed to speak at presidential events? Why am I sure that I'm going to be hated just for saying this in a public forum? It's taboo, and it's lunacy.

These women are not victims. A dictionary will tell you the definition of "victim" is "a person who suffers from a destructive or injurious action or agency". In other words, by choosing not to keep their legs together before marriage or, failing that, not put their child up for adoption; they are the ones victimizing. There is an entirely volitional act involved with becoming a mother (just ask a public school kindergartner). They are consigning their children to being second-class citizens from the get-go (remember, highest indicator of poverty is not being raised by parents who are married).

No, we should not hate single mothers, nor revile them. But it is absurd that they should be so respected, when their primary contribution to society appears to be raising criminals. I believe it is far more heinous to condemn their children while kowtowing to the women who ruined their life. I don't hate single mothers, I simply care more for the children. And about not getting mugged.

My proposal: double the income tax on unwed mothers. You want less of them? Stop subsidizing them, and create something other than an incentive.

Then stop glorifying them. We had that case a couple years ago where a bunch of high-school girls formed a "pregnancy pact", and each got pregnant on purpose. They're 15. One of them's "lover" was a homeless man, who managed to woo her with rides in his shopping cart. This is a travesty. Far be it from those morons who think children are as smart as their parents, minors tend to be pretty dumb and impressionable. If you throw propaganda their way, they will believe it. This is why we have liberals, who are generally devoid of any actual facts, just slogans.

Which leads me to the final contributing factor and my third solution to the illegitimacy problem: public schools. I'm not sure how anyone can continue to think "sex education" is helping the situation at all. Not only are you allowing the government to talk to your impressionable child about morality- which sounds like madness to me- it's been thoroughly proven to encourage kids to have sex. Don't believe me? What was the rate of STDs and teen pregnancies in the early 60's? Ok, now fast-forward to today, after fourty-odd years of the liberal's policies on sex education. What's the rate now? Causing 10 girls to practice safe sex doesn't help if 10,00 more girls are having sex. The "they're going to have sex anyway" argument I would assume is fairly idiotic, because the societal problems associated with sex did not reach epidemic proportions until (1) welfare and (2) sexual education.

Try that sort of education with other issues on kids. "Don't kill people- but if you do, make sure to pick up your brass afterwards!" "Don't steal- but if you do, make sure it's only candy or something cheap." Sex education apparently doesn't cover the negative effects of promiscuity enough. Far be it from me to be surprised that the government isn't doing something effectively, but this is also the fault of parents as well, allowing strangers to teach their children their morals.

(As a quick aside, another misunderstanding of today: the job of parents is not to make them like you. The job of a parent is to make sure they grow up into something other than a degenerate/criminal/Democrat.)

The solution to the taxpayer-sponsored indoctrination of our children was mentioned in my last column, which would be abolishing government-run education entirely or at least give vouchers. Failing that, most certainly abolish sex-ed, since its track record has been something less than stellar. Failing that, then parents should realize the cute little children are impressionable morons and take their duties as parents more responsibly.

Public Education: Government Making Your Child More Stupid (and Making You Pay For It)

As the nation is in conflict over giving the government control over a sixth of the nation's economy and a rather important part of our lives, perhaps we should recall what happened when we gave them control of another important part of our lives: education.

Now, almost everyone makes jokes about how stupid high-schoolers are, and have probably heard such from me- but let's consider the subject seriously. We'll forget for a moment that the primary purpose of public education was to indoctrinate children (as John Dewey himself said so often, or liberal icon Woodrow Wilson put it: "Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.") You see, the greatest source of resistance to "progressive", state-enlarging and authoritarian change is the nuclear family, since it instills morals that the state might not agree with. Thus we have liberals constantly trying to bring us government-run pre-school, so that they might ruin our children earlier.

But putting that issue aside, I think with an impending expansion of government control over us it might be useful to remember how effective our government has been in the past with other large programs. We could look at the post office, which is notoriously inefficient and wastes millions of tax dollars simply because it's illegal to compete with it (a nice fascist touch). We could look at welfare, which has created an epidemic of illegitimacy (which happens to be the single worst problem our society has, giving rise to a cornucopia of other problems). We could take a look at Social Security (broke), Medicaid (fraud-ridden and inefficient), or public transportation (an utter waste of money). But I think the simplest option would be the public school system.

I can think of nothing more inefficient than public schools. Last year the federal government spent almost $100 billion on education- which, I should also note, is interesting since the Constitution quite clearly states that education is in the purview of the states, and not the federal government. When you add how much the states and local governments spend, you get almost $900 billion (an estimate of the Census Bureau). What does almost $900 billion (and remember that's just per YEAR) in taxdollars by our children?

Stupidity! When you look at the standardized international test scores for all nations, American students actually do worse the longer they spend in public school. The tests are for fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade. Our fourth graders rank almost at the top in science, math, and reading comp- the science scores only beaten by South Koreans and the Japanese. Once in 8th grade, American scores drop dramatically, averaging in the 60th percentile in science. At twelfth grade, once our students have had the full benefits of public education, they're only beating Lithuania and South Africa in science comprehension, and few countries in math or reading either.

Consider that the courts in New York- where they are ranked 6th in the nation for spending more money per student- ruled that graduates of New York City schools were unfit to sit on a jury.

Simply put, public schools- well, they don't really do anything useful. Half of all people who work at public schools are not even teachers- they're part of the endless bureaucratic machine that always accompanies government institutions. At private schools, 80% of employees on average are teachers.

Also, thanks largely in part to the teacher's unions (who, remember, represent teachers, not children) the teachers that ARE teaching our children are incompetent- to say the least. You can find many hilarious stories about teachers failing tests meant for eighth graders, and needing the standards lowered in order to continue teaching. In Godless, Coulter relates a story in which a teacher fails repeatedly at a test with questions so simple it's mind-boggling. Eventually he paid a homeless man with a history of mental illness to take the test for him- and drew suspicion to himself because the homeless man did so well.

Now, this isn't to say all teachers are incompetent- I had many great teachers, after all- but I could also think of quite a few that I knew most of the class was smarter than. Also some who simply did not need to be around children (there are so many reports of sexual molestation by teachers it makes jokes about Catholic priests seem silly), or were lazy, or just completely incorrect. A degree in education is often considered to be one of the easiest to get- which I find relatively easy to believe inasmuch as teachers don't bother actually knowing anything they teach- unless what they're teaching is factually incorrect, in which case they'll be sure that they "know" it.

But the single most important defect in public schools, in my opinion, is the fact that they teach barely anything on how our government works, and then maybe for only a year. And there are almost no classes on economic theory in most public schools. They even routinely teach complete lies to students as a subtle indoctrination attempt- fascism is "right wing", that there's any doubt of the Rosenburgs' guilt, or of Sacco and Vanzetti's. Also that "McCarthyism" existed or that Gorbachev won the Cold War for us, or what Watergate really was, or global warming, or the more fun examples such as that teacher a few years back being taped as saying America was a terrorist nation. Then of course there are the endless lawsuits about schools' suppressing Christianity but forcing impressionable 12-year old students to pretend to be Islamic for the course of two weeks (dressing similarly, observing the Five Pillars of Muslim faith, and playing a "jihad board game"- yes, that actually happened in- where else- California at a tax-payer-funded school).

I can personally recall instances that revealed how great our public schools were. For example, everyone's heard the fun bit about Christmas being banned in schools, where saying the word "Christmas" is punishable by watching a Clooney movie. But I WAS forced by threat of grade reduction to color something that celebrated Kwanzaa- which is a holiday invented by an FBI stooge. Or where I was told that if I went near a biology teacher (I had asked him if he wanted to help sponsor a debate between intelligent design and evoluion one time) I'd have a restraining order put on me. Or the amazing moment in my AP US History class that I was the only one to know which two presidents had been impeached- none of my liberal classmates could remember that the second one was Clinton. I was...astounded to say the least. And they called me stupid.

I could probably rant on and on about how effective our public schools are, but by now I'm sure I've gotten across my point. Privatizing schools or even school vouchers are certainly helpful solutions to schools that churn out illiterates who should not be allowed near a voting booth. So would the ability to fire bad teachers. So would having teachers who knew something of history- really, the issue is that they have no competition, so nothing bothering improves. The liberal solution- throwing money at it- certainly does not work, D.C. spend the most per student and has the worst schools (primarily since a lot of that money goes to bureaucrats- vice principals in New York city make over $100 thousand a year- a superintendent $300,000). For managing schools that probably do more harm than good.

Just remember how much the government is ruining our children and wasting your money on something that everyone takes for granted now when you think about nationalizing health care- and they've had over a century to work on this.