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.