An Open Letter by Liberty and Justice for All. [Scroll down] An affirmation of the traditional family — the belief that men and women should be encouraged to marry and have sons and daughters — cannot be thought a crime. Civilization perishes unless such unions are encouraged. The noble longing for a plural society, in which not all are cast in the same mold, must not be realized by belittling the family. Strong families headed by married couples have been the key to success in black America ever since slavery was abolished a century and a half ago, and this remains the key today for all Americans.

The Black Lives Matter Movement and America's Founding Principles. [Scroll down] The destruction of the black nuclear family and missing black fathers, for instance, are arguably the single most detrimental societal change America has witnessed over the past 100 years. Out-of-wedlock births are a corollary. Worse, these changes have too often been incentivized by government policies. Every weekend in major inner-city neighborhoods, the death toll from black-on-black murders is staggering. Black lives do not seem to matter to the BLM organization under these circumstances. The young perpetrators are more often than not from fatherless homes. Not only are BLM activists silent on this issue, but they say on their website: "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement[.]"

The Racism of the 'Anti-Racist' Movement. The biggest problem facing the black community today, says [Larry] Elder, is the absence of fathers. In the 1960s, most black children were raised in two-parent households. That changed when our government's war on poverty began. The handouts sent the message that it's the government's job, not your responsibility, to take care of you and your kids. "A mother with two children makes more money than she would make on minimum wage because of all the goodies she gets through the welfare state!" Now, he says, Black Lives Matter actually encourages the breakup of families. Their website does say, "disrupt the Western-prescribed, nuclear family." That's a Karl Marx idea straight from "The Communist Manifesto." Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors proudly describes herself as a "trained Marxist."

What 'Systemic Liberalism' Has Wrought. Why is it that certain parts of America — whether cities, towns, or schools — require very little policing and see almost no crime (certainly little to no violent crime)? I believe the answer is quite simple: Wherever one sees intact, God-fearing families — families with a married mother and father who regularly attend religious services — crime is virtually nonexistent. Of course, sound morality has long revealed this to be the case, but, if you require it, multiple studies have also shown that children raised by a married mother and father are better citizens; e.g., less likely to commit crimes, more likely to perform well in school, and so on. [...] Modern liberalism's war on the family and faith has been particularly devastating to fathers, and this has been particularly devastating to America's youth and the communities that must deal with the consequences of fatherless children. Among many other sad outcomes, fatherlessness is one of the leading predictors of future criminal activity.

Black Lives Matter, Just Not To Democrat Politicians: Part IV. [Scroll down] The Welfare State, ie Government, has replaced many Black fathers in the home. It's just that simple. Public assistance discourages marriage or even the presence of the father in the home. The structure of Public Assistance pits poorer fathers against Government's deep pockets. Married couples have a lower income threshold to receive public assistance than unmarried couples who live apart. If one or both of them are unemployed, the threshold is very low. For many, it's easier to not have a job (or to work cash jobs) and not live in the home. That kind of "easy money" discourages the father from getting a job with a real W2, the kind it takes to get ahead and discourages him from marrying the mother of his children. Without a father in the home to teach, coach and model correct behavior, young men, especially in the inner cities, turn to other role models. Even if the father is surreptitiously living in the home, what kind of positive model is it for a young man when he see's "Dad," hiding in the closet from the Welfare Inspector?

The Police, Patriarchy and Feminism. Substituting husbands for a government check has especially hurt low-income women. After decades of promoting the matriarchal family, especially in the inner city, neither children nor women prospered. Boys especially developed impulsive reactions to emotions, sought instantaneous gratification, held a twisted view of manhood, and an inability to self-control with no respect for any authority including their own mothers. The end results of chaotic homes produced chaotic inner city streets and high-crime neighborhoods. Even though the fatherless home experiment failed miserably, the progressive left refuses to change course even for the sake of these poor women and children. And instead, they doubled down on hating fathers and chose to blame the obvious inner city tragedy on racism.

Real American Privilege. I was born privileged. That privilege has nothing to do with race or gender. My privilege was to be born surrounded by intact families. My parents, both sets of grandparents, and all four sets of great-grandparents kept their families intact. That's seven couples who raised their children to adulthood and stayed together until one of them died. They weren't all great marriages, but to their great credit and my great fortune, they all stuck it out. What's more, though my childhood coincided with the divorce boom of the 1960s and 70s, I knew only a handful of kids with divorced parents. I knew another handful with parents who died young. I knew a sizable number whose grandparents had been exterminated, and whose parents suffered in the concentration camps. When I visited their homes, however, what I saw were intact families.

Black Lives Matter Does Not Care about Black Youth. [Scroll down] When asked why they don't want to marry the fathers of their children, the mothers indicated that they didn't trust the young men, that the men didn't work steadily or earn enough money, and that they were too often violent." What does this have to do with BLM? Consider that over 70% of black children now grow up fatherless. This past Father's Day meant little to them except possibly provoking indifference or hatred, as there is no father figure present in their lives. My own students write of this continually. Two themes repeatedly emerge: (a) women who were raised by their single mothers adamantly assert that they don't need a man; they can get along perfectly well without any men, and, furthermore, they don't trust any man; (b) women and men raised without their fathers often feel guilty that they may have been responsible for their fathers abandoning them. These feelings hardly result in positive self-esteem or future solid relationships. This is certainly a perfect opening for a group like BLM, who can be the stand-in for the missing parental units. Then combine this with the endless indoctrination of left-wing ideology in schools, and it is a witch's brew for all.

The Father's Day Obama Betrayed Black America. On Father's Day 2008, candidate Barack Obama made his most honest speech on race, maybe his only halfway honest speech on race. The media barely noticed. The site was the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. From the pulpit Obama spoke to the gathered voters — excuse me, congregants — with uncharacteristic audacity. He reminded his audience that too many black fathers were missing from "too many homes." He knew something of the phenomenon himself given that his father "left us when I was two years old." Yes, that con again. Putting aside for a moment his personal story, however fictitious, Obama made the traditionally conservative argument that fatherless children were five times more likely to grow up poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to get into serious trouble than children who grow up with both parents.

'Systemic Racism' Is Not What Ails Black America. [Scroll down] Peaceful protests in reaction to Mr. Floyd's death and against police brutality in general are completely justified. But why is there no vocal outrage, no call to action, in the black community over the fact that only 30.8 percent of black children, according to the latest dataset in the 2018 American Community Survey, live in a married, two-parent household? The vast majority of black children are raised in single, female-headed households. Despite the valiant effort that single black mothers show in raising their children, they can't be both good mothers and good fathers, and they shouldn't have to be. [...] If anything is systemic, it is the failure within the black community to see that the breakdown of the black family is the root cause of so many of the social ills that confront the community, and black males in particular.

A Deliberately Bankrupted America. In 1990, one of every three African-American men under 29 were in prison or on parole. Already stressed family bonds broke under this strain. Currently 77% percent of African Americans are born into unmarried families. The family pictures of son, father, and grandson is almost unknown in our poorest communities. The anger and pain of sons abandoned by their fathers is a lifelong wound. The consequences of numerous short-term disposable relationships is abusive stepparents and the loss of positive male role models. When the patriarchy is smashed, there are no fathers to guide boys to manhood, and the masculinity that remains is too often toxic.

The Indispensable American Family. In August 1884, Washington Gladden, possibly the most famous Christian preacher in the America of his day, wrote an article in The Century Magazine on "Three Dangers" besetting the welfare of the nation he loved. [...] Gladden was a liberal churchman, one of the fathers of the Social Gospel, and it is as such that he speaks. "The monogamous family," he says, "formed by the union of one woman with one man, and by the increase of children born to them, is the structural unit of modern society." He is deliberate about every word. Society is like a physical organism, which is composed not of separate particles, but of organized cells. So, too, "the modern social organism is composed not of individuals, but of households." Far from being primitive and atavistic, the family, he says, is "a late product of the social evolution," and "it is by most philosophers admitted to characterize that society whose type is the highest and whose foundations are the firmest."

America is awash in overmothered men. Growing up fatherless, or with a father a son rarely sees due to divorce or workaholism (yes, that's a thing), almost invariably stunts a boy's growth. The end result is almost always too much mother, which means boys will absorb all so much femininity and none of the masculinity they need. Ergo, he will spend years trying to figure out what it means to be a man. It's a tough subject, and thus taboo. But at some point, we will have to answer why there are so few strong, grounded, purposeful men among us when they used to be a dime a dozen. Video games have nothing to do with it.

U.S. has world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households. For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage. A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households. Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). The study, which analyzed how people's living arrangements differ by religion, also found that U.S. children from Christian and religiously unaffiliated families are about equally likely to live in this type of arrangement. In comparison, 3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households. In neighboring Canada, the share is 15%.

America Has World's Highest Rate of Single-Parent Households. The United States has a higher share of single-parent households than 129 other countries, a recent analysis from the Pew Research Center reveals. Twenty-three percent of U.S. children live with a single adult, Pew found, compared with an average of just 7 percent around the world. Of the 130 countries from which Pew obtained survey data, rates of single-parent households ranged from the low 20s in the United States and United Kingdom to as low as 1 or 2 percent in countries like Turkey and Afghanistan.

The Derangement Syndromes of Our Time. Who doesn't feel compassion? Who wouldn't do whatever they can to help someone in need? But there are intractable problems with compassion gone wild. In practice, misguided compassion breeds debauchery and dependence. Anyone wishing to see the former is invited to drive the streets of San Francisco, where they may smell human excrement, tons of which are deposited each week on the sidewalks and gutters by the city's nearly 10,000 homeless. They may witness thousands of intravenous drug addicts buying and injecting this poison in state-sanctioned acts of slow-motion suicide. Anyone wishing to see the latter is invited to tour pretty much any legacy housing project in America, where welfare checks and free rent made the presence of a father not merely unnecessary but economically disadvantageous.

The NBA and the Elephant on the Court — Unwed Fathers. In 1998, Sports Illustrated published a cover story called "Where's Daddy?": "Although there have been no studies on athletes and their out-of-wedlock kids, those who are familiar with the issue say the numbers are staggering. 'I'd say that there might be more kids out of wedlock than there are players in the NBA,' estimates one of the league's top agents, who says he spends more time dealing with paternity claims than he does negotiating contracts. "Len Elmore, an ESPN broadcaster and former NBA player, worked as an agent but says he quit in part because of a 'lack of responsibility' among his clients. 'For numbers, I would guess that one (out-of-wedlock child) for every player is a good ballpark figure. For every player with none, there's a guy with two or three.'"

Social and Political Disintegration Is Accelerating. In 1960, 5% of the nation's children were born out of wedlock; but in the last few years, the percentage is hovering around 40%. Sexual immorality is further intensified by promotion of sexual activity in our public schools. Free condoms are regularly distributed in our educational institutions. Some states have clinics where, after a ten-minute interview, young girls are given referrals to get an abortion (no parental or caregiver consent, for example, is needed in New York State as well as other states). In many states, at least one parent must be informed, but consent is not required. Little children are sitting on the laps of drag queens in library "readings" and some of those drag queens have records of pedophilia. Homosexual marriage is now the law of the land. Trashy exhibitionists are singing on youtube.com and throughout the media. A million babies are aborted a year, not for "women's health" in 90+% of the cases, but because of women's priorities. These changes in our sexual mores have led to the disintegration of the family.

Hudson: Affirmative Action Has 'Destroyed People's Lives'. [Scroll down] [Jerome] Hudson also reflected on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson's left-wing Great Society vision and the "welfare state." "One of the more searing points is that the poverty line in America had been decreasing 20 years before President Lyndon Johnson launched his quote-unquote 'War on Poverty,' and if you have the book, you can see the chart — poverty was taking a nosedive, and leave it to Democrats to create a situation where there is actually no crisis of poverty in America, and in fact, something amazing happens — particularly with black people — between 1910 and about 1955. You had, on scale, more blacks being married and having kids than whites for about four or five decades. I'm not the first person to argue that welfare has basically replaced the father in the black home."

How Trump Can Use Racial Resentment to Get Reelected. [Scroll down] Still, such policies don't explain why other racial groups, living under the same policies, have lower incidences of violence and of cultural dysfunction than blacks. Whether the liberal city is Baltimore, New York, or Portland, Oregon, Asians and Jews have very low incidences of violence and of cultural dysfunction, while blacks abound in each. The problem, then, is black culture, and the family in particular.

Researchers: Crumbling family structures are contributing to mass shootings. A study by the Family Research Council says that crumbling traditional family structures are contributing to a wave of mental health issues that often lead people to commit mass shootings and other violence. "The fact that we have an epidemic of absentee fathers in the home and that we have a disintegrating family structure in America, which is brought about by a variety of things, is a major issue and a major cause for what we see happening in these mass shootings," Ret. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Vice President of the FRC, told The Epoch Times.

Of the 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters, 26 of Them Had One Thing in Common. Suzanne Venker's recent opinion piece on FoxNews is very, very important, because she points out that almost all of the most recent deadly mass shooters have one thing in common: fatherlessness.

How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society and Family Life. The welfare state is another significant driver of the decline of the nuclear family. Unsurprisingly, the black family is massively impacted. In 1965, 25 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock. In 2016, that rate had increased to 70 percent and even topped 80 percent in certain urban areas. In the 1940s, this number was five percent, which was comparable to that of white children. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate in 2016 was 52 percent, while for whites it was 30 percent. The rise in children born out of wedlock cannot be separated from the massive expansion of the welfare state under Johnson's Great Society.

The American Left Is Racist, Not President Trump. Does anyone truly believe there isn't a causal relationship between 50 years of welfare spending and the destruction of the black family, where only one-third of black households with children have a father and mother? Ah, but the "traditional family" is oppressive, patriarchal, and obsolete! [...] It is not racist to point out that the reason for disparate educational outcomes, where whites and Asians outperform blacks and Latinos, is more likely caused by the destruction of the traditional two-parent family than by racism.

Fathers Matter — A Lot. The truth of the title is obvious to all but the most fanatically anti-natural-family ideologues, and yet, our culture is drowning in fatherlessness and seems unable to get this most elemental requirement of healthy families right. So, our society suffers.

America's Detour from Sanity. Up until about 1960, children that were not orphans had fathers and mothers living together in a nest secured with bonds of love and civil rules inspired by God. That life is sacred was taken as fact, not opinion. Women were cherished and respected by men who were brought up to be gentlemen. You did not require a high IQ to know that a man could never be the equal of a woman, and vice-versa. Respecting each other's real differences, both sexes would laugh at the ridiculous notion that male and female are interchangeable, either in function or psyche. Such a claim, as made by post-Friedan feminists, reveal a mind tangled in abstractions and lost in wish lists.

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness. Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness. The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: "Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions." Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking.

Facebook Suspends Candace Owens For Saying Liberal Policies Incentivize Fatherless Homes. The social media monopoly has suspended activist and commentator Candace Owens for the crime of claiming that liberal policies incentivize fatherless homes in the black community. Owens was hit with a 7 day ban for posting, "Black America must wake up to the great liberal hoax. White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is." She then included a screenshot of a tweet which pointed out that the poverty rate amongst married blacks is 7 percent, compared to 22 percent for blacks generally.

Thank you, Michelle Obama! As a mother of a divorced dad who's been fighting for shared parenting legislation, I'd like to thank our former first lady for her insensitive and cavalier remarks concerning divorced dads and parenting when she compared the Trump era to "living with divorced dad." In just one riveting sound bite, Michelle Obama brought to light the dangerous misperceptions that our family courts and legislators have about parenting and divorce. Maybe some divorced dads (and moms) are terrible parents, as Michelle depicts. But that's not relevant when it comes to shared parenting and family court reform. There's a bigger issue, and that's about how much time and responsibility each fit, able, and willing parent of divorce gets to have with their children.

Leftism Threatens American Family Life. The main problem with their socialism (communism relabeled) is that it will weaken or even give the coup de grace to the family. Government will pretend it can take care of people and give sufficient womb to tomb nurturance, and can do what no family can do in terms of assuring security, purpose, and even love. Undoubtedly under any new federal takeover of day-to-day life there will be new "love laws." Virtue signaling will become passé, and persons will be open to public contempt and fines if they do not participate in state-defined love signaling. These assumptions and promotions are gaining momentum among our obsessed, depressed, and possessed fellow citizens as they experience lovelessness to an extreme.

Your Family Can Save Our Civilization. Everybody has mentors, of course, or one hopes everyone may be so blessed. But for the majority of human beings who have ever lived on God's green Earth, their values come from their parents. It's incontrovertible. Parents are our primary role models. And for men, you always — always — try to live up to your father's example.

Tucker Carlson's Firebell. Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated. In it, he fingered long-standing economic policies pushed by Swamp residents and their donors for the benefit of a rootless elite class and an establishment about whom we might be tempted to say, "They hate normal Americans," except that it is not clear at all whether they know normal Americans exist. The latter is the best construction. Factories closed, jobs shipped overseas, Midwestern wasteland towns, stagnant wages for men in what jobs remain, illegal aliens winked at in order to depress wages and increase the bottom line: These are major factors contributing to the decline of marriage rates, the delay of marriage, and the increase in bastardy and single-parenthood, and Carlson risked a great deal in saying so, on a program that depends on the advertising dollars of major corporations.

The Worst Enemy of Black People. Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers. In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80. Actually, "breakdown" is the wrong term; the black family doesn't form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.



Macy's holiday pajama pics prompt backlash for perceived 'racist' photo. Macy's product images for its holiday pajamas feature a number of families decked out in festive gear, but some on social media are calling one photo in particular racist. The collected images shared on social media depict a white couple with children twice, an interracial LGBTQ couple with biracial children, and a black mother with three black children. Naturally, social media users — in particular, a Cincinnati city councilman, Jeff Pastor — wondered why the family that did not feature a father was black.

The Editor says...

The only thing unusual about this ad is that it it NOT an inversion of the truth, as most advertising is. Most advertising depicts abnormal relationships as normal, good things as bad, bad things as good, chronic illness as inevitable, and $50,000 as a reasonable price for a new car. In practically all television ads, the criminals are white males, and all blacks are either the heroes, the experts, or the victims of those evil white people. In the advertisement discussed in the article above, the black family has no father. That is not an exceptional situation. Such a depiction is not something to get upset about.

The World Needs Fathers. America needs more good men. America needs fathers to be present and there. America needs men to work, earn, protect and provide for their families. America needs men to treat women and children with a higher regard than society seems to currently favor. American needs fathers to be an example of true manhood and success. I know it's not politically correct to say this — but it seems like a major problem with violence, abuse, mass shootings and attacks is fatherlessness. What do the Parkland, Newtown, Thousand Oaks and the racist SC murderers all have in common? Single motherhood and absent fathers.

Almost Half of U.S. Births Happen Outside Marriage, Signaling Cultural Shift. An increasing number of births happen outside of marriage, signaling cultural and economic shifts that are here to stay, according to a new report from the United Nations. Forty percent of all births in the U.S. now occur outside of wedlock, up from 10 percent in 1970, according to an annual report released on Wednesday by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the largest international provider of sexual and reproductive health services. That number is even higher in the European Union.



The Consequences of Fatherlessness. Some fathering advocates would say that almost every social ill faced by America's children is related to fatherlessness. Six are noted here. As supported by the data [in this article], children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.

Ten Inconvenient Facts. [#6] The traditional family is best. Just this week a study came out showing that being a child of divorce cuts in half the likelihood of that child earning a college degree. That's just one of hundreds of studies demonstrating worse outcomes for children from broken homes. The infamous "Life of Julia" ad for the Obama 2012 campaign peddled a feminist myth contrary to this mountain of evidence, showing that a woman needn't worry about finding a man to help raise her child. She can do it just fine all by herself.

The Real Reasons for Chicago's Deadly Crime Wave. If you were somehow to identify and arrest every single one of the shooters involved in the weekend violence, you would no doubt discover that nearly all of them came from homes with absent fathers, and that nearly all of them had been previously arrested for violent crime. As Rahm Emanuel knows, to take a stand against hit-and-run fatherhood is to cast blame on a significant portion of the Chicago electorate. What's more, to do so would also cast blame on the leftist policies that gave rise to the welfare state and to which he owes his political career. The vast government apparatus that over the years has come to make fathers unnecessary, at least in a financial sense, lies at the very heart of Democratic politics. Single mothers may do their best, but the research is consistent and irrefutable: boys raised without fathers are far more likely to become involved in crime.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples. [#29] Stupid Fathers: Fatherhood is constantly looked upon as either a needless cultural habit or an outright joke. A 2008 study by a fatherhood advocacy group noted that fathers are all too often portrayed negatively on TV sitcoms. And Rebecca Hagelin noted in 2009 that commercials, TV shows, and the media often portray fathers as hateful, uninterested in their families, or not nearly as smart as the kids in the family.

The Left and Children. Even longer than they have ignored the right to life, American liberals have worked to build a massive welfare state that has played a terrible role in the destruction of the family — especially the black family. Yesterday [6/20/2018], Rush Limbaugh again reminded Americans which political party enabled generations of children — again, especially black children — to be separated from their parents. The Democrat Party exists on dependency, and people that escape it pose a problem. So don't buy that the Democrats care about separated families. Because, after all, the Democrat Party literally subsidized single motherhood in the black community for decades. It was called AFDC. The Democrat Party promoted a welfare policy that gave single women additional money for every child they had. The father need not ever be around. In many cases, the father was not even known, the father was not even identified because the Democrat Party assumed the role.

Fewer Americans are celebrating Father's Day, because more kids are growing up without fathers. Fewer people are celebrating Father's Day than ever before, a fact that may have less to do with the nature of the holiday than it does with the nature of American families. A U.S. Census Bureau study found that the percentage of children living in single-parent households increased from 12 percent in 1960 to 31 percent in 2016. During that same timeframe, "the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled."

Fathers Deserve More Than Stuff For Father's Day. They Deserve Respect. An Internet search for "Father's Day 2018" brings up a top hit: "20 Last-Minute Father's Day Gifts That Are Amazon Prime-Eligible." Now, like most dads, I'm not one to complain about receiving gifts (especially when they involve a good weekend of fishing), but something is wrong when popular culture understands the obligations of Father's Day as nothing more than a 30-minute phone call and shipping your dad something Amazon's website said were "Dad's Favorites." Like so many other things in our culture today, the commercialization of this holiday obscures its true meaning. Father's Day is about so much more than store sales and cheesy coffee mugs. It is, to borrow the words a resolution President Calvin Coolidge once signed on its celebration, a day "to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations," and remind ourselves of the importance of fatherhood to our country.

Government removal of children from their parents didn't start with Trump. The government has routinely taken children from their parents for the past 50 years; not in increments of 2,000 as indicated in the tabloid, but by the millions. It began with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which included sex on it its list of categories to receive discrimination protection. This law neutered the American male in general, but the African-American community experienced its immediate implementation. The government fostered unwed motherhood through financial inducements made possible by the welfare system, which gave women incentives to have children if they weren't married. Even well-meaning young couples who planned to get married opted for the welfare system because it meant tens of thousands of dollars in increased income over the life of the young family. Fathers lived with parents, other family members and friends, for if welfare workers found even a pair of pants hanging in the closet of the mother, she would lose her welfare payments. This was the first step in separating children from parents. The father was removed from the home.

Going Fatherless on Father's Day. Gay Pride Month, if you somehow haven't noticed, is this June. It happens to coincide with the Obergefell decision, June 26, 2015, when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and a handful of robed liberals rendered unto themselves the ability to redefine the multi-millennial, Western, Judeo-Christian, human, Biblical, biological, natural conception of marriage between a man and a woman. Obergefell is celebrated at the website of the official Gay Pride Calendar by the unforgettable image of President Barack Obama's White House illuminated in rainbow colors. It's ironic that liberals at Google and the Obama White House would, without any sense of contradiction, celebrate both things; that is, Father's Day and Obergefell. What's the irony? The irony is that by redefining marriage in America, and forcibly imposing that redefinition upon all 50 states via judicial fiat, leftists from Barack Obama to Google's anonymous powers have pioneered a form of family that is, flatly, fatherless. Think about it: a family of two married women is a family without a father. Why purposely create fatherless families?

Black America Walking Off the Cliff. The pre-welfare black society understood the necessity for respect and responsibility. From slavery until LBJ's War on Poverty programs, intact black American families were the norm. The church was the glue that sealed biblical bindings in the hearts and minds of the family. Fathers governed their households, and young men were less likely to become criminals. Fornicators and adulterers were unwelcomed parasites. Premarital pregnancies were a rarity, as they were a cause for shame and reproach. In 1950, eighty-five years after slavery, the two-parent black household was 78%. By the mid-sixties, black lives started to matter much less under LBJ's Great Society. Now, just fifty-three years after the War on Poverty began, the once stable two-parent black household has disintegrated to an abysmal 27%, and the black church is all but silent! The roots of this catastrophe were sown the minute the black church started trusting in government instead of God.



Target to remove 'Baby Daddy' cards that features a black couple. Customer ire has pushed Target to remove its ' Baby Daddy' greeting cards from stores ahead of Father's Day. Frustration with the cards first started approximately 2 weeks ago when Facebook user Takeisha Saunders posted a photo of the card.

Company slammed for 'Baby Daddy' Father's Day card. You can't judge a book by its cover — but a Father's Day card, that's a different story. Just ask American Greetings, which caught plenty of grief on Thursday for its tone-deaf "Baby Daddy" card. The card, which was quickly removed from the greeting card company's website — as well as from Target, where it was being sold — featured a silhouetted black couple on the cover behind the two-word greeting.

The More Young Men Are Bathed in Femininity, the More 'Toxic Masculinity' You Will See. One of the most ironic things about the constant "toxic masculinity" complaints that we hear these days is that we live in an overly feminized culture where most of the "toxic" males seem to have either been raised without fathers or claim to be adherents of feminism. [...] We take a young man and kick his father out of his life, send him to school where he has mostly women teachers, barrage him with negative messages about masculinity, then turn him loose at college where we treat him like a guilty-until-proven-innocent rapist, and after all that, we blame "masculinity" when he goes off the rails despite the fact that he spent a lifetime bathed in femininity. Unsurprisingly, the more women try to change masculinity, the more negative and toxic it actually becomes. Yet, articles explaining how masculinity needs to be changed and rewired — written by women or feminized males — are practically a cottage industry these days.

Before and After Welfare Handouts. What we have in our nation is not material poverty but dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives, aided and abetted by the welfare state. Part of this pathological lifestyle is reflected in family structure. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Today it's respectively 75 percent and 30 percent.

Project Freedom. The vagaries of human nature guarantee that we'll always have ne'er-do-wells. But in the 1960s, American elite culture multiplied them, by stripping the stigma from a wide swath of misbehavior, partly because elites hankered for their own fling with sex, drugs, and dropping out, and partly because they came to think that centuries of racial victimization made society, not the individual, responsible for dysfunctional black behavior. Society, the new orthodoxy claimed, was to blame for the supposed lack of opportunity that discouraged black Americans from working and learning, for the rage and resentment that fueled disproportionate black criminality, and for the despair that heroin and crack served to dull. Moreover, once out-of-wedlock sex lost its shame in the elite worldview, so did out-of-wedlock childbearing, widespread enough among black Americans a century ago to trouble W. E. B. Du Bois deeply, but astronomically higher after the cultural changes of the 1960s. As public opinion normalized single-parent families, the elites' belief that America owed some cash reparation for 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow found an outlet in the hefty enrichment of a Depression-era program meant to aid widows and orphans, for which unwed mothers were also eligible. No longer stigmatized, and financially enabled by fattened welfare benefits, illegitimate births in inner-city neighborhoods soon soared above 80 percent.

The Four Terrible Things That Are Destroying Boys In Our Culture. Let's imagine the world the average 13-year-old boy inhabits. [...] The boy cannot escape sex. It is all over his computer. All over his phone. All over social media. All over the TV. All over the music he listens to. He goes to school and his female classmates are dressed like strippers. He goes anywhere and that's how the women are dressed. It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand that he control himself.

The Surreal World of Teaching. [D]id you know that in the inverted world of education today, if a student has a baby, then more financial aid is available? Indeed! Consequently, students are being told by their college advisers that they should get pregnant. Even some of the students are appalled at this suggestion. But then there are those who proclaim that "the money comes from the government," implying that it is not really problematic. Deliberately unschooled in how things actually work, and already the recipients of financial assistance, these students see government as the ultimate security blanket. There is no connection to the idea that government comprises taxpayers. What a wonderful idea — to have a money tree somewhere pumping out financial aid ad infinitum!

Of Course Children Prefer Liberalism. Liberals knew well what they were doing as they worked for decades at destroying the family. As generations of Americans have been raised in broken homes — often by broken people — it makes it easier to make them wards of the state. After all, if you don't have parents who care much or provide much for you, why not look to Uncle Sam and his trillions? One of the great lies of modern liberalism — perhaps the great lie — is that the world owes us something, and it's up to us to do whatever it takes to get it. If one has the "right" to do whatever one wishes in the sexual realm, why take responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy? And if we don't have to worry about sex leading to children, why get married at all? And if we want to get married, why can't we define what is marriage?

Another Inconvenient Truth. The nuclear family unit has been desecrated, belittled and devalued by a people in a secular world that have developed their own morals, ignoring the eternal Author of morality.

Professor Says Men [are] Taught There's Something Wrong With Masculinity. In the first installment of a weekly series on Men In America, Tucker Carlson discussed the disparagement of masculinity with University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson. Carlson said many middle-aged men know people who have committed suicide, and that younger women may seem more "on the ball" than young men. He added that in the recent rash of mass shootings, all culprits were men.

The vast majority of mass shooters come from broken homes. To point out that boys need their fathers is to shine a spotlight on divorce and single mothers; and that is, admittedly, uncomfortable. But there's no way to address fatherlessness comfortably. The fact is, divorce and family breakdown — which, to answer my emailer's question, is the root of fatherlessness — is catastrophic for children. There's more than one reason why, but an obvious one is that in the majority of cases, divorce separates children from their fathers. This is destructive to both boys and girls, but each sex suffers differently. Girls who grow up deprived of their father are more likely to become depressed, more likely to self-harm, and more likely to be promiscuous. But they still have their mothers, with whom they clearly identify. Boys do not have a comparable identification and thus suffer more from father absence.

America's inexorable decline continues. [The Florida shooter], age 19, was a young man who had no male role model in his life. Whatever underlying mental illness he had, it is dangerous to ignore the fact that [he], like so many young American men today, lacked positive male role models. This is important because, until the rise of modern Feminism, virtues that were considered decidedly masculine, such as "fatherly instinct, loyalty, fraternity and camaraderie, constancy, courage, chivalry, patriotism, protector, laborer, and responsibility" were highly valued by society. Thus, men — and the need for positive male role models — were cherished. Unfortunately, we do not live in a society that believes men can or should be the exclusive proprietors of these virtues or a society that wants these virtues to be distilled at all. Just look at how society has reacted since the terrible Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting last week. The Left's anti-gun and pernicious "toxic masculinity" agendas have fused, and become a widely popular belief. But, neither guns nor masculinity were the cause of Parkland high school shooting. In fact, it was the lack of masculinity — or the toxicity of what modern American Liberalism defines as worthwhile male behavior today — that spurred [the shooter] on in his dastardly deeds last week.

When Will We Have the Guts to Link Fatherlessness to School Shootings? Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen minutes of fame, let's start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999. Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness. Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.

Marriage is a great anti-poverty program. So why does government discourage it? For example, let's say a couple is living together, unmarried, with their two children. Each partner has a low-wage job and a poverty-level income. The single mother and her two children get payments through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program run by the federal government and their state. But if the mother marries the father, their combined income is just a bit too high to quality for government assistance — so they lose their monthly payment. To avoid that, the two don't get married. Abruptly ending assistance to couples when they marry is a shortsighted policy that acts as a powerful disincentive to marry. That's bad for the couples, their children and our country.

The Real Gender Gap: Family Breakdown and Black Males. Data from the state of Virginia shows a strong association between single parent households and violent crime. [...] According to the Heritage Foundation, black illegitimacy rose exponentially halfway through the 1960s. This is precisely when the perverse incentives of Johnson's "War on Poverty" were being implemented.

Infidelity rates by ethnicity. The following table, constructed from GSS data, shows self-admitted cheating rates among those who were married when they were fooling around, sorted in descending order by female creeping: [...]

Transgenderism Is an Intellectual Disease. Like sex itself, having children out of wedlock used to be a matter of shame. It is no longer so. Marriage used to be understood as a partnership that people undertook for fundamentally practical reasons centered around survival. Now it embodies a strange expectation: "emotional fulfillment." Like a bottomless soft drink, one's spouse is to keep one perpetually satisfied and refreshed. This sentimental notion of marriage, so representative of our time, is terribly wrongheaded — indeed, it is mere egotism — and the result is a culture of children, many of them unintended, who are poorly raised products of transient encounters. [...] For me, the end of the family signals the end of civilization itself. But in trying to make the family normal again, we encounter the most formidable of obstacles: human pride and its desire for absolute sovereignty.

40 Percent Of Kids Now Born To Single Moms — Up 700 Percent Since 1960. A recent report from the Social Capital Project reveals that the American family is disintegrating, fast. Fully 40 percent of mothers are currently unmarried. This is bad news, because good families depend on good marriages. Marriage is the moral glue that binds them. It's the stabilizing agent. There's a reason that children from married couples do better in school, and are less likely to end up in jail as compared to children of unmarried mothers, known as "fragile families." Lavar Young, civil rights activist, thinks marriage is a powerful tool for fighting against racial inequality.

CDC: Black men better fathers than white men. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which I affectionately refer to as the Diseased Centers of Control, have conducted a study showing that black men make better parents than white men. The study, conducted in 2013, came to light in a recent Washington Post article on the Post's favorite topic — you guessed it! — of racism. The study was conducted by the CDC's Division of Vital Statistics, centering on how involved fathers are in the lives of their children. [...] We have to thank the CDC for bringing this to our attention. The CDC are funded to fight diseases, but it's great how they take taxpayer money and do all sorts of creative things with it — like this study!

The Profound Value of 'Merry Christmas'. The words "Merry Christmas" are the tip of the iceberg of our longing to go back to a more normal America. The words are not merely about elevating a Christian celebration or an earlier period of exclusive white dominance. [...] "Merry Christmas" instead has a cluster of meanings that include the birth of Christ, of course, but also are linked through nostalgia and through the facticity of history to a time where more families were intact, where a more positive view of our heritage as a Christian society was held, where sexual mores frowned upon premarital and non-marital sex, where the USA itself was seen as a beacon and a haven in a world of poverty, heathen belief systems, and dictatorial governments. The words "Merry Christmas" resonate with a dominant belief in the worth of the individual as being greater than the needs or consciousness of the "collective." Yes, "Merry Christmas" is about shopping at Macy's or Saks or Amazon, but it implicitly and nostalgically reminds us that the family, not the "global village," is the building block of society.

Moral Values and Customs vs. Laws. It has always been considered a good idea to refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage or at least adulthood. During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passe and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortion. Out-of-wedlock childbirths are no longer seen as shameful and a disgrace. As a result, the rate of illegitimate births among whites is over 30 percent, and among blacks, it's over 70 percent. For over a half-century, the nation's liberals — along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts — have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many in today's generation have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what's moral or immoral, right or wrong, is a matter of convenience, personal opinion or what is or is not criminal.

The Wealth Gap Between White and Black in America. On average, as persons near retirement age, black families and individuals have about one fifth as much in the way of assets as white families. Even when black incomes start to approach white incomes, the wealth gap remains immense. Economists have long been trying to figure out exactly why this is. Part is because blacks do not own their own homes as much as whites do. Plus, there is considerably less inheritance between and among generations in black families and with regard to individuals. But even correcting for these factors, as statisticians can do, the gap between blacks and whites in terms of wealth remains immense. There do seem to be three factors that do explain it: One is that married couples pool their incomes and thus can find the wherewithal to save. Whites marry at a rate about three times that of blacks. By itself, that explains a lot. Pooling of income is a serious step towards financial security. Next, families that stay together and do not disperse their savings tend to have more money available to save and invest. White families tend not only to marry more often but also to stay together more than black families and that, too, is an explanation for a lot.

Out of Wedlock Birth Rates High in America; End of Shotgun Weddings Partially to Blame. The Social Capital Project (SCP), spearheaded by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) is an ongoing project of Congress's Joint Economic Committee to measure the breakdown in what Lee and others talk about as "associational life" in America. That refers to the institutions — churches, schools, teams, and other civic organizations — which connect Americans and mediate between the individual and the state. Preeminent among these institutions, the new report argues, is the family, which it calls "the most intimate and central form of associational life." "A healthy family life is the foundation for a healthy associational life... weakened family life portends a diminished ability of a people to promote and nurture the civil society and pro-social norms that facilitate happiness and prosperity," the report notes. The weakening of family life, the report contends, is signalled and determined by the shocking rise in unmarried birth rates over the past half a century. This matters in part because the children of single mothers, whether the parents nominally "stay together" or split up, do worse across a number of dimensions when compared to their peers from intact homes.

Denzel Washington: Prison system not to blame for crime in black communities. Actor Denzel Washington stressed the prison system was not to blame for crime in black communities, stressing the importance of properly raising children at home, during his tour promoting his new movie at an advanced screening last week. "It starts in the home," the two-time Oscar-winner told The Grio. "If the father is not in the home, the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me, and every one since." "If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home," 62-year-old Washington added.

Liberal Author Says She's Being Blackballed for Warning about Dangers of Early Daycare. Erica Komisar describes herself as a political liberal. But, when it came to getting her book Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters published, let alone publicized, she was roundly rejected by liberal media outlets. Why? Because the social worker and psychoanalyst chose to stand with fact instead of political fiction in the ongoing mommy wars.

Has Promoting Mother Absence Spawned Campus Crybabies? The reflective Mary Eberstadt has the latest Weekly Standard cover story, asserting that the late rise of identity politics especially among the young descends from the decline in family, despite myriad other theories. [...] She touches on some of the research that has become well-known among child psychologists and sociologists, referencing the dramatic increase in, for example, mental health problems, at a high point now on campuses and in the public at large. Mental health problems are linked with family instability, as are reductions in the resources that can help alleviate them, such as church attendance and deeper, broader community relationships. Divorce and failure to marry before bearing children also harm nearby families that do not themselves experience these maladies. Private choices are in fact not private choices, after all.

Having 'white nuclear family' promotes white supremacy, says New York professor, report says. A City University of New York sociology professor reportedly said in a tweetstorm last week that "the white-nuclear family" promotes racism, prompting a backlash on social media. Jessie Daniels, described as an expert on "the Internet manifestations of racism" on her CUNY page, infuriated social media users after reportedly saying that white families promote racism by default.

Motherhood Before Marriage. A fascinating, in-depth study published in 2005 — Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage — explores the views of low-income single mothers whose children are illegitimate. Its insights on out-of-wedlock births shatter the paradigms of poverty warriors left and right. The harmful effects of growing up without a father in the home are depressingly well documented. Children raised in single-parent homes are more likely than children raised in intact families to have emotional and behavioral problems, to engage in crime, to fail in school, to abuse drugs, and to be on welfare as adults.

Census: More Americans 18-to-34 Now Live With Parents Than With Spouse. Four decades ago, in the mid-1970s, young American adults — in the 18-to-34 age bracket — were far more likely to be married and living with a spouse than living in their parents' home. But that is no longer the case, according to a new study by the U.S. Census Bureau. "There are now more young people living with their parents than in any other arrangement," says the Census Bureau study.

The American Dream Hinges on Family. The American family has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last 50 years. The number of single parents in America has increased threefold since 1960. Nearly one-third of households are now headed by single parents, most of whom are mothers, although the number of single fathers is on the rise. [S]ignificantly, this transformation hasn't occurred across the whole population; instead, it has disproportionately affected the low and middle-income households who can least afford to take an economic hit. According to [Raj] Chetty, the number of single parents in a community is the single biggest predictor of social mobility. More than four in ten single mothers live at or below the poverty line compared with one in ten married mothers.

Why Are Black College Graduates Less Wealthy than Other Grads? [Scroll down] Now consider the demographics of black college graduates. The overwhelming majority are women. Females now account for 66 percent of all bachelor's degrees earned by blacks, 70 percent of master's degrees, and 60 percent of doctorates. Women tend to desire husbands who are as educated or more educated than they are, which makes marriage more difficult for black women with higher education degrees. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the percentage of black women college graduates aged 25 to 35 who have never married is 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women. Further, only 2 percent of highly-educated white women had children out of wedlock, whereas 26 percent of black women with four-year degrees did. [...] Oh, and black couples are more likely to divorce than others.

Parents, quit caring more about the White House than your own house. Right now in America our greatest strength and weakness is the family unit. What happens in the American cornerstone, our house, will be the foremost factor that determines our nation's ascent or decline. Divorce rates hover around 50 percent. The United States pornography industry brings in more money than the NFL, NBA and MLB combined and has infiltrated the institution of marriage, morality and adolescent minds. Children raised in single-parent homes are on the rise. Many of our inner cities are becoming the dens of crime due to lack of discipline and leadership from parents. Absentee fathers are the norm.

Black History (aka Demonize White America) Month. Clarence Thomas describes Myers, his grandfather, as "the greatest man I have ever known." Where are such strong, wise, character-driven, and masculine mentors for black males today? The number-one mission of high-profile blacks (actors, politicians and preachers) appears to be getting blacks to embrace same-sex marriage, men using little girl's restrooms, and blaming white America. Myers' Godly principles and values are only echoes of a distant past in the black community today.

LBJ vs. the Nuclear Family. Fifty years ago, in 1966, a political revolution emerged in America that would have a massive impact on millions of families and marriages. The man behind it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who reached the White House amid a national tragedy but grabbed the reins of power quickly and purposefully, bent on transforming the country. Though he is lionized in popular culture these days, it is worth asking whether the celebratory tone accurately reflects the results of his revolution, at least in terms of his massive Great Society.

Report: Only 16% of Baltimore Teens Raised With Married Parents. A new report released by the Family Research Council's Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family. The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is "one of the five least intact counties of America," along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn.

Blacks and Politicians. The overall welfare of black people requires attention to devastating problems that can be solved only at the family and community levels. Mountains of evidence demonstrates that outcomes are not favorable for children raised in female-headed households. Criminal behavior is greater, and academic achievement is much less for such children. This is a devastating problem, but it is beyond the reach of a president or any other politician to solve. If there is a solution, it will come from churches and local community organizations.

All the Queen's Men. [Scroll down] Lest we forget: It was at a Manhattan LGBT Gala in September where Hillary Clinton proclaimed half of her opponent's supporters to be a basket of deplorables — a declaration met with resounding cheers from those whose lives stand for anti-complementary, anti-conjugal marriage. Beyond that, these are the urbane pro-motherlessness and pro-fatherlessness elites. Progressive elites — especially the males among them — are untroubled by motherlessness and fatherlessness. This would have been horrifying ten years ago. Today it is a badge of sophistication. More troubling, it is an act of compliance with our new laws. In the religion of the sexual revolution, adult access to sexual pleasure trumps everything else, including the best interests of children. And leading the charge to destroy the American family and faith — dragging us deeper into the dark pit of chaos of the sexual revolution — are all the Queen's men. Why are we deplorable to them? Because we strive to maintain a degree of self control over our appetites. And more than that, we have a conscience, especially concerning the loving care of children, and they have none. They cannot bear our presence.

'Favors' to Blacks. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression. In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.

Corrupt Academics and the Media. Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts. In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it's close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the "legacy of slavery" argument.

Princeton dives into the deep end of the political correctness pool. [Scroll down] Though Princeton insists this is not policy, merely guidelines, and no words are banned, it encourages the use of a vocabulary that is more gender neutral. So, instead of man and wife use spouses or partners. Instead of man made, use artificial, handmade, manufactured, synthetic. Gone is the verb to man, as in to work something, instead use to operate or to staff. Throw out workmanlike and replace it with skillful. No more actresses, only actors. Coed? Out. Replaced by student. Forefathers? Gone. Ancestors is the preferred word. Forget freshman. It's now first-year student or frosh.

Lifelike baby dolls not effective birth control, study finds. A weekend spent mothering a robot baby to mirror the "real experience" of parenting is meant to discourage teenage girls from getting pregnant. But so-called Baby Think it Over dolls don't cut teen pregnancy rates and in fact increase the risk, Australian research has found. In a study published in The Lancet medical journal Friday, researchers found teenage girls who used the lifelike computerized dolls as part of a pregnancy-prevention program were more likely to become pregnant compared with girls receiving a less high-tech sex education.

The Anti-Cop President. [The 1960s] sexual revolution removed the stigma from out-of-wedlock pregnancy. An explosion of inner-city illegitimacy ensued, with between 70 and 90 percent of black children born to single mothers, depending on the city. [...] So by the early 1990s, murders in New York, for example — mostly by young black men killing other blacks — were occurring on average every four hours, every day. The same spirit of elite racial contrition made generous welfare payments, with virtually no questions asked, seem like appropriate reparations for the long mistreatment of African Americans. In this way, government ended up enabling the spread of out-of-wedlock childbearing, which the culture had legitimated. But those fatherless welfare families proved far from ideal for raising successful, law-abiding children. What came to be called the cycle of poverty — single parenthood, school dropout, drug use, crime, non-work, welfare dependency — went into overdrive.

Obama Is The Last Person To Turn To For Healing And Peace. [Scroll down] The Democrats have established their future voting block and re-election efforts on poor people, disproportionately black under the Obama administration, whose population is also disproportionately unemployed and poorly educated with no fathers in the home and whose mothers are swamped with too many welfare children to raise alone on a barely existent welfare budget and living in crime-ridden areas.

We Have a 'War on Cops' because of the War on the Family. [Scroll down] It has been widely reported for years now that the out-of-wedlock birth rate among American blacks is over 70 percent. Almost always, mothers are left to raise their children alone. In U.S. cities, where the violence and poverty among U.S. blacks is most pronounced, the out-of-wedlock birth rate is even worse. For example, in Chicago about 80 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Today, only 17 percent of American black teenagers reach age 17 in a family with their biological parents married to each other. In no state in the U.S does black family intactness exceed 30 percent. Social science is finally revealing what sound morality and good common sense always told us: Children of single mothers do worse in almost every metric measured: school achievement, poverty, crime, emotional well-being, drug use, delinquency, violent behavior, and so on. These negative outcomes are even worse for black children born to single mothers.

CDC: 40%+ of U.S. Babies Born to Unmarried Women for 8th Straight Year. Of the 3,977,745 babies born in the United States of America in 2015, 1,600,208 of them — or 40.2 percent — were born to unmarried mothers, according to data released this month by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That makes 2015 the eighth straight year that 40 percent or more of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers, according to CDC data.

Welfare: The Hand-Basket Road of Good Intentions. "More 18 to 34 year-olds are living at home than any other living arrangement" because the government has supplanted the husband in the American nuclear family. Wednesday's [5/25/2016] AT featured a blog by Rick Moran titled "More 18 to 34-year-olds are living at home than any other living arrangement," which speculated attribution of the phenomenon to later marriages in the demographic, a poor economy, and few available jobs. But the later marriages are not a cause; they are an effect. The cause of the later marriages is the War on Poverty, as amply illustrated in a report by The Heritage Foundation titled "How Welfare Undermines Marriage and What to Do About It."

Sheriff Clarke: Democrats 'decimated the black family'. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Sunday accused the Democratic Party of "bigotry" that has "decimated the black family." Clarke, who has become a leading conservative black voice on gun rights and other issues, was responding to Hillary Clinton's charge Saturday evening that a Trump presidency would put "more kids at risk of violence and bigotry." "If black kids are at risk from anybody, it's from other black kids in black-on-black crime," Clarke said.

America's Addiction to Pleasure Harms Marriage and Family. Granted, many factors have contributed to the decline of marriage and family in the U.S, but one underlying factor is frequently overlooked: America's obsession with pleasurable indulgence. Marriage and family will inevitably decline in a society of too many self-absorbed pleasure junkies, which is basically what we've become. The selfless, sacrificial love that's necessary to sustain marriage and families involves doing the difficult — whether one feels like it or not: foregoing one's self-interest for others; compromising with others; and putting children's interests ahead of one's own. But pleasure junkies have conditioned themselves to do the opposite.

Why the War on Poverty Is So Unwinnable. Any assault on poverty collides with powerful social and economic forces that are undermining marriage and families. The report lays out the bleak facts, which include:

• Out-of-wedlock births are soaring among all major racial and ethnic groups. Among whites, the percentage of births to unmarried women went from 5.7% in 1970 to 35.9% in 2010; among Hispanics, the rise was 36.7% (in 1980) to 53.4%; and among blacks, the increase was from 37.8% to 72.1%.

• Low-income men, especially blacks, are working less, and wages have stagnated for those with jobs. For black men aged 20 to 24, only half had jobs in 2013, down from a high of about 65% in the late 1980s.

• Meanwhile, the wages of the poorer 50% of all men are "more or less what they had been in 1979." By contrast, wages for the poorer half of women rose 35% in the same period.

• As a result, family structure has changed dramatically. In 1970, nearly four-fifths of women at age 35 were married with children, while slightly less than 10% were single with children — a ratio of 8-to-1.

By 2010, the ratio was roughly 2.5-to-1, with about half of women married with children and 20% single with children.

Feminization of America Is Bad for the World. Unfortunately, more and more American women are single. Meanwhile American boys are increasingly raised by single women and taught almost only by female teachers. In addition, they are often taught to be ashamed of their masculine natures and to reject traditional masculine virtues. As a result of the above two trends, the amount spent on national defense will continue to decline (while the amount spent on welfare will continue to increase), and America will confront the world's evils less and less. The consequences will be disastrous for millions of people around the globe. When America retreats from killing bad guys, bad guys kill more innocent people.

Fatherless Black Males and Same-Sex Parenting. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan's word taken in the present context of same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting casts a light on black lesbians as a new matriarchal structure within the black community that is being acknowledged. However, what is rarely mentioned is that the African American community already has many years of experience with female same-sex parenting in the forms of structures such as mother/grandmother, mother/aunt, and mother/female family-friend co-parenting. I argue that all forms of female same-sex parenting in the black community have been incomplete in general for raising black males, and adding another female same-sex parenting structure (lesbian couples) as a new accepted norm further distracts from the importance of black men as fathers in the black community.

Why Family Structure is So Important. Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution released a study that reported "most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes." Why this is so is still hotly contested. Another study, co-authored by Wilcox, found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty.

Marriage And Economic Growth — A Match Made In Heaven. [A recent] study, published by the American Enterprise Institute, looked at the relationship between marriage rates and economic growth at the state level. It found that high levels of marriage and higher levels of intact families "are strongly associated with more economic growth, more economic mobility, less child poverty, and higher median family income." States with the highest marriage rates, it found, had a $1,451 higher per-capita GDP than those at the bottom of the marriage pile. This relationship is actually a stronger predictor of these measures of well-being than commonly measured variables like the educational, racial, and age compositions of states, the study concluded.

The Ivory Tower Continues to Crumble. [Scroll down] Apart from these breathtaking displays of ignorance, another serious problem is the preponderance of single-mother families. Many of these students are caring individuals who are shouldering enormous responsibilities that used to be the purview of a husband; thus, when their mothers become sick, they need to stay at home to tend to the mother. Sometimes it involves helping with bathing or medication. Other times, they are the only ones who can provide transportation for the mother to go to the hospital. And then there was the young woman who has been absent because she had "to take care of her boyfriend's mother." Such absences create serious gaps in an already fractured learning background.

100 Facts About The Moral Collapse Of America That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe:

[#25] In the United States today, more than half of all couples "move in together" before they get married.

[#26] Not surprisingly, an all-time low 44.2 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34-year-old age bracket are married at this point.

[#27] America has the highest divorce rate in the world by a good margin.

[#28] America has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.

[#29] 100 years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.

[#30] According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all American adults are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all adults in the United States were married.

[#31] For women under the age of 30 in the United States, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.

[#32] At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.

[#33] In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old. Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old.

If you're an absentee father, you probably don't have any idea what your kids are up to.

Death of Gunman in Oregon College Shootings Is Ruled Suicide. The father of the gunman who killed nine people at a community college here called on the nation to change its gun laws on Saturday [10/3/2015], saying the massacre "would not have happened" if his son had not been able to buy so many handguns and rifles. "How was he able to compile that kind of arsenal?" the father, Ian Mercer, said in an interview with CNN at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He said he had no idea that his son owned more than a dozen firearms.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal Defends Comments Blaming Oregon School Shooter's Father for Massacre. In a blog post on his campaign website, Jindal said the father of Chris Harper-Mercer should be embarrassed to show his face in public. Ian Mercer, the shooter's father, told CNN last weekend he was surprised to learn his son had gotten so many guns. "The killer's father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns," Jindal wrote. "Of course he doesn't know. You know why he doesn't know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son's life. He is a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He's the problem here."

Reality Therapy for Liberals. Look at what has happened to our black urban communities since the father was made irrelevant by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society policies. Here we are now, nearly a half century later and the ghettos are worse than ever, over 70% of black mothers are single moms, in New York City 69% of black pregnancies end in abortion. High school graduation for blacks is only 69%. Unemployment especially amongst young black males peaked in 2009 at 49%, drug use and incarceration rates are off the charts. Obviously, a society cannot function without strong families headed by strong fathers; it takes no leap of faith to reach that conclusion. Yet people still contend that family is merely a human construct and can be redefined willy-nilly.

Rep. DeLauro Pushes for Gov't Assisted 24/7 Child Care. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) has been promoting federal government child care assistance "that expands with need," focusing on 24 hour availability and pay of at least $15 an hour for child care workers. DeLauro was part of an event last week at Sleeping Giant Day Care in Connecticut, where she discussed her support for a resolution on universal child care. "I'm proud to add my name to a resolution supported by SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and the Congressional Progressive Caucus," DeLauro says in a video released Monday [8/24/2015] by the SEIU.

The Editor says...

Once the government takes 24-hour control of the lower-class children, the government will be the head of the household, unionized workers will dispense all meals, and the kids will be immersed in all-day indoctrination. This can only result in cradle-to-prison socialism.

Also posted under Politicians and unions exchange favors constantly.

Obama's "Community Schools" Aim to Replace the Family. Lawmakers and the Obama administration are plotting to unconstitutionally commandeer local schools and turn them into "full-service community schools" — government centers that will usurp vast new responsibilities over children that have traditionally been handled by parents and families. Under the plan, adopted in the Senate last month as part of a massive "education bill" solidifying federal control over children and schools, federally funded so-called community schools will "target" families and children for "services" covering their "academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health, and other needs." If Congress and the Obama administration get their way, these full-service parent-replacement centers will soon be coming to a community near you, along with the swarms of government workers in charge of "home visitation" and "parenting education" under the program. In fact, even without legislation to authorize it, Obama's education bureaucracy has already started using tax funds to create the "community schools" nationwide.

The Butchers of Planned Parenthood. Mitchelle Blair, not knowing what to do with the bodies of two of her children, whom she had murdered, stuffed them in her freezer. She'd tortured them for months first — strangling them, suffocating them with plastic bags until they passed out, starving them, burning them with boiling water. She said she killed her son by accident; she'd intended to torture him further. Her daughter she killed on purpose. "If I had the chance to do it again, I would," the mother said. Pleading guilty, she asked the court to impose the death penalty on her. Prosecutors regretfully informed her that Michigan has no death penalty. Of course the children had different fathers. Of course this was in Detroit. Of course they all resided in a beyond-dismal housing project called the Martin Luther King Homes, a pit of despair that those of us whose faith is less than unshakeable might in our weakness suspect has been abandoned by the One of Whom the Reverend King was a minister.

The Big Gay Lie. Even a cursory examination shows it's absurd to think that gays are born gay, that there is a "gay" gene. Evolution teaches that genes that help an organism survive and reproduce endure and genes that hinder survival or reproduction disappear. Yet what gene could possibly be worse for reproduction than a "gay" gene? Clearly any person with a "gay" gene wouldn't have had kids and hence the gene would disappear from the gene pool. Further many studies have shown that being gay is not genetic. Eight major studies of identical twins prove that being gay is not due to genetics. Identical twins have the same DNA and hence, if being gay is purely genetic, if one twin is gay the odds of the other being gay would be 100%. Yet the reality is on average the chance of the other twin being gay is around 12%. This does not mean that gays wake up one morning and decide to be gay. Studies have shown that gays are very likely to come from families with detached or absent fathers. That makes sense; gays turn to sex with men to replace the love they never had from their fathers.

Muslim Marine murderer's father 'sexually assaulted wife and beat his son' -- and wanted to take second wife 'because it was allowed under Islamic law'. The Muslim murderer of four US Marines came from an abusive and violent home where his mother was physically and verbally abused by her husband. Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Online reveal that Muhammad Youssuf Abdulazeez was also victim of beatings by his father that were carried out 'without provocation or justification.'

America Had More Married Couples With Kids in 1963 Than in 2014. Fifty-two years ago, there were 24,321,000 married couples in this country who had at least one child under 18 living in their home, according the bureau's Table FM-1. Last year, despite a significantly larger national population, there were only 23,933,000. The Census Bureau numbers dramatically demonstrate America's abandonment of the traditional family.

The Hidden Message of Same-Sex Marriage. The road to gay marriage began with feminism. Feminists argued that there were no important differences between the sexes. Thus, mothering and fathering were interchangeable. The word "parent" became a verb. If mothers and fathers bring nothing unique or complementary to their roles, then it logically follows that two mothers or two fathers should be just as good. Talk of three or more parents misses the mark. The relevant number is one. If fathers are no different from mothers, then single women needn't pause before embarking on "parenthood" solo — and they aren't. Along with feminism, the past few decades have featured a widespread retreat from the idea of family duty. [...] Marriage today is treated as optional by many parents, just one of many available paths. As Alito noted in his dissent, fully 40 percent of American births are now to unmarried women. Additionally, more than half of all children will spend some part of their childhoods in a non-nuclear family.

Getting Government Out of the Marriage Business. It seems surreal a single unelected lifetime judge could decide that the nation's supreme law requires its unwilling states to derail human history's central social institution. The bad news is that's likely to happen this month. The good news is that unwilling states can sidestep it.

I Don't Need No Daddy. [Scroll down] No, it's been a sad and sometimes heartbreaking semester because many college students' assorted troubles are related to the fact that they are bereft of wholesome father figures. The combination of resentment, hurt, anger, and defiant pride run through their writings. It affects everything they do, from having trust issues with the opposite sex to taking direction from anyone they view as an authority figure. Most carry an enormous chip on their shoulders and take offense at the slightest thing.

Obama: Society Must Deal Honestly with Issues of Race. Monday at the Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center in Camden, NJ, President Barack Obama commented on community policing and said we as a society must deal honestly with issues of race. [...] "Our kids are growing up without intact households," Obama added.

The Editor says...

That's because the welfare state that was set up by John F. Kennedy and implemented by Lyndon B. Johnson is a system that rewards illegitimacy, encourages dependence and punishes work.

45.4% of American Moms in Their Twenties Have Never Been Married. Forty-five percent of American mothers in their twenties have never been married, according to data that the Census Bureau released leading into the Mother's Day weekend. As of June 2014, according to the Census Bureau, there were 8,118,000 American women who were mothers and were from 20 to 29 years of age. Of these 8,118,000 American mothers in their twenties, 3,689,000 had never been married. That is 45.4 percent.

Prospects for Black America. [Scroll down] America has made no real, concerted effort to promote fatherhood, and part of the problem is feminism, with its refrain that "strong women" can rear children without men. "Fathers," [Heather Mac Donald] said, "should not be seen as an optional add-on or frill." Illegitimacy, she added, is such a disadvantage to children that we should come to grips with the idea that "it is not true that everybody has the right have a child." [John] McWhorter agreed that it would be marvelous if blacks would marry each other, but noted that "after 50 years, there is no way to create a movement in black America to rebuild the family." If even half the black leaders and columnists and preachers came out with a strong endorsement of fatherhood, the other half would call them vicious names for letting "institutional racism" off the hook.

Time for the Welfare State to Stand Trial. As of 1950, "only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent." Between 1940 and 1960, "the black poverty rate had been cut in half." [...] By 2012, the black illegitimacy rate was at 73%, starkly high in contrast to other demographic segments. And the moral decay that came with this trend is not obscure. "According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes." In light of these facts, these statistics may be less surprising: In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of all arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery. It was by design that the social structure provided by government supplanted the social structure of the family.

Po-Po and the Missing Papas. With the moral code destroyed, the po-po are the most important group still acting as if young people there are capable of obeying a legal code. Police do the work of behavioral control that should be done by fathers. They are the ghost of fatherhood lost, the last group of public workers who don't have to submit to the vast victimization hoax that whitey hasn't sent enough money for you to learn how to read; whitey hasn't come across enough for you to control your own breeding; and especially, that in your downtrodden state you can't be expected to obey the law.

Report: Only 16% of Baltimore Teens Raised With Married Parents. [A] report, released Wednesday [5/6/2015] and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is "one of the five least intact counties of America," along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn. The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are least likely to experience poverty during their youth, because married families generally earn higher incomes than stepfamilies, cohabiting families, divorced families, separated families, and single-parent families.

In Baltimore and Elsewhere, It's the Culture that Can Make or Break a Cycle of Poverty. Some social scientists argue that peers are more important than parents in determining how kids turn out. Others argue that parents, particularly married parents, are the crucial factor. And everyone agrees that schools, criminal-justice policies, and racial attitudes are important variables. The debates are about how much weight we should give them. All of these factors influence each other. In very poor neighborhoods they combine to compound problems. In middle-class neighborhoods, they reinforce each other in positive ways.

Yes, "black culture" is to blame for the riots in Baltimore. It absolutely is black culture that's responsible for what's going on in Baltimore, that's plain to see for anyone who's willing to look at the situation objectively. Why do you think there's so many young black men on the streets rioting? It's mainly because young black men and women decided to have out of wedlock births, which is the fault of both the men and women in the black community. The men usually leave and the moms have to work and rarely teach their kids any values or how to be decent, productive, and law-abiding members of society. Furthermore, the young boys have no male influence to show them how to be good men and respect women and authority figures, and they also have a lot of anger built up subconsciously from being neglected, usually by both parents. The rioting isn't about their economic situation or police brutality, at it's core it's about the breakdown of the black family and the lack of parenting in the black community.

'Lord of the Flies' comes to Baltimore. We hear about the absence of black men from families, but what happens when they disappear from an entire community? West Baltimore delivered the answer to that question this week. It's no accident that one of the most enduring images from the riot was a young mother spanking her son as she dragged him away from the protests. Where were the men in his life? As I walked through my old streets, it was filled with nothing but black young women, children and teenage boys. It was as if an alien spaceship had come in the night and spirited all the older black men away.

Baltimore: Where the Progressives Get It All Wrong. [D]espite all the hand-wringing by liberals that the problems in the inner city black community come from the evil police, or lack of jobs, or poor schools, or lack of 'activities' for youth — or that time-worn canard, the "legacy of slavery" — I believe the source for that community's dysfunction stem from the lack of marriage between the parents of these kids. [...] No amount of money thrown at the inner city, or youth programs, or education will bring the social pathology evidenced in Baltimore to a halt. It must come from within the community itself, and it needs to start by fathers and mothers marrying and raising their offspring together.

Mom smacks, drags son from Baltimore violence. One Baltimore mom took matters into her own hands Monday, furiously grabbing her would-be rioter son by the scruff of his neck and dragging him away from the violence. The jaw-dropping encounter captured by WMAR-TV showed a teen boy clad from head to toe in black, including a scarf over his face, and ready to rumble — until Mom stepped in. He had just thrown rocks, WMAR reported, when his mother jumped into action. She grabbed him in the back of his head and smacked the rock thrower several times in the face with her open right palm.

Mom filmed berating her son at Baltimore riots didn't 'want him to be a Freddie Gray'. A woman seen berating and hitting a black-clad teenager, later confirmed to be her son, has been hailed as "mom of the year" after her intervention on the streets of Baltimore was caught on video. As violence flared up across the city on Monday [4/27/2015], the woman, who was identified as Toya Graham on Tuesday afternoon, was filmed telling her child to "take that f--- mask off." Graham spoke to CBS News about the video, which initially went viral with little context. In the interview, the single mother of six tells the network that she intervened out of concern for her 16-year-old son's safety.

The Editor says...

Three cheers for Mom, but if Junior had a father, he wouldn't have been anywhere near the riot.

Ben Carson Pleads With People Of Baltimore: 'Please Take Control Of Your Children'. Ben Carson, the former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who is expected to run for president in 2016, issued a statement Tuesday [4/28/2015] condemning the violence and riots in Baltimore. "I urge parents, grandparents and guardians to please take control of your children and do not allow them to be exposed to the dangers of uncontrolled agitators on the streets," Carson said in a statement to the media.

Income Inequality: Married Couples With Kids Make Average of $107,054. Married couples with children under 18 years of age, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (Table HINC-04), made an average household income of $107,054 in 2013 and a median household income of $85,087. "A married couple, as defined for census purposes, is a husband and wife enumerated as members of the same household," says the Census Bureau in its list of definitions used in the Current Population Survey. How do a husband and wife with kids compare to Americans living in other social arrangements?

America's Decay Is Speeding Up. Nearly half (48 percent) of American children are born to a mother who is not married. Forty-three percent of American children live without a father in the home. About 50 percent of Americans over 18 are married, compared to 72 percent in 1960. Americans are having so few children that the fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women in 2013. And in an increasing number of states, there are now more deaths than births.

Can Family Breakdown in Low-Education America Be Reversed? Maybe. Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated, who almost entirely raise their kids in Ozzie-and-Harriet style families today (except that Mom usually works outside the home). Among the bottom third of Americans in education and income, however, the negative trend accelerated. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was alarmed that 26 percent of black births were to unmarried children. The rate is about twice that for the least educated third of Americans of all races today.

33 Strange Facts About America That Most Americans Would Be Shocked To Learn. [#10] In 1950, less than 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents. Today, that number is over 40 percent. [#11] The poverty rate for households that are led by a married couple is 6.8 percent. For households that are led by a female single parent, the poverty rate is 37.1 percent.

New Honey Maid Commercial Celebrates Divorce as 'Wholesome'. According to a Honey Maid commercial, divorce is now "wholesome." "You know, I never thought I'd get divorced," says a dad, as pictures of a smiling, blended family flit across the screen. "But the way I look at it, there are just more of us to love the kids now," he says.

End of the traditional familyin America. Less than half of U.S children under the age of 18 live at home with two married, heterosexual parents in their first marriage, new research has revealed. The figures reveal the ever-changing make-up of the family structure. In the 1960's, 73 percent of children had what is considered a traditional family structure but by 1980 that figure had dropped to 61 percent.

Family fragmentation: Can anything be done? The facts are easy to state. About 40 percent of babies born in America these days are born outside of marriage. That's true of about 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites, more than 50 percent of Hispanics and more than 70 percent of blacks. Back in 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan was prompted to write his report on the black family when the out-of-wedlock birth rate of blacks was 25 percent. He believed, correctly, that this spelled trouble ahead. Half a century later that's the figure for supposedly privileged non-Hispanic whites.

Black Progression and Retrogression. [Scroll down] Black illegitimacy is 75 percent. Close to 50 percent of marriage-age blacks never marry. Close to 70 percent of black households are female-headed. If one thinks family structure doesn't matter, consider that the poverty rate among black female-headed families is about 47 percent but among married families it has been in the single digits for more than two decades. It's not just poverty. Children raised by single parents are likelier to be physically abused; use drugs; engage in violent, delinquent and criminal behavior; have emotional and behavioral problems; and drop out of school.

When Black Lives Don't Matter. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and countless others like them grew up in broken families, their lives haunted by fathers and stepfathers with gang ties. The only masculine culture they had was that of the thug and that culture eventually killed them. Criminal culture is even more fatal to criminals than it is to their victims. If you attack enough people, eventually one of them will fight back. Eventually one of them will kill you.

GA:"We is teenagers, don't shoot me". Has the use of the word "teenager" by the old media given criminal teens a sense of immunity? You see it again and again. Trayvon Martin is constantly referred to as a teenager, as though that somehow absolved him of his crimes. Most male children, who are brought up in intact families, do not become predatory creatures in their teens. But for those who do not have strong, moral, male role models in their lives, especially if this is the default position in their community, predation is a common role. [...] The "progressive" position seems to be that "children" are inherently good. That is not true. Children are inherently selfish and amoral. In Christianity, this is recognized as original sin. Each child is a wild animal that must be civilized and taught moral virtues. This is much h