Blogs May 10, 2010 at 12:20 pm

Comments

1
Douthat's homely. Eek.
2
Dan, this is what a lot of us have been saying--the right is simply against all these things because natural evolution of society is against them. It's just finally starting to be more and more apparent now.
3
The first paragraph is already full of bullshit. Do I really need to read the rest?
4
Ross doesn't bother to delve into the possibility that some of the abortions in blue states could actually be coming from red staters not being able to get abortions in their own states, thus raising the stats for abortions in blue states.
5
@2, huh? You mean the natural evolution of society is against the right? Just wanted to make sure we were clear.
6
"Out-of-wedlock births, while more common among African-Americans, were rare in almost every region and community."

With that statement Mr douhat leaves clear his lack of real comprehension about the history of the African American family. The alarming out of wedlock births seen today have been brought about in direct contact from the sad association with and adoption of sexually indulgent ideologies fomented by outsiders who sought an opportunity since the Civil Rights struggle to conflate unrelated issues with a legitimate one and implement their social experimentation that were diametrically opposed to the moral and spiritual backbone in the African American community. Now with the hindsight of the destruction brought about from this association and the laxed policy that was adopted by many of the leaders and even the Church, it is imperative that such error be recognized for what it is and to begin the process of rebuilding upon the true pillar of the Black family if such numbers are to be truly reversed.
7
He can't Douthat!
8
The author doesn't take into account that almost everyone is receiving the same sex education.

You can't cite that the teen pregnancy rate is the same in two areas and then point out cautiously that liberal states have a higher abortion rate to declare that the "liberal" system is flawed. The flaw is in the education. If the liberal states got the sex ed that they wanted, pregnancy rates there would go down and abortion would follow.
9
@ 6, YOU don't know anything about the history of the African American family. I'll prove that by asking you an essay question: Did the slave trade, in which husbands were routinely separated from wives, and parents from children, have an affect on the notions of family held within the African American community? An adequate and detailed answer will be appreciated.
10
"implement their social experimentation that were diametrically opposed to the moral and spiritual backbone in the African American community"?

you mean crack cocaine and the disproportionate, racist sentencing rules that put an entire generation of black fathers behind bars, right?
11
Finally unbanned the Mr. Poe IP tree, did you?
12
@9 You know well it did. So did the aftermath of Black codes and Jim Crow which, to use modern language, were nothing more than domestic terrorism. However, even during the brutality of open unabashed white domestic terrorism faced by the community, the Black family (which involved more than blood kin precisely due to the separation and atrocities started by the abomination of slavery) there was more cohesiveness based principaly in the moral spiritual values well grounded in terms of the family unit headed by a mother and father, paired with the extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and neighbors who functioned as second parents when outside the home. The social permissive policies that were allowed to infiltrate the African American community like a virus have destroyed the same principles that allowed African Americans to survive slavery and it's subsequent rotten offshoots in this country.
13
What is it with conservative fuckwits that they never acknowledge the failure of their own policies? Douthat is an asshat.

The demise of the single-earner household is not based in the sexual revolution. It's based in the social and economic policies of Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981 and declared war on the lower middle class. It was him who blew the National Debt into a mushroom cloud over America. It was him who created "trickle-down economics". It was him who oversaw the largest period of rampant inflation at the same time as he froze the minimum wage. It was him who gutted a good portion of union power.

Thanks to Reagan, women no longer had the option of joining the workforce, they had to in order to maintain their family's standard of living. It was his fault a lot of kids had no Mom to come home to after school any more.

If you want to draw a timeline of the genesis of social ills in America, start with Reagan and the fuckwit Conservative Republican philosophy. Lay the blame where it fucking belongs, Russ Asshat.
14
So LC thinks that, somehow, white people were able to convince black people to participate in all the things they wanted to be legitimized (gay relationships, non-marital sex, equal rights for women), but in the worst possible way (being on the down low, not using protection, having sex with as MANY people as possible rather than just WHOEVER YOU WANT), disproportionately, and even though, it claims, black people had a stronger familial and moral system than white people at the outset. My brain is now bleeding...
15
I don't know what kind of fantasy world Douche-hat is living in if he thinks single income homes have ever been the norm. Except for a brief period when my mother and uncle were young kids, my grandmother worked to support the family, and my grandparents had a typical '40s/'50s nuclear family.
16
@12: So your claim is basically the following:
"Yes, the traumatic cultural effects of centuries of slavery DID cause societal problems and unstable families within the African-American community. But that's only what USED TO cause those problems. Now it's the fag-enabling hippie-dippie free-love cappuccino-sipping pasty-white elitist liberals and their disgusting immoral values that have been injected into the black community!"
Well, like that only with worse grammar and mechanics. Correct me if I'm wrong.
17
@ #4,

Women/girls in state with comprehensive sex-ed and liberal abortion laws and access to family planning (mostly Blue states) do have lower rates of unplanned pregnancies and abortions. While more abortions are preformed in Blue states, it's not blue state women who're having them.

Here's a map of unplanned pregnancies in the U.S.
http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/state…

Here's a map of teen pregnancies in the U.S.
http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/state…

Here's a map of abortions.
http://revolution-computing.typepad.com/…

18
Well said, Ms. D. Reading that just made my head hurt.
19
@14 & @16 Not much to add, you both said it so well. It's worth remembering that a person who believes his spiritual leader was born of a virgin and walked on water is not necessarily going to have a firm grasp of logic in his arguments.
20
Slavery and Jim Crow were not as devastating to the back family as were the sexual revolution and Great Society welfare programs of the 60s....
21
Teen parents, single parents, divorce, and broken homes are all social evils.
But killing innocent babies is worse.
22
@19: Well, there are insects and lizards that walk on water, as well as many that can reproduce via parthenogenesis. Perhaps we're getting over towards Raptor Jesus here...

@20: I seriously hope you are joking.

@21: I'm not even going to respond to your assertion that abortion is equivalent to infanticide.
What I WILL challenge is your claim that divorce is a social evil. Sometimes it is good and necessary, when you have two people in a relationship that has gone sour. There's a reason that almost all major religions have some provision for divorce (and a woman's right to demand one of her husband, should she need to); people can fall out of love, enter into marriages of convenience, or marry for the wrong reasons. While divorces are not generally fun, they tend to happen when they become better than staying married. People have understood that for millennia and you should really go shopping for a leg to stand on.
23
Thank you @17, when I read the article's stats for abortion states v. teen pregnancy rates I had the same thought as @4

Love how conservatives rake "abortion" states over the coals when it's their own daughters running north to take care of a little problem...
24
Huh. The writer has a rather idealistic view of the 50s. Mommy-Daddy-2.5 children-golden retriever-white picket fence has *never* been the normal American family. That's just nostalgia with a solid dose of re-writing history.
25
@23: "Their own daughters" nothing. There are plenty of rabid anti-choice activists out there who are women who have themselves had, and subsequently regretted, abortions, that regret being their primary reason for being anti-choice. That bunch actively seeks them out as spokespeople a lot of the time.

That is the big thing to remember, and it applies to most other social conservative talking points: they don't want to just ban or restrict activities, they want to ban or restrict activities for everybody except themselves. It is, after all, an ideology borne primarily from the assumption that they're better, more moral people than the slavering amoral horde that makes up the rest of the human race.
26
22
Children of divorce always suffer.
The sins ofg the fathers visited on the heads of the children,
as it were...
27
22
...and divorce produces broken homes.
28
From the Washington Post
('Marriage Is for White People')

"Although slavery was an atrocious social system, men and women back then nonetheless often succeeded in establishing working families. In his account of slave life and culture, "Roll, Jordan, Roll," historian Eugene D. Genovese wrote: "A slave in Georgia prevailed on his master to sell him to Jamaica so that he could find his wife, despite warnings that his chances of finding her on so large an island were remote."

"I was stunned to learn that a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today, according to sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin."

".....and that's when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."

"He's right. At least statistically. The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the marriage rate in the United States for blacks fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country."

(Joy Jones, a Washington writer, is the author of "Between Black Women: Listening With the Third Ear" (African American Images). )

29
"Marriage provides many benefits for the married couple and is especially beneficial for the children, as Kay Hymowitz has amply demonstrated here. Hymowitz sees the "marriage gap" as "America's chief source of inequality." No other family unit provides as many psychological, economic, medical and social benefits. Why don't these teens know this? The Globe article looks into historical trends:

"Their disillusionment mirrors a growing resistance to marriage among African-Americans. In the post-Civil War era, when African-Americans had the option to marry legally for the first time, many did. The 1890 Census showed that 80 percent of African-American families were headed by two parents....But in 1970, census figures show ed that only 57 percent of black men and 54 percent of black women were married."

In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43 percent of black men and 42 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27 percent and 22 percent respectively for whites.

"A Black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today."

"Blacks now have the lowest rate of marrige of any ethnic group in the U.S."
30
" A letter to the Editor in today's Globe notes another more likely explanation for the precipitous drop in marriage rates of Blacks since the 1960's:

"But wasn't that also at the start of the Great Society's welfare programs that all too often created ``economically independent" women -- black, brown, and white -- at the expense of requiring that fathers and husbands leave the home? ..... Welfare programs undermined the black family."

"No kidding! The rise in single motherhood - and all the social ills that accompany that - looks to be a direct result of liberal welfare policies enacted in the 1960's. Great Society welfare programs supported you more if you didn't marry, put you in subsidized housing, and pay additional money for having more children (even though you're not able to support yourself or one child). "

31
DIVORCE AND MARRIAGE AFFECT BLACK CHILDREN MORE

(a study, published in the journal Demography )

Divorce and marriage play much bigger economic roles for black children than white children in the United States, according to a new study by two UC Davis economists. Marianne Page and Ann Huff Stevens find that in the first two years following a divorce, family income among white children falls about 30 percent, while it falls by 53 percent among black children.
"This difference increases dramatically in the long run," Page and Stevens write. "Three or more years after the divorce, about a third of the loss in whites' household income is recouped, but the income of black families barely improves."

In fact, three or more years after the divorce, the black families' income remains 47 percent lower than if the parents had remained together. Marriage appears to have even greater benefits for black children whose single mothers marry than for their white counterparts, according to the study.

Page and Stevens estimate that while the family income of white children rises by 45 percent when their single parent marries, the family income of black children rises by 81 percent with marriage.

The study, published in Demography, followed a
nationally representative, longitudinal survey of Americans conducted by the
University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

Contact the researchers at:
o Marianne Page, Economics, (530) 752-1551, mepage@ucdavis.edu
o Ann Huff Stevens, Economics, (530) 752-3034, annstevens@ucdavis.edu
o Susanne Rockwell, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-9841,
sgrockwell@ucdavis.edu
>From the Smart Marriages listserv
32
During the days of slavery a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents than he or she is today.
Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, rev. and enl. ed., (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 110 . See also Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon). For a review of this and similar studies see Stanley L. Engerman, "Black Fertility and Family Structure in the U.S. 1880-1940," Journal of Family History 2: 177ff

As recently as 1960, three-quarters of African Americans were born into a family of a married couple.
Christopher Jencks, "Is the American Underclass Growing," 86, Table 14. In Jencks and Peterson, eds., Urban Underclass, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution).
33
"Today only [one-third] of black children have two parents in the home."
Dennis A. Ahlburg and Carol J. DeVita, "New Realities of the American Family," Population Bulletin 47, no.2 8.

"Black children are only half as likely as white children to be living in a two-parent household, and are eight times more likely than white children to live with an unwed mother. For black children under six, 'the most common arrangement -- applying to 42 percent of them -- was to live with a never-married mother.'"
Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, rev. and enl. ed., (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 98-99.
34
@22 We should warn Randall Munroe as soon as possible.

http://xkcd.com/87/
35
@22 I feel woefully ignorant...I had no idea Raptor Jesus actually existed! This explains a lot.
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Rapto…
Given that Raptor Jesus lived 19 billion years ago, perhaps he was the precursor to the flying spaghetti monster?
36
Like 4 and 17 have said, I've talked to girls from red states who have done the very thing. It makes me sick that they'd go back to a place that has no fucking interest in their health or future.

Please wait...

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