Liberals are Smarter than Conservatives.

Science has proved it. Wretchard has some thoughts. Interesting comment thread.

For smart people, liberals sure don't seem to have much ability to understand the potential unintended consequences of many of their brilliant policies. Even the ones which are highly predictable based upon the lessons of history.

During the Great Depression, the crime rate was very low. The marriage rate was high among all races in America, but it was higher among blacks than whites (though blacks tended to marry after the birth of a child more often that whites). LBJ's War on Poverty and subsequent progressive programs and policies inadvertently destroyed the black nuclear family in poor neighborhoods, made men peripheral to the family structure (often leading them to gangs), led to a massive increase in the black crime rate, wasted multiple billions of dollars and did not reduce poverty.

Of course, reducing the family role of men to "sperm donor" was a good thing in the minds of some feminists and socialists.  Whew. "So some women didn’t want to have male children for the best of motives."? "Progressive Eradication" of men?

 Even for today's feminists, who are (for the most part) less radical, "sex education" must give feminist principles the highest priority:

What is important here is to separate sex from procreation.

The Left certainly did a bang-up job in this regard on the South Side of Chicago, didn't they?   If you can separate "sex from procreation", it's easy to separate "sex from parenthood." Especially when you promote an easy government substitute "Provider" which takes over a major part of the only rational initial family role (during pregnancy and early infancy) for a potential husband and father.*

And remember the most famous  "mainstream" feminist line from the era of the War on Poverty, which certainly must have "empowered" many deliberately single mothers?  I find it much more ominous in the plural:

Women need men like fish need bicycles

Putting women in charge of family life was an idealistic goal of many on the Left during the 1960s and 1970s.  But  turning men into "sperm donors" with limited connections to their children certainly was not the intention of most American liberals who supported the "War on Poverty".   Who is in favor of poverty, after all? Most American liberals certainly did not set out to create whole neighborhoods essentially free from fathers.  But that's where their policies led.

These kids are growing up in something between anarchy

and Lord of the Flies.

Candidate Obama made a good start at reversing some of the lasting damage from the counter-productive policies of the War on Poverty:

As journalist Nicholas Lemann observed over two decades ago in The Atlantic Monthly, the black illegitimacy rate has only a weak correlation to employment: “High illegitimacy has always been much more closely identified with blacks than with all poor people or all unemployed people.” An Alinskyite approach to the related problems of illegitimacy and crime is only a distraction. Seeking redress and salvation from the “power structure” just puts off the essential work of culture change.

Barack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence — “How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?” — Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech. The best thing that the president can do for Chicago’s embattled children is to confront head-on the disappearance of their fathers and the consequence in lost lives.

Whether President Obama can follow through with his positive, though hard, cultural message in the face of currently popular liberal ideology and sensitivities is a big question. Remember that Jesse Jackson wanted to castrate Obama for straying from liberal orthodoxy.

The deterioration of civilization on the South Side of Chicago continues:

The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own. . .

“Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” ”

Related: From an undercover investigator who infiltrated NAMBLA:

I am often asked how we can protect our children. There is no magic formula for identifying a molester. There may be clues, but they are not foolproof. We cannot prove a negative. We can prove a person is a child molester. We cannot prove he is not. . . . of course, there are exceptions to most rules, but single moms (and married moms and dads), let me give one piece of advice. . . Based upon my three year affiliation with these child molesters, I observed one thing: Not one boy who came from a home with a strong, loving father figure was successfully targeted by a persuasion predator.

Protection may be that simple…a boy needs a loving father.

And Mom's new boyfriend (or one of his friends) may be dangerous to her child in ways which go beyond the molestation of boys. A single mom's new boyfriend, is, statistically, the most dangerous person in her child's life. The phenomenon of young children in nearly-fatherless communities doing violence against each other comes later. For lots of kids on the South Side, the road to hell has been paved, in part, by the good intentions of our smart and compassionate liberal cultural, political and bureaucratic elite.

*  A short personal story:  A woefully unprepared 15-year-old pregnant girl (a white girl in this instance), told me that most of the girls in her class for pregnant teenagers were putting "unknown" in the space on the birth certificate where the father should be listed.  She claimed, unrealistically, that most of the girls in the class did not know who the father of their baby was.  In most cases, this was probably a strategy to make welfare payments easier to get, and to protect the young boyfriend from future financial responsibility.  Her baby was soon put into foster care when she and her mother failed to provide care adequate to allow the baby to thrive.  She was not doing well in her quest to get the baby back, so she got pregnant again, proclaiming herself to be a "proud single mother".    Indescribably sad.  


And imagine that she is successful in keeping one or both of her children:  in the future, they will know that their mother, and most of her friends, were so unconcerned about the idea of children having a father that they failed to note with whom they were having sex.  How would that make young boys feel about their place in the family structure?