I suppose I’m showing my age if I quote Dan Quayle (hey, look it up yourself if you don’t know what I’m talking about) but two articles today really reinforce the fact that the American Left is pretty indifferent to whether women bear their children within or outside of marriage. I guess Glen Reynolds would call this “21st century relationships.” I don’t have a cute tagline for it, but may have to invent one, at the rate that these stories keep popping up.
Story one, linked to by a facebook friend: “Why Does Everyone—From Pastors to Progressives—Doom Teen Mothers to Failure?” This was on a site called Dame Magazine, which I’d never heard of, and it may be that said facebook friend just came upon something that’s indeed rather obscure. The author raises a legitimate concern: whether pregnant teens are being “punished” in order to serve as an example to frighten other girls into avoiding pregnancy. Now, in terms of particulars, the author laments the lack of day care and other social welfare provisions for teen moms — where, in reality, there’s no shortage of these programs, though inevitably they’re not as generous as progressives would like.
But the core of the author’s message is this: there’s no reason to be ashamed of being a teen mom; having sex is inevitable and a certain percentage of sex-having teens will get pregnant due to the simple fact of contraceptive failure, so if they choose to parent, we as a society need to step up and given them what they need to succeed.
Actually, she doesn’t even say, “having sex is inevitable” — she just takes this for granted.
Story two, a Slate piece by Amanda Marcotte, “Bill O’Reilly Begs Barack Obama to Save “Futures of Babies and Children.” Most of the article consisted of a transcript from a portion of an interview of Obama by Bill O’Reilly, talking about the issue of unwed parents, especially in the black community. And here’s Marcotte’s take:
Black women are not conducting their sex lives in precisely the way that O’Reilly thinks they should.
. . .
Obsessing over whether women have their paperwork in order before they choose to reproduce is what conservatives do when they don’t want to think about more realistic and effective ways to solve income inequality in this country.
In other words, to be concerned with whether children are born to a married mother and father is not a reasoned response to the serious statistically-demonstrated controlled-for-other-factors disadvantages that children of unmarried parents face — it’s just none-of-your-business moralizing and meddling by people who have no right to do so.
Which gets us back to the problem I was trying to think through in the fall: how can we remedy the growing number of fatherless children if we can’t even all agree it’s a problem?
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