home  |  book  |

Euro-Paradise Lost Our Post-patriotic Elite

print view

Fathers Keep Society Safe

by Christopher Chantrill
June 16, 2005 at 11:23 am

|

FOR THE last couple of weeks, lefties in Britain have been leaping to the defense of the three teenaged sisters, aged 16, 14, and 12, that have each recently brought a little bundle of joy into the world. These brand-new single parents live with their single-parent mother, Julie Atkins, in public housing at a weekly cost to the state of about $1,200, or $60,000 per year.

“There have always been women like Yeats’s Crazy Jane whose gardens grow ‘nothing but babies and washing,’” huffed Germaine Greer from a bunker on the feminist senior circuit. “They live in an alternative society that is matrilineal, matrifocal, and matrilocal, a society that the patriarchy has always feared and hated.” And old lefty Roy Hattersley spluttered in The Guardian that “they’re being treated like characters in a Victorian morality play!” But the absent father of two of the young mothers had another opinion. Reading about their new status in the papers he declared that it was all the fault of the schools.

It’s appropriate that our lefty friends should be leaping to the defense of single moms right now. What better time to celebrate single motherhood than in the run-up to Fathers’ Day, celebrated this year on June 19th? Liberals seem to like nothing more than spoiling other peoples’ holidays.

But we mortal folk may as well go ahead and celebrate fatherhood anyway. If liberals are against it, then we must be good reasons to be for it. And indeed there are. Let us rehearse just three. Fathers promote the safety of children; fathers promote safety for society from feral children; and fathers protect society from feral government.

Children living with their fathers are safer than other children. The safest place for a child to live is with its biological married parents. The most dangerous place to live is with mother and a boy friend who is not the father of the child. Want to guess how dangerous? It is 33 times more dangerous for a child to live with mommie and her boy friend than to live with the child’s married biological mother and father, according to James Bartholomew in The Welfare State We’re In.

But, surely, most children are not subject to the predations of a live-in boy friend? That is true. A child is only 5 times more at risk when living with mother married to a stepfather than when living with its married, natural parents.

Children living with their fathers are safer not just from violence by others but also from becoming violent themselves. There are dozens of studies demonstrating the connection between juvenile crime and single parenthood. Here is a list of just a few. Children living with their natural, married parents are less likely to commit crimes; they are more likely to start having sex later, and they are more likely to finish school.

With this sort of evidence about fathers and child safety you’d think that liberal activists would be proposing legislation from coast to coast to promote traditional families and to end forever the social devastation of single parenthood, in fact nothing less than a War on Single Parenting. You would expect earnest academic social scientists and activists to be turning up on TV talk shows demanding that the government end the holocaust in at-risk teens by demanding a comprehensive and mandatory government program to protect at-risk children from the dangers of single parenthood.

But in fact you don’t.

There’s another good thing about fathers. They lower the cost of government, and that’s a good thing because it increases freedom. Of course, it’s no secret that married people tend to vote Republican, and therefore for less government. And it’s no secret that the “marriage gap” has been increasing. According to USA Today:

In 1984, the difference in the presidential votes of married and unmarried women was 17 percentage points, according to surveys taken as voters left polling places. There was a 21-point marriage gap in 1992, a 29-point gap in 1996, a 32-point gap in 2000.

In 2004, the marriage gap was 44 points. Married women voted for Bush 57% to 42%. Single women voted for Kerry 64% to 35%. But add children into the mix, and the marriage gap expands even more. According to USA Today again: “Married women with children are even more Republican [than] those who don’t have children; single women who have children are even more Democratic than those who don’t.” The more married fathers you have, the less government you need to support women and children.

Every man learns soon enough that men are expendable. Whether it’s the War in the Pacific or the War on the Patriarchy, it is men that get sacrificed for the greater good of all. That’s as it should be.

But expendable or not, you sure wouldn’t like to live in a society without fathers.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact