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Fathers Keep Society Safe

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

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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.

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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

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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