Right Minded Online

A couple of readers have left comments to my post yesterday “What about ‘choice?’” that deserve a response. I have a lot to say, so I’ve decided to create a new post rather than leave an extended comment.

I’ll take pieces of those comments out, put them here, and deal with them one at a time.

While the debate rages on about whether a fetus is a life, there is NO debate that once it is out of the mother and breathing on its own it is a life…and that’s when most conservatives who call themselves pro life walk away, only to want to kill that human being years later when it commits a hideous crime because he didn’t get the care he should have gotten at birth and through childhood.

That’s an overly dramatic representation. You’re assuming the children that result from unwanted pregnancies are automatically relegated to a life of crime. That’s a rather cynical assumption. I don’t believe for a minute that it’s true. Also, a child is not an “it.”

At any rate, it is liberal social programs that got us to this point (the breakdown of the American family) in the first place. I dealt with this very thing in my Lebanon Democrat column back on October 3 of last year, “It’s time to end the war on poverty.” I’m not one to re-create the wheel, so I’ll re-post that column in its entirety below, and then we’ll pick it back up.

What is our exit strategy in the War on Poverty?

The Heritage Foundation reported in a June 13 research paper that “In the 40 years since President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty, the nation has spent over $8.5 trillion on means-tested assistance: food, housing, medical care, and social services for poor and low-income Americans.”

Now, $8.5 trillion is 108% of the entire national debt. With a price tag that large, you’d like to see some results. But we haven’t.

According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate in the U.S. in 1959 (the first year for which data are available) was 22.4%. By 1965, the year President Johnson declared war on poverty, the poverty rate had already fallen to 17.3%. The next year, it was 14.7%. In 2004, it was 12.7%. Since 1965, the poverty rate has never risen above 15.2%, or fallen below 11.1%. Clearly, the War on Poverty hasn’t worked. It’s time to end it.

A lack of wealth is not the problem. Going back to the Census Bureau, per capita income in 1967 (again, the first year for which such data are available) was $2,464, or $11,500 in 2003 dollars. In 2003, that figure was $23,276, having more than doubled during the intervening 36 years. So if our wealth production continues to increase, then why hasn’t the poverty rate been appreciably lowered?

The answer lies in the breakdown of the two-parent family. Using 2004 data, the poverty rate for people in married-couple families was 6.4%. The poverty rate for people in families with no wife present was 13.8%. And the poverty rate for people in families with no husband present was 30.5%.

In other words, a person living in a home headed by a single woman is nearly five times as likely to be impoverished than in a home headed by a married couple. And, of course, the percentage of families headed by married couples has fallen considerably since 1965. In that year, 87% of all families were married-couple families. By 2004, that number had fallen to 75%.

Thus, as per capita wealth has increased in the U.S., the number of individuals living in single-parent homes has increased so that our wealth-building has been offset by the breakdown of the nuclear family such that the poverty rate during the past four decades has remained largely unchanged. Throwing money at poverty has only treated its symptom — not the disease itself — and has instead produced unintended side effects, namely single parenthood.

We therefore do not need more government. We need more married-couple families. It’s so simple a concept that it’s often dismissed.

Back on May 19, 1992, Vice-President Dan Quayle asserted “…marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.”

“It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’”

Quayle was summarily scorned and ridiculed by the press and the political left for his advocacy of traditional “family values,” but it turns out that Dan Quayle was right. Ten years after Quayle’s ill-fated comment, Murphy Brown star Candice Bergen conceded “[Quayle's] speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.”

Instead of perpetuating an endless, costly war on poverty that encourages single-parenthood, it is time to formulate an exit strategy and pull out. The government certainly can’t force individuals to marry, nor should it, but it can replace the failed formula with, say, a tax system that rewards married-couple families instead of punishing them. In other words, let’s try conservatism for a change. After all, the most effective barrier against poverty isn’t a left-wing social experiment that redistributes wealth. The most effective barrier against poverty is simply a home that’s headed by a married man and woman.

Indeed, one can hardly look at the complex web of social programs the government has woven in the last four decades and see success. So what is the left’s answer to the dilemma of what to do with unwanted children? More social programs. Yet social programs have largely contributed to the breakdown of the nuclear family in the first place, which happens to be the most effective means for fighting poverty.

Yes, pro-lifers believe every child has the right to be born, and we also believe that government programs that reward out-of-wedlock parenthood only encourage that type of behavior by trying to eliminate the consequences of irresponsible behavior.

So, the child you mentioned could survive IF it had good healthcare. Guess what? That child would be dead in Tennessee if born to a mother cut from TennCare.

How many children have actually had their TennCare benefits dropped? How many have been denied health care wholesale? How many of those have been killed as a result?

(By the way, when I refer to “health care,” I don’t mean just health insurance. I mean access to doctors and hospitals and emergency rooms. Heck, illegal immigrants even have that kind of access in the U.S., so I’m not buying the argument that anyone has been completely denied access to health care.)

I believe it is the ultimate hypocrisy of the conservative right to oppose abortion and then also oppose the services that would make the lives they “save” worthwhile and successful.

Conservatives do not entirely oppose government services. Most conservatives I know do not have a problem with their tax dollars going to assist those who cannot help themselves. Unfortunately, social programs have been expanded far, far beyond helping only those who cannot otherwise help themselves.

By limiting access to services that provide birth control, they are actually increasing the number of abortions that will be performed!

The single most effective means for avoiding unwanted pregnancies is also the means the left ridicules the most: abstinence. It has an effective rate of 100%. There’s no other birth control means that has that kind of success rate.

At any rate, who has denied Americans birth control? Heck, teen-agers can get condoms right in their schools, even candy-flavored ones. I’m sure Planned Parenthood gives that stuff away, too. I’m not buying the argument that access to birth control has been limited. It’s probably easier to obtain birth control now more than ever before.

Again, we have spent more money on taxpayer-funded social programs in the last 40 years than we owe on the national debt, yet we’re still not doing enough? We’re still accused of demanding that every child be born and left to the vicissitudes of an uncaring world? No. We’ve given liberalism more than four decades to fight poverty. Not only do we have essentially the same percentage of impoverished people now as then, but we also have twice the number of non-married couple families, which exacerbates poverty and contributes to more unwanted children. That’s an unintended consequence, for sure, but I think liberalism has done enough damage to the American family. It’s time we try something different, like encourage marriage (between men and women, for clarification) so we can re-construct the nuclear family.