Guilty (8 page)

We've already run that experiment. It was precisely the advent of the pill that precipitated the gusher of illegitimate births in the first place. As with Dalrymple's battered women, if it was just bad luck, why were conservatives able to predict that the wide availability of birth control would lead to more illegitimate children? Teaching proper condom use in government schools sends what we call a “mixed message”:
Never, under any circumstances, have sex before you're married. Now, here are the precautions you'll want to take before having premar-
ital sex….
It doesn't matter if twice as many unwed girls are using birth control if 10,000 times more unwed girls are having sex.

Our public schools are drowning in condoms. More seventh-graders know how to put on a condom than can name the first president— although kids who are really good with a condom all seem to know the name of the 42nd. If public schools were required to offer any more birth control classes, they might not have time for their “plan a jihad” lessons. The idea that mastering the use of birth control is information adolescents are lacking is nonsense. They're running transcontinental drug rings and complicated welfare frauds. But they need instruction in how to put on a condom?

Apparently it wasn't society's failure to provide birth control classes that led to a spike in unwed mothers at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts in 2008.
Time
magazine revealed that nearly a dozen adolescent girls had entered a pregnancy pact, agreeing to get pregnant on purpose. After seventeen high school girls—none older than sixteen—got pregnant that year, four times more than the average, the school nurses remarked that they had noticed a surge in sophomores coming in for pregnancy testing. The girls walked out sullen if the test came back negative, but ecstatic if it was positive. For some, it was the first test they had ever passed.

Under questioning, the girls “confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.” One girl had gotten herself pregnant with a homeless man who reportedly wooed her with free rides in his shopping cart. “They're so excited,” one unwed teenaged mother said, “to finally have someone to love them unconditionally.”
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Another classmate explained, “No one's offered them a better option.” Admittedly, a “better option” than being impregnated by a guy who sleeps under an overpass and collects cans for a living is hard to imagine. But the point is: It's our fault. These girls are just victims of a society that hasn't “offered” them something better—other than living in the most prosperous, free nation on earth.

I know from reading the
New York Times
that it's madness to ask people to wait until marriage to have sex. Why should people worry about the kind of life they are giving a child when they have a shot at
fleeting sexual pleasure? Even Sidonie Squier, head of President Bush's marriage-promotion project in the Office of Family Assistance, stoutly assured
The Economist
that her office did not “take a view on whether people should have pre-marital sex.”
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So I guess, as with global warming, the debate is over.

But Americans used to be able to care about the circumstances of their children's births: The illegitimacy rate has gone up by more than 300 percent since 1970.
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Moreover, even assuming that, sometime around the year 1969, the entire human race lost the ability to defer gratification, there's still the wholly volitional decision not to give the baby up for adoption.

In 1979, only about 600,000 babies were born out of wedlock and one-quarter of them were put up for adoption. By 1991, the number of illegitimate births had doubled to 1,225,000 annually, but only 4 percent were allowed to be adopted
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—and most of those babies were snapped up by either Angelina Jolie or Mia Farrow. By 2003, 1.5 million illegitimate babies were born every year, but only about 14,000 of them, less than 1 percent, were put up for adoption.
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Not surprisingly, unwed mothers who care enough to give their children up for adoption also come overwhelmingly from responsible backgrounds. They tend to have higher education and income levels and to come from intact upper-middle-class families with highly educated parents.
⁵⁵

You will note that we do not read about adopted children filling up the prisons, welfare rolls, and runaway shelters. Adopted children are no worse off—and, indeed, are generally better off—than nonadopted children. There aren't a lot of studies about adopted children, because they aren't constantly mugging us and creating social disorders, but one four-year study by the Search Institute in Minnesota looked at the mental and psychological well-being of 881 teenagers who had been adopted as infants. The study found that adopted teenagers had greater empathy, higher self-esteem, and more close friends than nonadopted teenagers in public schools.
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They were less likely to engage in high-risk behavior, such as stealing or excessive drinking, than nonadopted teenagers.
⁵⁷
In all, they scored higher than the control group of nonadopted children on sixteen indicators of well-being.
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They were less than half as likely to
have divorced parents than nonadopted teenagers (11 percent to 28 percent) and were as strongly attached to their parents as their nonadopted siblings. Ninety-five percent of the adoptive parents were strongly attached to their adopted child. The majority of adopted teenagers rarely even thought about the fact that they were adopted.
⁵⁹

Adopted children of a different race from their family did just as well.
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The only important factor in adoption is that the child be adopted within the first fifteen months of his life. “We cannot overstate,” the study's authors said, “the power of early placement.”

The blessed “single mothers” we are required to idolize had a choice of placing their children in the best of all possible worlds for their children (adoption) or the worst of all possible worlds (single-mother families). To satisfy their own selfish interests, they chose the worst of all possible worlds. Couldn't newspapers start telling us how global warming, government programs, and hurricanes are going to affect a more desirable group, like drug dealers?

Obviously, adoptive parents are the people who deserve all the praise, admiration, and
Oprah
appearances, not “single mothers.” But they're merely saving children's lives. They're not sad-sack victims selfishly destroying their children's lives and depending on society to support them.

Contrary to popular mythology, there is no shortage of parents ready to adopt. There are waiting lists of parents who want to adopt babies with Down syndrome, spina bifida, and AIDS. In 2004, the head of Adoption Rhode Island, Jeff Katz, said, “I have seen children who were victims of torture adopted. I know an adoptive mother who grew up in foster care who was able to recognize the cigarette burns on her adopted son's body because she, too, had those scars. I have seen countless children whom ‘nobody wanted' become treasured members of their new families. I have seen all of these children thrive and I have seen their families thrive.” Katz implored, “Don't ever, ever let anyone tell you that these children wait because no one wants to adopt them.”
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Unable to adopt babies in this country, Americans adopt from abroad—more than 20,000 babies in 2003.
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▪ ▪ ▪

BACK IN THE DAYS WHEN WE WEREN't REQUIRED TO CONSTANTLY praise single mothers, a New York University study found single mothers to be “overtly dominant, aggressive, narcissistic and bitterly hostile.”
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And yet all of society has been trained to have nothing but sympathy for these aggressors.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood has taken a leading role in portraying single mothers as victims, while relentlessly promoting promiscuity, single motherhood, prostitution, and divorce to the detriment of the most vulnerable members of society. But if anyone makes a peep of criticism, suddenly it's 1939 Germany and overpaid writers from
Murphy Brown
are the Jews.

Hollywood movers and shakers are as rich as any oil company CEO, but the role they love to play the most is victim. There was unmitigated joy when Dan Quayle said in 1992, “It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional women—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

At the Emmy Award ceremony that year—they're always giving awards to one another, these martyrs—the creator of the
Murphy Brown
show, Diane English, was showered with awards. English took the occasion to say, “I would like to thank our sponsors for hanging in there when it was getting really dangerous.” Inasmuch as the entire awards program was a Quayle-bashing festival, it's hard to believe any of them were ever in much “danger” from Dan Quayle. TV producer Gary David Goldberg said, “I've never seen a time where people have responded this viscerally and taken the attacks so much to heart.” Bob Burkett, vice president of a film production outfit, said, “No question that a gauntlet has been laid down to this community. We've decided to pick it up.” Marge Tabankin, executive director of the Hollywood Women's Political Committee, said, “The community feels targeted. It's created a chill and fear reminiscent of the '50s. Let's face it: We feel we're being used as whipping boys.”
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Yes,
Hollywood liberals have got balls to spare and that's why I admire them so much.

The starring victims, single mothers, were almost completely forgotten in the Hollywood sobfest. Liberals invoked their own mythical victim status to censor any criticism of Hollywood's celebration of illegitimacy.

The
New York Times
denounced Quayle's Murphy Brown speech in an editorial, sniffing, “He seems seriously to believe that what poor people most need is moral fiber.”
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Obviously, what poor people really need is free housing, food stamps, and yet another government program designed to treat them like passive, helpless children.

Despite the fact that a majority of illegitimate children in America are whites of European descent, soon Jesse Jackson was getting into the victimhood act, attacking conservative criticism of single motherhood as “racist.” In a debate about Quayle's remarks between Jackson and Pat Robertson on ABC's
Good Morning America,
Robertson discussed the scourge of single motherhood, saying he had lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, “one of the worst black slums in America, and I know the plight of the poor and I've committed my life to help them, but you're not going to help black people unless the black men stop siring children out of wedlock.”

Fortunately, Jackson did not threaten to “cut his nuts off as he would years later to B. Hussein Obama. Instead, Jackson retorted, “That's a racist statement! That's a racist statement!”
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Then at the 1992 Democratic National Convention that year, Jackson said:

I wonder if that's the line Jackson used on Karin Stanford, the mother of his illegitimate child.

Needless to say, the Democratic Convention erupted in applause at Jackson's lunatic comparison of single mothers to Mary the mother of Jesus. In the Democrats' defense, they could not be accused of applauding a sacrilegious speech, because the delegates were unfamiliar with the original story.

Just quickly: Mary and Joseph were married before Jesus was born. They were not homeless, they were traveling to Bethlehem to register for the census. No one ever “abused and questioned” Mary about being pregnant. Mary did have the baby, so—luckily—we dodged the bullet of her aborting the Son of God. No one called Mary “unfit, without family values.” The only people who knew who the real Father was came to worship Jesus. Also, Mary was a virgin. I am fairly certain that we are not witnessing the miracle of 1.5 million virgin births every year. As David Reinhard wrote in
The Oregonian,
perhaps at the next convention Jackson would “be likening Jesus' disciples to the Crips and Bloods.”
⁶⁸

Finally, to compare someone to Herod is like comparing him to Hitler—or whoever the current head of Planned Parenthood is. Herod ordered the slaughter of all children under two years old in Bethlehem. He did not give a speech criticizing Hollywood elites for glamorizing single motherhood.

But apart from that, the Reverend Jackson had all his biblical points right. For example, Jesus was, in fact, a “Hymie.”

Not only was Jackson not laughed into obscurity, but his inane remarks turned him into the Democrats' most respected speaker since William Jennings Bryan. The
Boston Globe
hailed the speech as “a powerful reminder of his importance to the party, as its conscience, its goad and its spokesman for those too often ignored as the Democrats move relentlessly toward the middle.”
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I couldn't have said it better
myself. Jesse Jackson: not just an unintelligible, skirt-chasing shakedown artist, but the Conscience of the Democratic Party.

After the massive, coordinated attack on Dan Quayle for his Murphy Brown speech, no politician again dared to speak up on behalf of the 1.5 million children consigned to starting life on the back bench each year in America. They might be accused by Bryant Gumbel, then of CBS's
Early Show,
of using “family values” as a “code word” for “intolerance”
⁷⁰
and “less inclusion.”
⁷¹
As Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center said, even after the 2004 election, when voters chose “moral values” as the most important issue, Republicans refused to campaign on issues of morality. “Republican strategists,” Bozell said, “pull muscles just thinking about Dan Quayle scorning the ‘Murphy Brown' single-mom plot in 1992.”
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A phalanx of professional victims—oppressed Hollywood multimillionaires, single mothers, and black agitators—swept the real victims, children raised without fathers, under the rug.