Guilty (9 page)

As Time Warner's surprisingly large-circulation magazine
Babytalk
put it in 2007, “Just 15 years ago, then Vice President Dan Quayle publicly scolded a fictional television character, Murphy Brown, from the prime-time sitcom of the same name, for choosing to have a child on her own. Today, the 2008 Presidential hopefuls from both parties recognize that single moms are a force to be reckoned with and would be more likely to send Brown a baby gift than to question her choices.”
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And so they do.

When President Bush gave the commencement address at Miami Dade College in 2007, he singled out two members of the graduating class for special mention, both immigrants. One had enlisted in the United States Marine Corps out of high school, served in Iraq, and returned to go to college. The other, from Trinidad and Tobago, was a single mother of four.
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Did America lose some sort of immigration lottery?

That same year, President Bush's daughter Jenna wrote a book about a seventeen-year-old single mother who was HIV-positive:
Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope.

As a presidential candidate, John Kerry was constantly touting single mothers, using them in his campaign ads and giving them speaking
time at campaign rallies. The week he announced he was running for president, Kerry held a campaign event at Faneuil Hall in Boston. Three eminences spoke on his behalf: the mayor of Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy, and … a twenty-year-old single mother.
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It's hard to say whose reputation suffered the most from this joint appearance.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton held an emotional press conference at the White House to promote his crime bill, which was going to end crime in America by providing for midnight basketball and banning so-called “assault weapons,” defined as “Semi-Automatics That Look Scary to Liberals.” Three crime victims spoke in favor of one or another aspect of the bill, including Janice Payne of New Orleans, whose nine-year-old son James had been shot and killed in his neighborhood. In an eerie coincidence, just days before he was shot, James had written a letter to Clinton saying, “I want you to stop the killing. People is dead and I think somebody might kill me.”
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In this particular case, however, there were other risk factors in James's life that arguably superseded the availability of guns. For example, he lived with a single mother in a crack house—or as the Realtors call it, a “shooter-upper.” His mother had pleaded guilty to possession of painkillers and crack cocaine.
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These facts came to light after Louisiana law enforcement saw Ms. Payne standing next to the president during the Rose Garden ceremony and arrested her for parole violations
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—which, by the way, was about the extent to which Clinton's crime bill stopped crime.

In 2008, the city commissioner of Opa-locka, Florida—a single mother herself—hosted “A Salute to Single Mothers,” with cash prizes for the single mother with the most affecting story.
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They “struggle to cope.” Give them prizes! One single mother said, “It would be easy to be single by myself, but I would rather have my kids with me and struggle with them.” If someone said that about a pet, he'D be charged with animal cruelty. The attendees got gift bags, cash prizes, and information on taxpayer-funded goodies available to single mothers. The commissioner said she hoped the next “awards ceremony” for mothers who intentionally harm their children to be even bigger!

In 2004, the
New York Times
attacked the Bush tax cuts by quoting
a retired coal miner from southern Illinois who complained, “My daughter is a single mother,” and she didn't get a tax cut.
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Admittedly, in this case, the problem may have less to do with the absence of a husband and more to do with Democrats' maddening inability to understand that you have to pay taxes in order to get a tax cut. But notice how the man, a Democrat according to the
Times,
self-righteously announced the embarrassing circumstances of his own daughter, as if it were a badge of honor that she was a single mother. People used to brag about their children getting into an Ivy League school or joining the Marines. Now they brag about their kids having children without being married.

That same year, discussing the alternative minimum tax on National Public Radio, David Cay Johnston, then a tax reporter for the
New York Times,
illustrated the unfairness of it by saying, “It now applies to very few people who make multimillion-dollar incomes, but it can apply to a single mother who only makes $30,000.”
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How about we double the tax on single mothers to create a disincentive to illegitimacy, so that fewer children's lives will be ruined?

Sociologist Ruth Sidel was a little late to the party when she wrote that single mothers should be “celebrated and indeed applauded” for their “courage, determination, commitment to others, and independence of spirit.” This was in her book,
Unsung Heroines: Single Mothers and the American Dream,
which is not to be confused with Louise Sloan's book
Knock Yourself Up: No Man? No Problem: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom,
or Jane Mattes's book
Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood,
or Colleen Sell's book
Cup of Comfort for Single Mothers: Stories That Celebrate the Women Who Do It All,
or Rosanna Hertz's book
Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family,
or Ellie Slott Fisher's
Mom, There's a Man in the Kitchen and He's Wearing Your Robe: The Single Moms Guide to Dating Well Without Parenting Poorly.
And of course there's the soon-to-be classic by me:
What to Expect When You're Expecting Because You're an Irresponsible Little Tramp.

Single motherhood is the apotheosis of the feminist vision: women
without men! Except they're not without men. They're without one specific man with an interest in their particular children. But men—and women—across the country have been forcibly enlisted in the job of feeding, housing, and clothing single mothers and their children. The rest of us have to be constantly attuned to the needs of single mothers. Government policies are designed to support single mothers, rather than to stop them. Churches, corporations, and nonprofit organizations are required to chip in to make up for single mothers' lack of husbands.
I am woman, hear me roar! Hey, what's the holdup with my government check?

A 2008 study led by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi found that single mothers—unwed or divorced—cost the U.S. taxpayer $112 billion every year. We could have had two Iraq wars at that price. Ken Starr gave us more than a dozen high-level felony convictions and a presidential impeachment for a mere $40 million. Scafidi underestimated single mothers' burden to society by using the lowest estimates of single mothers in poverty and excluding additional costs of single mothers to programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and remedial education programs in public schools.

Scafidi's study did not even consider the burden single mothers place on law enforcement because of their higher likelihood to neglect or kill their children in order to spend more time with their boyfriends. A huge percentage of law enforcement resources are spent dealing with the behavior of white trash in America, of which single motherhood is a major part. Eighty-five percent of mothers who kill their children through neglect are single mothers.
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Consider some of the more newsworthy child murder cases over the past few years:

In the fall of 2008, single mother Casey Anthony was indicted for the murder of her two-year-old, Caylee Marie Anthony. However the trial comes out, the child is gone.

In 2004, twenty-eight-year-old single mother Tammy Huff beat to death her eight-year-old son, Jose Torres, with the assistance of her boyfriend, Bradley Dial.
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In 2003, single mother Amanda Hamm, twenty-seven years old,
drowned her three young sons, aged six, three, and twenty-three months, so she could move to St. Louis with her boyfriend. It would have been a lot of trouble to bring the boys with them. Apparently, the prospect of hearing “are we there yet?” for eight hours was just too daunting for Amanda.
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In 2001, twenty-one-year-old single mother Jennifer Cisowski killed her eight-month-old illegitimate son, Gideon Fusscas, by repeatedly throwing him down a flight of stairs at her grandmother's swank Florida home. The case was especially unusual because Cisowski came from a wealthy, albeit broken, Connecticut family.
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In 1998, twenty-five-year-old single mother Tami Lynn Richards left her two children, three and one and a half years old, alone in their apartment while she went to a bar to drink and listen to a band. One of the boys set a fire when he was playing with matches he found in the apartment. Both boys died. On the other hand, from what I hear, the bar band was pretty awesome.
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