The Single Parent Trap

How our culture’s mindless pursuit of freedom has made us ignore the obvious.

One early August evening last year, I turned on the TV to discover that PBS’s Charlie Rose had John Leo as one of his guests. Leo, a columnist for U.S. News & World Report, was a member of a four-person panel discussing the evils and/or merits of single parenthood.

Leo and the other male member of the panel were decidedly of the opinion that the fatherless-child phenomenon was a great social evil. The other two members of the panel, both women, disagreed. One of them, Katha Pollitt, an editor at Nation, felt that the correlation between single parenthood and a wide range of social pathologies—crime, violence, drugs, failure in school, poverty, and so on—was not a causal connection. She speculated that if we did a study while controlling for other possible causes, the effect of fatherlessness would fade to virtually nothing. The other woman had deliberately had a child out of wedlock and has written a book about her experience.

What was interesting about the TV panel discussion was not so much the points that were being made as the fact that it was taking place at all. What, I wondered, will be a debatable issue next? Will I turn on Charlie Rose next week and find that he has a panel discussing whether the earth is flat or round? Will some “flat-earther” explain that the evidence for the roundness of the earth is worthless because our observations were not controlled by parallel observations of some admittedly flat planet? And will someone who has sailed around the world single-handedly, and then written a book about the experience, argue that the ocean sure did look pretty flat during that voyage?

Was Murphy Brown right?

By this late date, it is difficult to see how anyone who has not been in a Rip Van Winkle coma for the last 20 years can doubt that the fatherless-child epidemic has been a gigantic social disaster. Yet there are people—intelligent, well-educated, glib (often very glib indeed)—who not only doubt it, they positively deny it. The reasons they give are interesting:

1. “Many children have grown up in single-parent households and have turned out very well.” Yes, and many people have smoked cigarettes for 30 years without getting lung cancer. No matter: smoking still increases the risk of lung cancer, and single parenthood still increases the risk of misfortune for children.

2. “This is a classic case of blaming the victim—blaming women who often act heroically in very difficult circumstances.” But to the degree that parents get blamed, the lion’s share of the blame is assigned to males who have walked out on their parental responsibilities. More important, most critics are not interested in assigning blame to individuals. Instead, they blame a contemporary culture that has made unlimited personal freedom the summum bonum of human life.

3. “The critics are conservative males who are distressed to see women rising in the world. They want to put women ‘back in their place.’ ” Yet it is difficult to think of anything, including male prejudice, that has so retarded the progress of women in recent times, especially their economic progress, as the burden of single parenthood.

In other words, the arguments offered by those who disagree with John Leo and others are devoid of intellectual respectability. So why do apparently intelligent people keep giving these reasons?

The smoking analogy provides a clue. We understand why some people refuse to acknowledge the evidence that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. For tobacco companies, it is a question of income. For smokers, it is a question of a bad habit they have grown to love. In other words, interests have a tendency to blind people to facts.

So what interest is blinding people to the fact that the single-parenthood epidemic has been a social disaster?

Some people (especially males) do not want to hear about it because this will call upon them to change their lives, to adopt habits of responsibility, including sexual responsibility, where they would prefer a more happy-go-lucky style of life.

Others (especially women) do not want to hear about it because they find themselves in a single-parenthood situation, raising children with minimal or zero assistance from fathers. And no matter how often the critics say, “Don’t worry, Ms. Jones, we’re not blaming you, we’re blaming the culture,” they cannot help feeling guilty.

But the intellectual defenders of single parenthood (who might also be called the apologists for Murphy Brown) have yet another motive: the ideological motive. The pivotal ethical doctrine of this ideology is the one mentioned above, namely, that the summum bonum of human life is virtually unlimited personal freedom.

From this single axiom are deduced a number of doctrines. Heading the list is this one: (1) The good society is the society whose only common good is the agreement not to agree on any common good. But this is followed by others: (2) Cultural diversity is to be prized regardless of the culture’s content; (3) The sexual-liberation movement is a great step forward in the advancement of civilization; (4) The right to abortion is a fundamental human right; (5) The right to suicide is another fundamental human right; and, of course, (6) Regardless of whether or not there are children involved, society has no business pressuring people to get married or remain married.

These doctrines are all part of an ideological package. Attack any one of them and you have attacked the supreme axiom upon which they are all based; but attack the central axiom and you have attacked all the other doctrines that are derived from it.

At all events, subscribers to this ideology cannot afford to yield on a single point of doctrine, no matter how illogical or contrary to fact. This is why John Leo is as likely to persuade Katha Pollitt to change her mind as is the ASPCA to persuade adherents of the Santeria faith to renounce the sacrifice of chickens.

Mention of Santeria reminds us that religion always involves sacrifice. Some religions sacrifice chickens. Others sacrifice contrite hearts. The secular religion of the cultural Left sacrifices the prosperity and happiness of millions of children.

Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.

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