1806 Fathering Is Greater Than Choice or Public Policy
Larry Elder believes that black fathers matter. A couple of years ago, Elder did a presentation for PragerU.com that is worth revisiting because his main point was broader and more important than the title would indicate.
Drawing statistics from the Journal of Research on Adolescence (JRA), he begins by citing all too familiar statistical trends concerning the state of the family in America. From 1960 to 2000, the percentage of children born to households without married parents rose from 5% to 41%. To look at it another way, by 2015, out-of-wedlock births were at 25% for whites, 53% for Hispanics, and 73% for blacks.
Those dire statistics were not really his main thrust. The balance of his message was about basic negative economics. Elder noted the problem well: “In 1949 the nation’s poverty rate was 34%. By 1965 it was cut in half, to 17%.” “But after the war [Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty] began in 1965, poverty began to flat line.” In other words, Johnson’s war on poverty defeated progress. Elder’s point was that “if you subsidize undesirable behavior you will get more undesirable behavior.”
His point is well taken. Human nature seems to be such that for far too many men, given choice between hard self-generated responsibilities or an easy excuse to skip post-baby-making fatherhood, skipping is more attractive. The relationship between irresponsibility and economics could not be clearer. If one’s “baby-mama” won’t suffer too much, why stick around?
At the same time, somehow, there is this. The Pew Research Center published a survey in June of 2017 entitled “6 Facts about American Fathers”. Kim Parker and Gretchen Liningston summarized it this way: “Fatherhood in America is changing in important and sometimes surprising ways. Today fathers who live with their children are taking a more active role in caring for them and helping out around the house. And the ranks of stay-at-home and single fathers have grown significantly in recent decades. At the same time, more and more children are growing up without a father in the home.” For those fathers who chose to stay involved, 57% said that parenting was “extremely important to their identity”. Fully 54% said that “parenting is rewarding all of the time”.
Don’t miss the significance of comparing the JRA findings with those of Pew. While men are abandoning responsibilities more and more and making a bad societal situation worse, the ones who do the right thing in some form or another are realizing personal fulfillment they may have not expected.
Which leads to another observation by Scott Yenor in his paper “Can the State Be Neutral on Marriage?”.
The issue that Yenor is addressing is what he calls “government agnosticism” toward the workings and form of marriage. The idea for some conservatives, libertarians, and liberals alike, is that the controversy over marriage might be better fought without any government involvement. It is the temptation to advocate for, as some academics would call it, the “privatization” of marriage. It goes without saying that every one of these groups are advocating from their own ulterior motives.
But, as Yenor points out so well, “[N]o political community can be completely indifferent to the form of the institution that bears primary responsibility for raising the next generation of citizens.” Later in the paper he offers this: “There is no such thing as a neutral law. Laws make some thoughts more thinkable and some actions more doable. They affect behavior and attitudes by attaching honor or shame to actions.” And again, “Public morality is never neutral as it meets the challenge of the human passions. It takes sides and hence makes some ways of living more possible than others.”
So, where does that leave us; with the results of 1960’s snake oil promises of what Albert Mohler labels “autonomous individualism”, what Yenor’s piece examines as the “morality of self-expression, or the Prime Minister of Ireland referred to as “modern morality” after his nation voted overwhelmingly to constitutionally disenfranchise unborn children of their lives on May 25th.
Personal choice multiplied thousands or millions of times changes the structure of society. That shift then in turn lends license to multiplied more personal choices in the same direction which then changes nations. Government economic policies affect the perceptions of individuals and therefore their choices. If economic programs lend a hand either negatively or positively in a certain direction, innumerous men will perceive those policies as permission to do the wrong thing or as a constructive challenge to do the right thing.
After all is said and done, the inescapable fact is that fatherhood is much greater than choice or public policy. There is a natural law of created order to fathering, family, and marriage. The hope for a brighter future for family’s rests in more and more men abandoning a self-gratification-first morality to meet the challenges and enjoy the blessings of fatherhood as it is designed to be.