Liberal and Conservative Agree: Fathers Matter, Case Closed
13th August 2020
America has witnessed months of civil unrest in cities around America following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Many of the protesters decry income and net worth “inequality.”
But the most serious “inequality” is the unequal percentage of fathers in black households, a phenomenon that has been encouraged by government policies that normalize and reward out-of-wedlock births.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was assistant secretary of labor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, published “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” At that time, 25% of blacks were born outside of wedlock, a number that this former adviser to President John F. Kennedy, future adviser to President Richard Nixon, future U.S. ambassador, and future Democratic senator from New York, said was catastrophic to the black community.
Moynihan wrote: “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable.”