A Simple Government Page 2
This essential belief is not (at least it shouldn’t be) a partisan issue, but sometimes it can seem like one. For example, President Obama, speaking to the West Point graduating class on May 22, 2010, said, “American innovation must be the foundation of American power.” Yes, innovation is important (as I will discuss in later chapters of this book), but, to repeat, I believe that the foundation of American power has always been and must continue to be . . . (drum roll, please!) . . . the American family.
On this issue, as on so many others, I cast my lot with Ronald Reagan, who said, “The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation of our freedom.”
It should surprise no one—certainly it would not have surprised President Reagan—that those who now want to “transform” traditional America recognize this truth from the opposite direction and have placed the American family smack in the crosshairs. You know this. You see it every day. The family structure that made this country the most powerful and prosperous in the history of the world—father, mother, children—is under assault today as never before.
As parents and even grandparents, what can we do? Simple. We fight back. What happens in our day to the traditional family will determine whether we remain a morally healthy nation of self-reliant families, for the most part, or degenerate into a decadent welfare state of shattered, chaotic, and dependent families.
If you think I’m exaggerating, a little history lesson might be in order. (Many of us somehow managed to get a high school diploma even with a meager knowledge of history, but I digress. . . .) In 1917, when the communists seized power in Russia, they immediately and frankly set out to destroy what they saw as the two biggest threats to their authority: religion and the family. According to an article in the July 1926 issue of Atlantic Monthly, the Bolsheviks hated the institution of the family with a fierce passion. They forbade all religious ceremonies, which had the effect of turning marriage into just a piece of paper issued by a clerk. In turn, marriage could be undone in a matter of minutes by a piece of paper from another clerk. The ultimate aim of this new socialist state, so far as family was concerned, was to promulgate free love. Along the same lines, abortions were officially sanctioned and paid for by the government.
The article contained some startling facts to back up the report:
It was not an unusual occurrence for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions. Some men have twenty wives, living a week with one, a month with another. . . . They have children with all of them, and these children are thrown on the street for lack of support.
The party’s long-term goal? To throw families into chaos, thus making children loyal to the state rather than to their parents. To that end, children still living at home were told to keep a close eye on their parents and, if they criticized the regime, turn them in to the authorities. So now the young, after all, knew better than the old!
Almost one hundred years later, of course, the Soviet Union has collapsed. We don’t live in the shadow of the cold war; but threats lurk elsewhere. The legacies of this massive failed “experiment” are the ideas of sexual revolution that live on and wreak havoc in our own society today through legalized abortions (and the movement in favor of having them funded by the government), seemingly casual divorce (for the first time, in 2010 fewer than 50 percent of American adults were married), growing nonchalance about unwed pregnancy among teens, and, finally, the fevered attempts to extend the definition of marriage beyond “one man, one woman.” Not even the heirs of Marx and Lenin thought of going that far!
Pull Up the Drawbridge
From our friends across the pond, the Brits, we long ago adopted the idea that “a man’s home is his castle.” Fine, so far as that goes, but we must remember this: Castles were built not as mansions or showcases to impress the neighbors but as fortresses that would provide protection from ruthless enemies. Not to sound paranoid (just realistic), but I believe that in America today, as in the Russia of 1917, the family has lots of enemies—not all of them clearly identifying themselves or riding up armed and mounted on a steed. So parents really do need to draw up the drawbridge against a widespread culture of vulgarity and violence. You don’t have a drawbridge? That’s fine, because you have something better—parental guidance. If you can monitor the influence the world has on your kids and fulfill your parental responsibility by acting as the filter representing traditional values, then you will be, in effect, keeping out any enemies threatening to take over your family.
When it comes to questionable influences, just where do you draw the line? Well, you could start with a simple premise about what’s beaming in on the airwaves: Much of it deserves to land squarely in the moat. But some stuff is worse than other stuff.
Not to give government a pass here (we’ll get to them), but I’d argue that pop music is often the worst culprit, with “reality TV” (talk about untruth in advertising) running a close second. Without parental guidance, an impressionable girl might learn that the way to succeed is to shed her innocence as early as possible. That means, for starters, that becoming recognized in the public eye as a talented young woman involves seminudity, plastic surgery, and maybe even a stripper pole. Also, posting naked pictures or a sex video on the Internet is a guarantee of instant attention.
This is, to some extent, just a contemporary exaggeration and exploitation of the old story of the teen years. Many girls, particularly those who don’t have a dad at home, believe that male approval in the form of a boyfriend is essential to existence. I don’t think any sane person who doesn’t live under a boulder would try to argue otherwise. Some boys sense this very well (hello!), pressuring girls to “get with the program.” One good message that did come out of feminism—that girls can write their own program instead of just trying to please boys—is now out the window among many young people, especially when dealing with their peers.
Okay, so you’re fully aware of all of these influences, and you’re standing warily at the drawbridge. Or maybe by now you’re up on the battlements armed with cauldrons of boiling oil. Next step, aside from insisting that your home conform to your values: You have to be vigilant about what goes on in your local schools. That means get out the catapult! To be effective, your reach needs to extend as far as it possibly can.
Here are some things you might want to look into. Is your first grader reading about Dick and Jane getting a puppy named Spot, or is he learning how nice it is that Heather has two mommies? Is your eighth grader studying the fruit and vegetable exports of South American farmlands, or is he practicing how to put a condom on a banana? Or is your child not learning anything at all today after being sent home for wearing an American flag T-shirt on Cinco de Mayo—or any other day?
Don’t hesitate to pore over your kids’ assigned books and lesson plans. Do the history books teach them that America should be cherished—or blamed for something? Talk with your kids about what goes on in the classroom: Do any teachers preach according to personal agendas that conflict with what you teach at home? Encourage your kids to read widely for themselves, rather than be bound by the assignments from school. Help them understand that they go to school to be educated, not indoctrinated. Class is supposed to be for exercising the mind. That means they need to be taught how to think, not what to think.
Pull Up Some Chairs Around the Table
Perhaps by this point you think I’m being too optimistic. But I’m also realistic. I know from talking with parents that many are about ready to throw in the towel. They try and try again but don’t feel able to counter the peer pressure and insidious media messages that bombard their kids every day. Many have come to believe that they may be fighting a losing battle. The struggle is just too difficult and exhausting.
Well, I get that. But how hard is it to have dinner with your children?
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Let me share with you an amazing statistic discovered by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. For the past decade and a half, researchers there have been totting up the differences between teens who eat dinner with their parents “frequently” (defined as being at least five nights a week) and those who do it only three times weekly or less. The results of a CASA report published in 2009 were dramatic:
1. Teens who eat dinner infrequently with their families are twice as likely to use tobacco and marijuana as those who have family dinners “frequently.”
2. Similarly, they’re one and a half times more likely to use alcohol.
3. And they’re one and a half times more likely to get mostly Cs or lower in school. (No one’s saying that infrequent family dinners necessarily cause bad grades, but there’s clearly some sort of correlation. Try it!)
“The magic of the family dinner comes not from the food on the plate but from who’s at the table and what’s happening there,” explains Elizabeth Planet, CASA’s vice president. “The emotional and social benefits that come from family dinners are priceless.”
That means the food doesn’t have to be fancy, or organic, or even homemade. What counts, evidently, is the time spent together around the table. Good grades; avoidance of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs; closer and warmer family relationships—it’s a scientific fact (not to mention plain old common sense) that something as simple as sharing take-out pizza is associated with all of them!
Whatever Happened to Dad?
I’ve been criticized many times for talking so much about “social issues” when the real issue now, according to some people, is the economy. Well, buckle up, Turbo, because here’s a simple, inarguable fact: Every broken, fatherless family has a tremendous economic impact.
Common sense is clear: The more families can do for themselves, the less they will need from the government. But what happens when there’s no dad in the picture?
Here’s what Robert Rector, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has to say about that:
The disappearance of marriage in low-income communities is the predominant cause of child poverty in the U.S. today. If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of them would not be poor. . . . When liberals refuse to talk about marriage and the poor in the same breath, they are guilty of willful neglect of the major source of poverty.
Surprise. Liberals are just fine with that, since one of their goals seems to be getting as many people as possible on public assistance.
According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, about one in three American kids lives in a home without a dad on the premises. Are you—like me—stunned to hear that? Allowing for exceptions, as in all things, the typical portrait of these children is grim indeed. These kids are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids living with both parents. They have higher rates of delinquency, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, and obesity. It gets worse. They have a 125 percent higher risk of suffering from abuse and are twice as likely to drop out of school. You can guess the next stat: Girls raised by a single mother are more likely as teenagers to become pregnant themselves.
Some of you may be inclined to turn away, as if none of this has anything to do with you and your family. In fact, far from affecting only the children directly involved, fatherless families affect all of us and our descendants. The so-called dad deficit added more than $300 billion to the national deficit in 2010 because of welfare payments to moms. Many of these men are responsible—at least, in the biological sense—for two or more single-parent families. Remember Russia in 1917? This is exactly the same problem that the communist regime deliberately created.
Again, a relevant comment from Robert Rector: “[L]iberal politicians . . . have a vested interest in the growth of the welfare state, and nothing grows the welfare state like the disappearance of marriage.” And what happens then? The bigger the welfare state grows, the more powerful it becomes. Beware a government bearing gifts, because every one of them comes with strings attached. Over time, those strings grow into heavy chains.
Basically, the decline of the family is a failure of personal responsibility. The personal rights of each one of us are sacred, a part of our connection to God, but they are linked to our personal responsibilities. If we fail to live up to those responsibilities, we will lose our rights. And the state, following its own agenda, will take over.
The Worst of Both Worlds: Out-of-Wedlock Birth and Abortion
If we could hop into our “way-back machine” and travel to Washington in 1965, we might find a young Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then working at the Department of Labor in his presenatorial days, prepared to issue a report about the rate of out-of-wedlock births among African Americans. He is clearly dismayed to report that it’s almost 25 percent. Now let’s zip forward again to 2008 for the latest statistics then: almost 75 percent, or exactly the reverse of the 1965 ratio of illegitimate-to-legitimate births! I can hear Senator Moynihan now from beyond the grave, intoning, “I told you it was getting bad. . . .”
There’s more bad news from 2008. Among whites, out-of-wedlock births were almost 29 percent, higher than the rate among blacks back when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Moreover, at 41 percent, the overall out-of-wedlock birthrate for all Americans was the highest ever, compared with just 5 percent in 1960. So it’s safe to say that every group is moving dramatically in the wrong direction.
What to do? Well, when we compare out-of-wedlock births by state, those with higher incomes and education levels show lower rates. Some observers, as you might imagine, infer that this statistic suggests a socioeconomic problem that can be solved by helping more teens stay in school so that they can go on to college and higher-paying jobs. But wait: It’s not quite so elementary, my dear Watson.
Let’s look more closely at the situation. While red states do indeed have more out-of-wedlock babies, the blue states have—perhaps you’ve already guessed it—more abortions. In fact, pregnancy rates do not differ all that much; it’s abortion rates that do. As compiled by the Guttmacher Institute (using 2005 statistics, the most recent available), the abortion rate is 6 percent in Mississippi and Utah and 9 percent in Arkansas. But it’s 24 percent in Connecticut, 30 percent in New Jersey, and 33 percent in New York. Shockingly, the nation as a whole aborts about 1.2 million babies each year. So no matter what you may have read or heard elsewhere (perhaps from abortion activists), higher education and income levels are not stopping young women from getting pregnant: They’re just turning to a different “solution.” Of course, my view is that abortion, rather than actually providing a solution, is instead an even more awful problem.
So while we should be disturbed by the huge number of out-of-wedlock births, we should be even more disturbed that abortions are so common. As hard as it can be to grow up without a dad, there’s a far worse fate: not growing up at all because one’s life was snuffed out in the womb.
Abstinence for Kids Is the True Freedom
It is clear to me that these two epidemics—out-of-wedlock births and on-demand abortions—are sapping America’s moral strength. We have two challenges. On the one hand, we need to reduce the number of pregnancies that so often lead to sad, unstable homes and eventual divorce (assuming that marriage ever had any role to play in the situation in the first place). On the other, the answer to the likelihood that children will grow up in a fatherless home is not to abort them. The strong families this country needs are always built on two shared societal beliefs: the value of marriage and the value of human life.
“Grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure,” wrote English playwright William Congreve in 1693. “Married in haste, we repent at leisure.” That’s certainly still true all these years later, as many young people pressured to marry in response to an unplanned pregnancy will attest. But even those who decide not to marry may eventually have reason to “repent,” because the other choices can be equally dismal. As a pastor, I of
ten saw women who suffered wrenching guilt and/or depression after having an abortion or giving a baby up for adoption. I believe these women will feel their loss and anguish for the rest of their lives. As for single mothers, they typically have to interrupt their education, entrust their children to the care of strangers, and marginally support their households on a meager income. (It’s then, of course, that the kindly federal government steps in to “help.”)
Kids exposed to mass culture—TV, movies, music, the Internet—are incessantly told that everybody who’s “cool” has sex before marriage. What’s the prob? Sex is no more consequential than a handshake, dude, so “hook up” any time you want, and with anybody. After all, doing what you want, what you feel like in the moment—that’s what “freedom” is, right? Too bad our culture doesn’t bother to explain that it is abstinence that is the true freedom. Only abstinence ensures that our children don’t have to take on adult roles before they’re ready. It’s only abstinence, too, that protects their options to pursue their dreams, marry the one they love at the time that’s right, and feel joyful about the choices they’ve made freely along the way.
Gay Parenthood: A Social Experiment
I have often been criticized for my outspoken views on gay marriage and homosexuality, so let me be clear. I have no doubt at all that homosexual men and women love their children deeply. Just as deeply as heterosexuals love theirs.