Marriage and society
Dec. 13th, 2006 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoCobb has a good long post riffing on Kay Hymowitz's essay on the "Unmarriage Revolution" at Front Page Mag, and its import for black folks specifically.
No question that the failure to marry and build solid families hits poor blacks hard; even in the 1960s when Moynihan was first talking about the problem and catching seventy kinds of hell for it, it was obvious that trying to substitute Uncle Sam for a real flesh and blood on the premises father wasn't working well, had never worked well, and could never work well enough to overcome the problems of single parenthood. This is not a problem unique to urban blacks, however, as any student of trailer park culture could tell you, and its spread to Latinos from Central America ought to scare the crap out of anyone that gives a passing thought to the immigration situation.
It's become routine for the bourgie and upper-class left (especially in the media) to pooh-pooh "family values"; either they assume it's all about the gay and therefore it' an evil wedge issue, or they point to successful single mothers who happen to be pulling down serious money and can afford to hire a squad of nannies and cooks and other domestic help. Unfortunately it's not all about the gay, and it turns out that Dan Quayle's point about Murphy Brown was correct after all. As Jane Galt has pointed out, these policies may not have any effect on you, oh bourgie reader of LJs, but they have one hell of an effect at the margin. Jane gives several examples in her rather long essay; RTWT. And that goes for Cobb, too. As usual.
No question that the failure to marry and build solid families hits poor blacks hard; even in the 1960s when Moynihan was first talking about the problem and catching seventy kinds of hell for it, it was obvious that trying to substitute Uncle Sam for a real flesh and blood on the premises father wasn't working well, had never worked well, and could never work well enough to overcome the problems of single parenthood. This is not a problem unique to urban blacks, however, as any student of trailer park culture could tell you, and its spread to Latinos from Central America ought to scare the crap out of anyone that gives a passing thought to the immigration situation.
It's become routine for the bourgie and upper-class left (especially in the media) to pooh-pooh "family values"; either they assume it's all about the gay and therefore it' an evil wedge issue, or they point to successful single mothers who happen to be pulling down serious money and can afford to hire a squad of nannies and cooks and other domestic help. Unfortunately it's not all about the gay, and it turns out that Dan Quayle's point about Murphy Brown was correct after all. As Jane Galt has pointed out, these policies may not have any effect on you, oh bourgie reader of LJs, but they have one hell of an effect at the margin. Jane gives several examples in her rather long essay; RTWT. And that goes for Cobb, too. As usual.
