My Article on Fatherlessness
Posted by Adam Graham in : Family MattersMy latest piece is up at PJM:
In Harrisburg, the capital city of Pennsylvania, crime has become such a problem that Stanley Lawson of the NAACP has asked Governor Ed Rendell to call in the National Guard to restore order.
During the month of June, twelve young people were gunned down. Many in broad daylight.
Mr. Lawson said: “We’re beyond what the Harrisburg police department can do. We need help.” Another NAACP member, Stanley Mitchell, in declaring the need to suspend some civil rights, added: “We have the civil right not to be shot.”
It’s easy to attack their willingness to demand martial law with a mandatory curfew, or to quote Benjamin Franklin’s warning that those who trade essential liberty for security will have neither liberty nor security. But that misses the point. The reaction of the Harrisburg NAACP is the same reaction that will come from anyone forced to live in a war zone.
Yet Mr. Johnson blames the actions of young gang warriors on fear. It would be more apt to say that the problem is fatherlessness.
The statistics are not pretty. Of teen runaways, 90 percent come from fatherless homes. So do 85 percent of all youth currently sitting in prison and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates. The negative statistics continue seemingly without end regarding the social (63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes), economic (75 percent of children in single parent homes experience poverty), and educational (71 percent of high school dropouts are from single parent homes) impacts of homes without fathers — and how the problem has become pandemic among the African American community.
Read the rest here.
Comment by Rachael
Excellent article. Ms Gloria Steinem may be a “fish” but I am more like the moon, and my husband is the sun. I couldn’t shine without him. As my three sons grow to be honorable and hardworking I know it it because they have a father who models those traits daily. There is a reason it takes two parents to make a baby…because it takes two to raise one. We wouldn’t have boys shooting each other in the street if their father’s had stepped up and taught them to be men.