The Mind of a Liberal

Alan at Idablue writes regarding my post on prisons and traditional families:

You know, I just don’t see that families are in decline. Maybe the percent of nuclear families is lower, but that doesn’t mean there are fewer families. Being part of a blended family, I think my family is just fine. My kids don’t seem to be headed for prison.

A few things here. First of all, the way I used decline is the same way one would speak of a decline of civilization. The semantical argument in that case would go like this:

Adam: We’re seeing the decline of civilization.

Alan: Are you kidding me? We still have a civilization.

The traditional marriage based two parent family is what works, sorry.

Second, Alan’s use of anecdotal evidence (i.e. I don’t think my kids are going to prison.) is an Uncle Bernie argument. An Uncle Bernie argument goes, “You know my Uncle Bernie smoked to the day he died at age 80 when he was hit by a truck.” Uncle Bernie may not have got lung cancer, but that doesn’t mean smoking is safe, in fact it increases your chance of getting cancer.  There are facts about the presence of a fathers in the lives of their children:

Children in homes without the fathers present were at an increased risk for transmission of psychological disorders. Children who had lost their fathers were nearly twice as likely as those from intact families to manifest symptoms of psychological disorder (ratio 1.81; p<.03). Children who had experienced more than 12 months of lone-mother upbringing were twice as likely to exhibit psychological disorders as children who did not spend more than 12 months in a mother-only home (odds ratio 1.83; p<.03). Children who had experienced more than 12 months of stepfather upbringing were also nearly twice as likely as children in intact homes to exhibit symptoms of disorder (odds ratio 1.93; p<.04)

Even after controlling for family background variables such as mother’s education level, race, family income, and number of siblings, as well as neighborhood variables such as unemployment rates and median income, boys who grew up outside of intact marriages were, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in jail.

So despite Alan’s Uncle Bernie anecdote, the decline of the traditional family does have an impact. Just because a kid’s from an intact family, that doesn’t mean he can’t end up in prison, and just because he comes from a single parent home or a broken home doesn’t mean he can’t end up living a wonderful life. However, the odds are against both examples. 

A bigger reason for bulging prisons might be criminalizing drugs instead of providing treatment for users. But, conservative are usually into accountability (except when it comes to the Bush administration). So spend tax $$ to punish, rather than to help.

I actually have no difficulty with rehab for first time users as opposed to prison, but I think if you’re going to have to argue drugs as a concern, you have to look at why kids use drugs:

Even after controlling for the effects of gender, age, race-ethnicity, family income, and residential mobility, teens in single-parent and stepparent families were 2 times more likely to use illegal drugs compared to teens in intact, two-parent married families.

Alan then writes:

And BTW, I don’t think the rate of “fatherlessness” is changing at all. So far, everyone still has to have a father. Perhaps there are fewer fathers in nuclear families, and thus not living with the kids. That doesn’t make the kids fatherless.

Let’s take a look at the dictionary definition of fatherless:

1. not having a living father: a fatherless boy.
2. not having a known or legally responsible father.

To see a boy doesn’t know his father is not fatherless is just wrong and it’s a semantical game.

Alan: It’d be easy enough to show that large numbers of folks in prisons are from non-nuclear families, but there are many other stats that explain it even more closely. How about socio-economic status? If we had no poor people, we’d have way fewer folks locked up.

And again, we go back to Single Parent homes and the lack of a father:

Single-parent families are five times as likely to be poor as married-couple families. In 1999, 6.3 percent of married-couple families with children were living in poverty, compared to 31.8 percent of single-parent families with children.

It all comes back to the decline of the traditional two parent family.  Drugs, Poverty, Crime. The left will never acknowledge it because it’s the antithesis of modern feminism.

Modern feminism believes that a single mother (x) raising a child is as good as a father (y) and mother (x) raising a child in terms of the Child’s health, well-being, and general welfare. The formula mathamatically could be said to be:

x+y=x

The problem with such a statement is that if x+y=x, than y=zero, meaning ultimately that fathers are quite literally worthless in the lives of their children. Chris at Unequivocal Notion expresses it succinctly:

No, it is a direct correlation between stupid people raising stupid kids — two stupid parents are not necessarily better than one. 

Thus, if you’re children ended up in prison and you’re a single parent, it wasn’t because you were overtaxed beyond what 1 person could possibly be expected to do, it’s just because you were and single moms, having a dad around would make things even worse, because Dad is not a Zero, he’s a -1.

To see men arguing so strongly for their own irrelevancy is bizarre and indeed, a little sad.

UPDATE:

For clarification, I was not talking about all liberals. I was reminded that there are common sense liberals that don’t believe in the irrelevancy of men, marriage, family, etc. However, the ideology of the Idaho leftosphere definitely leans that way.