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Fathers Keep Society Safe

by Christopher Chantrill
June 16, 2005 at 11:23 am

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FOR THE last couple of weeks, lefties in Britain have been leaping to the defense of the three teenaged sisters, aged 16, 14, and 12, that have each recently brought a little bundle of joy into the world. These brand-new single parents live with their single-parent mother, Julie Atkins, in public housing at a weekly cost to the state of about $1,200, or $60,000 per year.

“There have always been women like Yeats’s Crazy Jane whose gardens grow ‘nothing but babies and washing,’” huffed Germaine Greer from a bunker on the feminist senior circuit. “They live in an alternative society that is matrilineal, matrifocal, and matrilocal, a society that the patriarchy has always feared and hated.” And old lefty Roy Hattersley spluttered in The Guardian that “they’re being treated like characters in a Victorian morality play!” But the absent father of two of the young mothers had another opinion. Reading about their new status in the papers he declared that it was all the fault of the schools.

It’s appropriate that our lefty friends should be leaping to the defense of single moms right now. What better time to celebrate single motherhood than in the run-up to Fathers’ Day, celebrated this year on June 19th? Liberals seem to like nothing more than spoiling other peoples’ holidays.

But we mortal folk may as well go ahead and celebrate fatherhood anyway. If liberals are against it, then we must be good reasons to be for it. And indeed there are. Let us rehearse just three. Fathers promote the safety of children; fathers promote safety for society from feral children; and fathers protect society from feral government.

Children living with their fathers are safer than other children. The safest place for a child to live is with its biological married parents. The most dangerous place to live is with mother and a boy friend who is not the father of the child. Want to guess how dangerous? It is 33 times more dangerous for a child to live with mommie and her boy friend than to live with the child’s married biological mother and father, according to James Bartholomew in The Welfare State We’re In.

But, surely, most children are not subject to the predations of a live-in boy friend? That is true. A child is only 5 times more at risk when living with mother married to a stepfather than when living with its married, natural parents.

Children living with their fathers are safer not just from violence by others but also from becoming violent themselves. There are dozens of studies demonstrating the connection between juvenile crime and single parenthood. Here is a list of just a few. Children living with their natural, married parents are less likely to commit crimes; they are more likely to start having sex later, and they are more likely to finish school.

With this sort of evidence about fathers and child safety you’d think that liberal activists would be proposing legislation from coast to coast to promote traditional families and to end forever the social devastation of single parenthood, in fact nothing less than a War on Single Parenting. You would expect earnest academic social scientists and activists to be turning up on TV talk shows demanding that the government end the holocaust in at-risk teens by demanding a comprehensive and mandatory government program to protect at-risk children from the dangers of single parenthood.

But in fact you don’t.

There’s another good thing about fathers. They lower the cost of government, and that’s a good thing because it increases freedom. Of course, it’s no secret that married people tend to vote Republican, and therefore for less government. And it’s no secret that the “marriage gap” has been increasing. According to USA Today:

In 1984, the difference in the presidential votes of married and unmarried women was 17 percentage points, according to surveys taken as voters left polling places. There was a 21-point marriage gap in 1992, a 29-point gap in 1996, a 32-point gap in 2000.

In 2004, the marriage gap was 44 points. Married women voted for Bush 57% to 42%. Single women voted for Kerry 64% to 35%. But add children into the mix, and the marriage gap expands even more. According to USA Today again: “Married women with children are even more Republican [than] those who don’t have children; single women who have children are even more Democratic than those who don’t.” The more married fathers you have, the less government you need to support women and children.

Every man learns soon enough that men are expendable. Whether it’s the War in the Pacific or the War on the Patriarchy, it is men that get sacrificed for the greater good of all. That’s as it should be.

But expendable or not, you sure wouldn’t like to live in a society without fathers.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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