In NJ only half of our kids live with both parents, and somehow that's the good news

Here's the saddest statistic you'll read today.

New Jersey is among only 10 U.S. states where more than half of children live with their married, biological parents.

Barely "more than half." 54% to be exact, with Utah, Minnesota, and Nebraska only slightly edging NJ out at 57, 55, and 54 percent respectively.

Somehow that's being spun as a Good Thing, and vindication of the "blue state model." (Nonwithstanding that Utah and Nebraska aren't "blue states.")

New Jersey fits into "the blue state model" offered by the study's authors, sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Zill, a psychologist. Under that theory, residents of some Democratic-leaning states are more educated and earn a higher income. Those people are more likely to get married and stay married, the report says.

And of course there's the knee-jerk swipe at those conservative, redneck states.

The states with the lowest percentage of children being raised in two-parent households where the adults are the kids' birth parents are Mississippi (32), Louisana (36) and Arkansas.

So many children, far more than half of all kids, stuck in broken families, dependent on The State to fulfill the role of Dad, Mom, or both. It's a damn shame. And an indictment of our society.

How did we get here? Pick one, or all: No-fault divorce. Free love. Feminism. Welfare. Antipathy to religion. Mix 'em all together, add in abrogation of personal responsibility and denigration of shared sacrifice, and you get a society on the decline, where the whims of the supposed adults outweigh the tedious but necessary work required to properly raise their offspring.

And why not? Dads are marginalized. Family courts almost never award them custody of the children, but mercilessly force them into penury via onerous child support payments. Meanwhile a plethora of government handouts ensure Dad isn't needed in the first place, because essentials like food and shelter are just a welfare check away. So what if he's also not there to provide a comforting hug or some words of wisdom? Feminist dogma obviates his necessity anyway, while Mom's lesbian lover fills her head with platitudes about empowerment.

You know what's really empowering? Watching your kid grow up into somebody you'd want to be friends with. Celebrating their successes. Picking them up after their failures. Guiding their maturity and sharing the joys and the tears with the woman who bore them. Yeah, that's so not hip, and it's a boatload of hard work, but it's how the world worked for thousands and thousands of years.

Until now, when our society sefishly took the easy way out. "It takes a village" became their excuse to let "the village" do all the heavy lifting. As soon as they found out there were no repercussions to narcissism the decline of the nuclear family was inevitable. It's no accident that children raised by Big Brother are enmeshed in a culture of dependency. People dependent on the government vote Democrat, because the Democrats are the party of government. So it behooves the government to create as many Democrats as possible.

It's a vicious cycle, and one that won't easily be broken. The allure of Free Stuff trumps the core values of personal responsibility and shared sacrifice any day. The politicians know that, and they don't particularly care that they're destroying everything the Founding Fathers fought and died to establish. Not so long as they get to maintain their stranglehold on power.

There's the legacy of the welfare state in a nutshell. Its soft tyranny devastates the hopes and dreams of the most vulnerable among us, our children. They'll inherit a nation worse off than the one our fathers and mothers created for us. And they'll grow up believing there's nothing they can do to help themselves escape from it.

Posted at 13:54 by Chris Wysocki   [/feminists]   Comments | Perm Link |
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