January 12, 2009

Change and Marriage: We Can’t Have None Without the Other

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like the horse and carriage
Dad was told by Mother
You can't have one; you can't have none;

You can't have one without the other!

We all know exactly what the “none” refers to in this standard by the incomparable Sammy Cahn, as immortalized by Ol’ Blue Eyes. Ah, the days of preserving virtue. But hold that thought.

What occasions this lyrical walk down memory lane? Why, it’s the release of another tome – Guilty – by that conservative fun-raiser Ann Coulter, complete with a manufactured media crisis, this time over her ostensible lifetime ban by NBC. This was a ban revoked – following a day of damsel-creating-da-stress interviews that blazed across other outlets – just in time for an especially testy joust with Today’s visibly irritated Matt Lauer.

I always enjoy the tortured cries and Romper Roomish rumpuses (emphasis on Mr. Don’t Be) that accompany the lithe Mouth of the Ouch’s latest edition. But this time, I’m concerned that all the public pyrotechnics might obscure an extraordinarily timely and important message.

In the second chapter of her opus, the colorful Ms. Coulter maintains that “(t)he most worshipped figure in modern America is the ‘single mother.” But also that “single mothers cause irreparable harm to other human beings – their own children – as countless studies on the subject make clear . . . (T)hey also foist a raft of social pathologies on society. Look at almost any societal problem and you will find it is really a problem of single mothers.” Ouch, indeed.

Like what problem? How about crime and juvenile delinquency? Teenage pregnancies, dropouts, suicides, runaways, sexual promiscuity, obesity, drug abuse and divorce? Poverty and homelessness? Sixty to 90 percent of all these “social pathologies” are products of single motherhood, Ms. Coulter demonstrates.

Yet despite the social wreckage, single motherhood is “the active social policy of liberals,” who celebrate the institution while, incredibly, trashing the traditional family. Courts and legislatures, spurred on by media and the glitterati, have rendered single motherhood – including the Hollywood-fed fad of conception by artificial insemination – not only “socially acceptable” but a fundamental right.

Ms. Coulter thus follows in the footsteps of the late, great sociologist, senator and patriot Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In his famed 1993 article “Defining Deviancy Down,” Moynihan noted the correlation among rising single parenthood and poverty, medical problems, educational decline and crime, and stated the “unmistakable lesson” of history that “a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women . . . asks for and gets chaos.” He bemoaned the “general acceptance of the situation as normal” and “none of the marshaling of resources that is associated with significant social action.”

And why, pray tell? Because “a growth in deviancy makes possible a transfer of resources, including prestige, to those who control the deviant population. This control would be jeopardized if any serious effort were made to reduce the deviancy in question. This leads to assorted strategies for re-defining the behavior in question as not all that deviant, really.”

In other words, a vast army of lawmakers, agencies, social workers, educators and even media has a stake in defining the “deviant” (his word) Baby Mama population as normal – and even noble. Still, the poverty warrior declared that “we are obliged to ask why things do not change.”

Yes, change. The mantra of the moment. Yet perhaps the best change in some circumstances is a change back:

Love and marriage, love and marriage
It's an institute you can't disparage
Ask the local gentry, and they will say it's elementary.
 

No bailout or stimulus package could do America as much good as a return to the elementary presumption that the only appropriate venue for sexual expression is marriage between one man and one woman – preferably “until death do us part.”

How? Start by restoring that presumption in the law and the tax code. Halt the brain-dead practices of giving children the tools and encouragement to engage in sex, and single women to impregnate themselves out of wedlock, and remember that the concept of “just say no” originally applied to now-vilified abstinence programs. End the insanity of treating vile pornography as “free speech” and the glorification of pre-and-extramarital sex. Re-elevate adoption – and not by gays.

And most important, join Sammy Cahn, as Ms. Coulter has done, in publicly redrawing a line in the sand – and standing by it:

You can't have one; you can't have none;

You can't have one without the other.
No, sir!