#facepalm part 3

[VIDEO] Our esteemed State Rep. Monique Davis was on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday to talk about her comments made on a Detroit radio station regarding cops shooting young people. She never walked back her comments and still maintains that she was only repeating what her constituents were saying to her. Bill O'Reilly was right to say that with her credibility as an elected official it was irresponsible to repeat such a statement unless there was evidence of such activity.

With that in mind, just because one is an elected official doesn't make them credible. For airing out such a statement is Davis more credible now than she was after making those statements, I would say unlikely. She does appear to be quite a spitfire over the years especially being named the worst person in the world after essentially attacking an atheist at a state legislative hearing years ago.

We have a member of the Illinois House or Representatives - who just so happens to be Davis' colleague whether I'm sure she likes it or not - who has been indicted for soliciting a bribe. Not only was he indicted but last year he was booted from the state House. However, he was re-elected last year to his old house seat because he refused to quit the race even after he had been removed from the house. Does anyone view him as credible now?

In any case another part of the discussion was the most important issue facing Black-Americans. O'Reilly wants to argue that it's the family, but Davis didn't really talk about that and stated that it was the lack of services, jobs, and education. It's hard to disagree with that to be sure, but Davis never talked about the family lives of many of these young people.

Speaking only for me, I never consider the family. I recognize that the family life of a lot of our young people are very imperfect. Would a father make more of a difference in the home? Haven't the slightest clue to be honest.

Personally I do believe before having children one should get married first. It doesn't always happen that way and there's nothing but evidence of that. However, I think anyone who has children should strive to create a nuclear family that includes a father at least.

Of course we could talk about the disintegration of the black family, but let's also recognize that having mother and father as head of a household could be a good thing. It's certainly excellent if mother and father were on the same page as far as what's in the best interest of the children. And hopefully that means at the very least the children go on and do something productive with their adult lives and stay out of trouble with the law.

Hat-tip The Blaze

NRO: The Death of the Family

Finding this article via Newsalert the title from there was "Single Mothers Mean Welfare State". Then I see that this piece written by Mark Steyn in fact starts off talking about gay marriage. What is Steyn saying?

Which of these alternative scenarios — the demolition of marriage or the taming of the gay — will come to pass? Most likely, both. In the upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach. Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray documents in his book Coming Apart, marriage is still expected to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day, “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.” “Stunning”: What a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s probably right.

Lower down the socioeconomic scale, the quality gets more variable. One reason why conservative appeals to protect the sacred procreative essence of marriage have gone nowhere is because Americans are rapidly joining the Scandinavians in doing most of their procreating without benefit of clergy. Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics (the “natural conservative constituency” du jour, according to every lavishly remunerated Republican consultant), and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “non-marital,” which is significantly higher than Canada or Germany. “Stunning” upscale gays will join what’s left of the American family holed up in a chichi Green Zone, while beyond the perimeter the vast mounds of human rubble pile up remorselessly. The conservative defense of marriage rings hollow because for millions of families across this land the American marriage is hollow.

Also:

Underneath all this apparent “fairness” is a lot of unfairness. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of adolescent daughters abused by Mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Millions of children are now raised in transient households that make not just economic opportunity but even elementary character-formation all but impossible. In the absence of an agreed moral language to address this brave new world, Americans retreat to comforting euphemisms like “blended families,” notwithstanding that the familial Cuisinart seems to atomize at least as often as it blends.

Meanwhile, social mobility declines: Doctors who once married their nurses now marry their fellow doctors; lawyers who once married their secretaries now contract with fellow super-lawyers, like dynastic unions in medieval Europe. Underneath the self-insulating elite, millions of Americans are downwardly mobile: The family farmers and mill workers, the pioneers who hacked their way into the wilderness and built a township, could afford marriage and children; indeed, it was an economic benefit. For their descendants doing minimum-wage service jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology, functioning families are a tougher act, and children an economic burden. The gays looked at contemporary marriage and called the traditionalists’ bluff.

Then finally Newalert lifts this conclusion from the final paragraph:

The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single women, for whom the state is a girl’s best friend, the sugar daddy whose checks never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a nation’s finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far harder to fix.

The article starts off with a conversation Steyn has who notes that gay marriage is an attack on marriage. Instead of this article being an attack of gay marriage it notes the many sociological issues that are occuring in this nation.

It seems to me the Christian right makes a big issue about marriage. From them we might hear that getting married has economic benefits and social stability. Although increasing Americans aren't going out of their way to get marriage they just simply shack up.

In this case, it's safe to say that this article is attempting to look at the big picture. The next question is, I can only wonder how the Supreme Court is going to rule on gay marriage.