Did I say anything about legislating two parent households ?
Do we stop trying to prevent or lessen racial bigotry because we can’t legislate people’s hearts or opinions? Why can’t we focus on the living conditions in our inner cities? Focus on the violence, gangs, poverty, and children being born out of wedlock. It’s not disputed that children from fatherless homes are far more likely to end up dropping out of school and find their to prison. We put so much effort into eliminating racial prejudice why can’t we put some effort into changing the culture of fathers not raising their children ? Statistics show this above all things would be the most effective path to help of children.
Because we put one third of the potential fathers in prison for one reason or another. The remaining men are disincentivized to choose a single mate because of the relative bargaining power of the women in the scenario. They can have two or three female lovers and there will still be women without a mate in some communities. For the women, many of the most desirable and ambitious men have been removed, so they are left with men who are less preferred and less motivated to remain with them. So they become disinclined to marry. Between this dynamic and pure economics: The expense of a baby which exceeds the skill set and opportunities of a mother, we see a cycle of welfare dependence that is the by-product of root cause de facto segregation.
The Mormons went through the same thing. Smith and Young sent the most impressive members of the community out to be missionaries for years at a time. In hindsight, they discovered that the men being sent out were the most physically capable and socially desirable men in the community. Women began to vocalize that they couldn’t find husband or if they did they were sent away leaving the women destitute. Dudes began fornicating on a grand scale because women were plain lonely and needed help. Unfortunately, most of the cat daddy’s couldn’t support their mistresses while their husbands were away. Or disclaimed fatherhood for social reasons. So Smith and Young began to control that by diverting missionaries before they were old enough to marry and having polygamist marriages for the men who could afford to support multiple women and children.
Once you returned from your mission, there was tremendous pressure to settle down immediately and help alleviate the social tension of having a societal imbalance in more women than men in the community. That tradition remains today.
It led to widespread abuses and it became unsustainable as a smaller and smaller number of men began taking more and more mates because of the diminishing desireability of most of the remaining men. The Prophet revealed that the Church would take a break from polygamy about the time that Salt Lake was showing the social strain of polygamy. Statehood and the potential for US Army invasion was an excuse.
Our inner cities are showing a similar strain on natural selection caused by skewed demographics and the temptations of the drug industry. The welfare state and the multi-generational poverty it generates is simply an inadequate salve on a symptom. It’s not the problem. And we shouldn’t blame anyone caught up in that cycle except those that choose to commit crimes.
It made take three or four generations - maybe 100 years - to undue what we’ve wrought and restore a fair chance for kids to be raised by a two parent household with the actual parents always present.
And that’s before we discuss the corporate interests that shape our economy and social structure that try and artificially decrease labor costs by encouraging more and more women into careers and away from motherhood, when cheaper imported labor is not available or desirable. Inner city single parent homes are normalized by suburban single family homes that are the result of career ambitions of women and the fundamental imbalance in the distribution of work in a home where too often the woman must juggle motherhood and career, while the father is largely focused on his career and can be disengaged. Divorce is too often the result there. And we are left with a society where it doesn’t matter whether you grew up on food stamps or in Jenks in a McMansion, there’s an equal chance you won’t see your natural father in a setting that is productive for your personal development as a child. At best, you got a stilted, artificial, court created fiction of a relationship with your father that we’ve been told is not disruptive to your development, but we all know the divorce rate for children of a divorce.
