CULTURE, EAGLE FORUM
Feminist Katie Roiphe is a single mom, and she resents the disapproval that she gets from others. She even complains about the tone of liberal NY Times articles on how unwed births are not the norm in the USA. She writes:
Conservatives will no doubt be elaborately hysterical over the breakdown of morals among the women of Lorain, but they will be missing the major point, which is that however one feels about it, the facts of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies. … one has to recognize that marriage is very rapidly becoming only one way to raise children. (And other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love, and the varieties of family life, into cultural attitudes toward unmarried parents.)
In a way, she is right. The breakdown of the American family will not be reversed by blaming the morals of the single moms. There are just too many cultural trends favoring those morals. As long as we teach women that we should follow Europe in accepting what they regard as “a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love”, we will have more single moms and all the consequential social proplems. The trends cannot be changed unless we adopt drastic policy changes that stop giving incentives for single motherhood.
Used with the permission of Eagle Forum.
