Guilty (11 page)

There's wrong and then there's crazy wrong. According to the U.S. Justice Department crime statistics, domestic abuse is virtually nonexistent for married women living with their husbands. From 1993 to 2005, the number of married women victimized by their husbands ranged from 0.9 to 3.2 per 1,000. Domestic violence was about 40 times more likely among divorced or separated women, ranging from 37.7 to 118.5 per 1,000. Even never-married women were more than
twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence as married women.
¹¹²
Evidently, the safest place for a woman to be is at home with her husband.

In another passage suggesting that Ehrenreich was raised on a different planet, she says, “The larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers.”
¹¹³
True, domestic violence skyrocketed the first year of Clinton's presidency and again the year of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
¹¹⁴
But not to worry— Caligula is gone! Even Democrats rejected his wife as their presidential nominee in 2008. Of course, he would have been gone a lot sooner without liberals like Ehrenreich denouncing the “sexual Puritanism” of those of us trying to impeach him.

Ehrenreich says she is merely brave enough to state what “we all know.” As proof that “we all” loathe the traditional family, she cites the public interest in O.J.'s murder of his ex-wife, the Menendez brothers' murder of their parents, and Lorena Bobbitt's attack on her husband's private parts. “Our unseemly interest in O.J. and Erik, Lyle and Lorena,” she says, “allow us, however gingerly, to break the silence on the hellish side of family life.”
¹¹⁵
I guess our unseemly interest in the missing Natalee Holloway case allowed us to break our silence on the hellish side of summer vacations and our unseemly interest in the Martha Moxley murder allowed us to break our silence on the hellish side of Greenwich, Connecticut.

In another upbeat article for
Time
magazine, Ehrenreich airily announced that society should concern itself with encouraging “good divorces.” The goal, she says, should be “to de-stigmatize divorce” and to “concentrate on improving the quality of divorces.” She suggests that couples be forced by the government to plan for divorce before marriage by “requiring prenuptial agreements specifying how the children will be cared for in the event of a split.”
¹¹⁶
Children of divorce “already face enough tricky interpersonal situations,” she said, without everyone acting as though divorce is a bad thing. Surely a society that smiles upon divorce will compensate for Mommy and Daddy not living together. While we're at it, if society would stop harping about drunk
driving, I think it would really perk up paraplegics who became that way by driving drunk.

This is mainstream liberal thought. Ehrenreich wrote these inanities not on the Daily Kos blog but in
Time
magazine. She has been regularly featured in the
New York Times, The New Republic,
and
The Atlantic Monthly.
As Irving Kristol said, “Rot and decadence [are] no longer the consequence of liberalism but [are] the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism.”
¹¹⁷

Still, the Left's transformation of society from family-based to single-mother-based has been accomplished with astonishing speed. Author Maggie Gallagher, who, as an erstwhile single mother, speaks with some authority, says the problem is that people shrink from addressing the social disasters of their friends. People are mum about the horror of single motherhood—if they know a single mother. They refuse to condemn divorce—if they know a divorcee. They can't think of a single objection to gay adoption—if they know a gay couple that has adopted. Gallagher says this allows “upscale conservatives to hurl stigmas at unwed moms”—but not divorced single mothers—“without having to insult anyone they actually know.”
¹¹⁸

That would help explain how marriage, the central force in transmitting civilization, has unraveled with such alacrity. Starting only a few decades ago, liberals launched a three-front attack on marriage through the courts, the welfare system, and popular culture. With each incremental gain, their advances grew geometrically as people lost the ability to condemn what their family, friends, and neighbors were doing. By now, as G. K. Chesterton said, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has … all the exhilaration of a vice.”
¹¹⁹

Welfare bureaucrats paid single women money just for having children out of wedlock, liberal justices on the Supreme Court stripped away the legal benefits of marriage, and pop culture glamorized single motherhood far more than cigarette companies have ever dreamed of glamorizing smoking. While masquerading as socially conscious do-gooders speaking for society's victims, liberals created a world where there would be a constant supply of new victims in need of their
merciful aid. An illegitimate child might or might not be better off by having contact with his biological father. But social workers would definitely be better off with a lot more illegitimate children.

Time and again, organizations purporting to speak for the children urged the courts to abolish the legal protections of marriage. To quote Irving Kristol again, liberalism “aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers.” The problem with liberalism, he says, “is liberalism.”
¹²⁰

The idiocy of paying single women to have illegitimate children has been so thoroughly explored, especially by Charles Murray in his groundbreaking book
Losing Ground,
that even President Clinton was compelled to sign the welfare reform bill that Newt Gingrich's Republican Congress sent him in 1996. No liberals resigned in protest over Clinton's getting oral sex from a White House intern, but Peter Edel-man and other liberals resigned from the Department of Health and Human Services to protest Clinton's signing of the welfare reform bill. Liberals all swear to believe in evolution, but their own development since the 1930s is an example of devolution: Frances Perkins, FDR's secretary of labor, strenuously opposed granting welfare benefits to unwed mothers on the grounds that it would encourage women to have children out of wedlock. She had worked in a home for unwed mothers, and had seen up close the damage wrought by illegitimacy.
¹²¹

To eliminate the pain of illegitimacy, liberals set out to destroy the stigma attached to illegitimacy, rather than to reduce its incidence. They turned a small problem into a national crisis by attacking laws that supported the idea that children should be born within marriage. Stigma or no stigma, the damage done to children born outside of marriage is the same.

From various Supreme Court decisions stripping marriage of its legal benefits, through Hillary Clinton's comparison of marriage and the family to “slavery and the Indian reservation system,”
¹²²
right up to the Left's freakish obsession with gay marriage today, liberals have never been able to grasp the point of marriage. The only interest society has in marriage is its ability to harness men's energy and direct it
to the upbringing of particular children, allowing children to grow up in a secure environment and not become rapists and serial killers. Because of the vital importance of marriage to creating half-decent human beings, civilized society has traditionally accorded a man no rights to his children—and the mother few or no claims upon the father—in the absence of marriage. Fathers of illegitimate children in colonial times would be pursued for minimal child support only to prevent the children from becoming wards of the state.

Ironically, the legal abolition of marriage was facilitated not by single mothers but by the archetypal villain in most liberal fairy tales: white men. Malingering unemployed white men, but white men nonetheless. Once again eclipsing women's accomplishments, men busting up the adoptions of their biological children may have done more damage to children in America than even single mothers. Unwed men began demanding rights to their biological offspring in the seventies, and this gave other men on the Supreme Court an excuse to destroy the legal protections of marriage.

From the beginning of history up until April 3, 1972, the law generally presumed that unwed fathers were not fit to raise their children. It was this statutory presumption that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in
Stanley v. Illinois
(1972). (The
Stanley
case was argued by attorney Patrick T. Murphy, who not only persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to ditch the legal benefits of marriage in
Stanley,
but years later would help persuade a state agency to return a three-year-old to his abusive mother, who later hanged the boy. Calling him a “Defender of Chicago's Children,” the
New York Times
hailed Murphy for believing that children should stay with their biological parents whenever possible
¹²³
— apparently, even violent, unwed, and unfit biological parents.)

Despite there being nothing in the Constitution about fathers' rights to children sired out of wedlock, the Supreme Court in
Stanley
found that it had the authority to nullify Illinois's statutory presumption that unwed fathers were unfit parents pursuant to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Peter Stanley had sought legal guardianship of his three biological children after their mother died and Illinois initiated a hearing to find legal guardians for them. Such a
proceeding, obviously, would have been unnecessary had Stanley been married to their mother. But in eighteen years with her, Stanley had never sought a legal relationship either with her or their children together. After the mother died, he turned the children over to another couple, who also had no legally enforceable obligations to the children. Though Stanley apparently had no interest in obtaining actual custodianship of the children, he was particularly concerned, as Justice Warren Burger said in his dissent, “with the loss of the welfare payments he would suffer as a result of the designation of others as guardians of the children.”

The U.S. Supreme Court found that the Illinois law on wed fathers violated “substantive due process” by requiring unwed fathers to establish their fitness as parents in legal proceedings, while married fathers had to make no such proof. The “substantive due process” construct allows the Court to jettison the considered judgment of elected state representatives as well as thousands of years of human history in order to enshrine the crackpot ideas of liberals as the law of the land. The Court discovered it had this power sometime in the 1960s. For the first two centuries of the nation's history, we had small governing units across the nation called “states.” These “states” would pass laws to govern people within their boundaries. The rulers of these governing units were elected by the people in a briefly popular system of government known as “democracy.”

A few years after
Stanley,
the Supreme Court was required to issue opinions further explaining an unwed father's rights. In
Quilloin v. Wal-cott
(1978) and
Caban v. Mohammed
(1979), the Court held that the Constitution required courts to examine the level of interest the sperm donor had shown in his child before allowing him to disrupt an adoption, including long hearings into “the best interests of the child”— hearings that anyone could see were unquestionably not in the best interests of the child.

It was only a matter of time before the new rights the Court had accorded unwed fathers would involve an adulterer claiming rights against the cuckolded husband. In
Michael H. v. Gerald D.
(1989), the
Court acknowledged the concept of “marriage”—eighteen years too late—and denied the male mistress rights to the child he conceived with a married woman. But the opinion rejecting the adulterer's claims to his biological child was a shockingly narrow 5–4 decision. All five justices who ruled against the adulterer were appointed by Republican presidents. One more vote for the dissent and courts would be forcing innocent husbands to leave their homes every other weekend so that the men who cuckolded them could have visitation time with the kids.

Justice William Brennan's blistering dissent was the perfect distillation of liberal thinking: The wisdom of all previous ages—circa 4500 B.C. to 1989—amounted to mere “prejudices and superstitions.” The traditional idea of a “family” as comprising a husband, a wife, and their children, Brennan said, would turn the Constitution into “a stagnant, archaic, hidebound document steeped in the prejudices and superstitions of a time long past.” Brennan claimed to be arguing for “tolerance” of those with “idiosyncrasies”—that is, people who enjoy pursuing adulterous liaisons. He pretentiously cited the “freedom not to conform.” But as Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in the majority opinion, one way or another, somebody loses rights. Rights are a zero-sum game. If the Court were to grant the male mistress his “freedom not to conform,” it would rather severely constrict the husband's “freedom to conform.” Brennan's dissent is like one of those snowy globes filled with floating flakes of liberal fantasies in an imaginary landscape. It's a perfect encapsulation of the sweet little dreams … of those who are barking mad.

Although Brennan claimed to be interpreting a new, hip Constitution, it was a Constitution that existed only in his head. In every one of these cases, the Supreme Court was being asked to overrule lower courts that had upheld state laws reflecting the traditional view of marriage. The justices who argued against overruling long-standing laws warned of what would be lost. In
Caban,
for example, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote—in dissent, “All of these children have an interest in acquiring the status of legitimacy; a great many of them have an interest in being adopted by parents who can give them opportunities
that would otherwise be denied; for some, the basic necessities of life are at stake.” He was right. And no one, not even Justice Stevens, can remember his argument today.