The State Has Been Destroying Marriage for Decades

In the discussion of marriage and the state, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the state has been busy destroying millions of marriages, and seeing to it that millions more never occur, for decades. One of the principal effects of the welfare state has been to make fathers optional in the minds of millions of lower-income women. Who needs them when a welfare check — and free housing, food, daycare, medical care, social workers, etc., etc. — will do just fine?

Add to that the success of feminist anti-male and anti-marriage propaganda (“a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” has been a popular feminist slogan for more than 30 years) and you get a 75 percent illegitimacy rate in cities like Baltimore, with over half of all black children born out of wedlock nationwide. The white population is catching up — it’s over 20 percent according to Charles Murray. Murray pointed all of this out in his 1984 book, Losing Ground, twenty years after it was accurately forecast by former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

As my friend Walter Williams has often said, even slavery was not as destructive of the black family as the welfare state has been.

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12:48 pm on July 8, 2003