We had an excellent discussion with Lamar Collins yesterday on Meet The New Press concerning the poster that Doug spotted in our local Post Office. We are concerned that our tax dollars and liberal government policies are, once again, unhooking generational bonds. The right and responsibility of Parents are to look after and raise their children; this RESPECT Teen Clinic is yet another step in Government and related NGOs inserting themselves inbetween and subverting the intergenerational bonds between family members (summary - good intentions but Social Security has bent, if not broken, the traditional bonds between the "Senior" generation and the "Middle" generation; Welfare helped to break the bonds of marriage and the responsibilities of the Husband, and now this "confidential" governmental service breaks the bonds between Parents and Children).
When it comes to the family unit, I'm afraid, Liberal policies of having Government become iparents, even for the parents, are not having the desired effect. The RESPECT Clinic assures confidentiality for the teens to the point of providing abortifacents without the knowledge and assent of the parents. I can think of few more evil things than governmental agents providing such services and then "dumping" the results back with the parents, leaving them to deal with the consequences (physical, mental, and spiritual) wreaked upon the youngsters.
Most of you have heard of the 17 teens from Gloucester, MA and the pregnancy spike. A H/T to NRO for quoting Kathleen Parker (who gets it right!) and echos what Lamar ("Coach!") talked about on the show (emphasis mine):
Where Are the Gloucester Dads? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
For the Save the Males file, from Kathleen Parker:
Where’s Dad? Not the “fathers” of these unfortunate pre-borns, but the fathers of these pregnant girls. Where, in other words, is the shotgun?
Back in the day when birth control and abortion weren’t readily available to high-school kids, fathers were pretty good deterrents to pregnancy. Boys knew they’d have kneecap problems if they got daddy’s little girl pregnant. If they were lucky, they’d be married by the morning after.
Girls, meanwhile, were less likely to risk pregnancy because alternatives to motherhood were few, adoption being the most likely.
It wasn’t a foolproof system, clearly, but the specter of lifelong consequences, combined with societal and parental disapproval, helped keep the illegitimate birthrate down.
Today, using the term “illegitimate” is more likely to spark disapproval than the activities contributing to the plague of unwed pregnancies. For sure there are far fewer fathers around to give young males The Eye. It is a fair guess, though not possible to confirm at this point, that at least some of Gloucester’s pregnant daughters are from fatherless homes.
That guess is founded on sound social science indicating a strong correlation between father absence and a high risk for early sex and unwed pregnancy. Not only do fathers provide the masculine affection so many girls seek elsewhere, but they teach their daughters how to handle male sexual aggression, as well as to understand their own role in stimulating that aggression.
Thus far, there’s been little mention of the family dynamic that often foretells the tragedy of children having children. Instead, most of the debate has centered on whether these girls and boys had enough access to sex education and contraceptives.
Other conversations have circled around the influence of movies, such as Juno, that glamorize teen pregnancy. In the movie, 16-year-old Juno is adorably pregnant and far wiser than the film’s adults.
Whatever happened in Gloucester, we know this much. Today’s girls and boys daily marinate in a culture that offers little instruction in responsibility and self-control — or the importance of marriage as antecedent to procreation — but celebrates single motherhood and encourages sex without strings.
The surprise isn’t that 17 girls are pregnant at one high school. The surprise is that there aren’t more.
I blame Liberal policies and culture for not just downplaying but outright denigrating Dads to the point where they are absent. I blame Liberals, too, for the the loss of society to rightly judge actions to be detrimental to society's members as shameful.
Shame - a word that should be brought back in its traditional sense. Self-control is a phrase I don't hear much of lately either.
Comments
Posted by: Dave Martin | July 1, 2008 6:45 AM
Posted by: Lori Ingham | July 1, 2008 1:44 PM