Ann Coulter, in her latest column:
Examining nearly a century of U.S. census reports, [sociologist Erol] Ricketts found that between 1890 and 1950, blacks had higher marriage rates than whites. Until 1970, black women were more likely to get married than white women – and that was despite the high mortality rates among black men, leaving fewer available for marriage. In three of four decennial years between 1890 and 1920, black men out-married white men…
Whatever else may cause illegitimacy and its associated problems, it isn’t poverty, discrimination, lack of education, unemployment or slavery. Black Americans had all those handicaps – and yet they still had strong families and low crime rates from 1890 until the 1960s.
But in the ’60s, liberals decided it would be a great idea to start subsidizing illegitimacy.
Everyone knew – even FDR’s secretary of labor, Francis Perkins, knew – that granting widows’ benefits to unmarried women with illegitimate children would have disastrous consequences. An early 20th-century social welfare advocate, Homer Folks, warned back in 1914 that to grant pensions for “desertion or illegitimacy would, undoubtedly, have the effect of a premium upon these crimes against society.”
But under President Lyndon Johnson, that’s exactly what the government did. The “suitable home” requirements for welfare – such as having a husband – were jettisoned by liberal know-it-alls in the federal Bureau of Public Assistance. As a result, illegitimacy went through the roof, particularly among blacks, our most vulnerable fellow citizens.
In 1970, for the first time, the marriage rate for black women fell below 70 percent. But even then, a majority of black children were still living with both parents. By 2010, only 30.1 percent of blacks above the age of 15 were married, compared to 52.7 percent of whites.
Liberals keep using the bad consequences of their policies as an argument for more of the same policies. Government subsidies to unwed mothers increase the illegitimacy rate, which in turn leads to poverty, criminal behavior and more illegitimacy. So Democrats reverse cause and effect to claim it’s the poverty that causes illegitimacy and then demand more payments to unwed mothers.
