Tag Archives: Father

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Why social conservatives should be fiscal conservatives

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from the Maritime Sentry! Thanks for the link!

We socially-conservative men need lots of things in order to have a successful family, and those things are all supported by free market capitalism.

Here is what I would need to marry and to run a family:

  • a job
  • the ability to to keep almost all of what I earn
  • the ability to spend what I earn on whatever I want
  • complete freedom from government influence across the board
  • the ability to find Christian services and products in the marketplace
  • the ability to find a new job if I get terminated for being a public Christian at work

The best way to achieve my social conservative goals is by voting for the economic system that will allow me to get the money and liberty to pursue the social goals.

Here are some things that raise the price of consumer goods and reduce my opportunities to find employment: (add yours in the comments)

  • workers unions
  • tariffs
  • corporate taxes
  • regulations
  • environmentalists
  • trial lawyers

And here are some others that have other nasty effects:

  • public schools: they substitute PC leftist indoctrination for a real education
  • teacher’s unions: they deny me school choice, protect unqualified teachers and indoctrinate my children with lefty crap
  • welfare programs: they waste tax money and destroy the need for real men and diminish the role of husbands and fathers
  • gun control: they disarm the law-abiding sector of the society in order to protect criminals
  • feminists: they reduce the pool of marriage-minded women by indoctrinating women to oppose chastity, family, men, God and children… and they favor no-fault divorce
  • socialists: they want government to control how I can spend my money on things like health care – they don’t want me to buy health care myself, they want me to pay for everyone else’s health care and then get in line
  • secularists: they are annoyed by the thought that I might spend my money in ways that increases the influence of Christianity and they will try to stop me from doing so
  • naturalists: they waste money speculating about ways to explain the effects of intelligence in nature without implicating an intelligence

Many of these aggravating factors have gotten worse because of the recession. We know why we are in a recession right now: because the Democrats forced banks to make loans to people who could not afford them. Obama himself worked for ACORN to sue banks like Citibank.

Consider this article from the American Thinker to see how Obama has affected the businesses where people work to earn the money they need to fuel their marriage and parenting activities.

Excerpt: (H/T 1RedThread)

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars.  This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service.  There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.
Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.
…This is beyond imagination!  My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN.  We did NOTHING wrong.This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy.  This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families?  This is a total economic disaster.

Obama has destroyed capitalism and the rule of law in this country. What happens to a man who has his means of earning a living, which is the fuel of his marriage and parenting engine, removed? Obama took trillions from the private sector to spend on his own special interest groups, like ACORN and auto worker’s unions.

Wrecking the economy is good for Democrats because their goal is to replace responsible men with the federal government. Single women, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, prefer the guarantee of security from government handouts over the responsibility of having to choose and relate to a moral, responsible husband and father.

Here is the article from the Wall Street Journal:

And the excerpt:

For example, for black males ages 20 to 24, the unemployment rate is close to 50 percent; in the black community overall, men have absorbed 100 percent of the job losses 463,000 jobs since the recession started in November 2007.

And even if the economy grows by the forecasted 1.3 percent, it’s not enough to create job growth, says Mr. Sum, who doesn’t anticipate any net job growth until 2011.

“From a fatherhood perspective, it’s going to have an enormous impact on an already fragile community,” says Roland Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a nonprofit group aimed at “increasing the proportion of children growing up with an involved, responsible and committed father.”

“So much of the traditional view of the father revolves around his ability to provide,” says Mr. Warren, who writes a column for The Washington Times.

…Meanwhile, black women have experienced a small net job gain during this recession, mainly due to the fact that they are overwhelmingly employed in health care and education, two sectors that haven’t experienced huge layoffs since November 2007, Mr. Sum says.

The article tries to make a case that men can have an influence in the family without earning money. In the vast majority of cases that is just not going to work. Men need to have authority in the family to have a positive impact, and that authority that is guaranteed by their role as primary provider.

Let me be clear. Welfare programs that reward people for choosing to have children from the wrong sorts of men come at the expense of good men. Good men pay the taxes for the welfare, and good men are passed over because the government is a substitute – a safety net – which removes the need for women to be choosy about men. When you have compassion on people for choosing bad men, you are encouraging them to continue to do so.

Before you vote, think about whether government welfare programs are an adequate substitute for a husband and father. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. I know an awful lot of single-mothers who voted Democrat in the last election and had no idea that they had just voted to destroy the male roles of husband and father. Ideas have consequences.

Further study

Recently, I blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Commentary

The war on parents in Canada, Germany and New Zealand

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Everyone is complaining about men not wanting to be responsible and get married these days, but no one is paying attention to the incentives that cause men to stay clear of a relationship that is completely regulated by the state. Men don’t want to be coerced to do things.

The problem with the political left is that they never understand what incentives they are creating when they start controlling private interactions between individuals. Take a look at the stories below and ask yourself: is this going to make men and women want to marry and have children?

In Canada:

A Quebec youngster has used the courts to avoid parental discipline in a “landmark” case. The 12-year-old girl, who is too young to be named, went to court to force her father to overturn his decision not to allow her to go on a school trip. Her father had decided to ground her after he found out she had posted photos of herself on a dating website against his wishes.

The sixth grader then took her father to court, arguing that his punishments were too severe.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled today that denying the girl permission to go on the school trip was an excessive punishment. The girl’s lawyer, Lucie Fortin, said, “She’s becoming a big girl” and described the school trip as “a unique event in her life”, the Globe and Mail reported.

In Germany:

A homeschooling family in Southern Germany spent six hours in a grueling German Family Court session this week with the hopes of regaining custody of their six homeschooled children, who have been held in state custody since January. After the long and confusing session, the Gorbers regained custody of their 3-year-old son. The judge, meanwhile, retained custody of five other Gorber children now being kept in foster care and youth homes pending a court-ordered psychological evaluation of the parents. The court did allow increased visitation for some of the children up from one hour every two weeks that had been permitted since the children were seized in a surprise raid by the youth welfare office (“Jugendamt”) and police.

In New Zealand:

Green MP Sue Bradford’s controversial child discipline bill was tonight passed by Parliament, with only seven MPs voting against it.

The bill removes from the Crimes Act the statutory defence of “reasonable force” to correct a child, meaning there will be no justification for the use of force for that purpose.

But it doesn’t even work because it targets law-abiding people only! (Just like gun control!)

It’s very much like the Democrat party’s complaints about outsourcing. The left caused outsourcing with their interventionist war on “the rich” and “greedy corporations”. We need to move away from noble-sounding intentions fueled by the need to feel superior, and talk about actual incentives and actual effects of policies.

Sex education and taxes

Laura posted on the state interfering with parents’ right to educate their own children about sex:  (CP link)

No, we generally are not in favor of sex ed at school.  If “comprehensive” sex education included what it did when I took it in the early 80s – basic human anatomy, puberty, tab A fits into slot B, birth control methods include the following… even in the conservative evangelical circles I run in, few would object.  That’s all stuff we tell kids at home after we opt them out of sex ed at school- along with the main message of “Don’t do this; it’s not time in your life yet for this.”   What we object to is the attitude that teen sex is normal and inevitable and we should quit squawking about it.  We object to schools teaching bizarre sex practices like fisting.  We object to the theory that teenagers are mindless bags of hormones who can’t be expected to control themselves.

…Our teens are political pawns for the left.  They’re helpless victims of our [= parents’] prudery, children that the government needs to provide for at every turn with health insurance and free college tuition (but don’t deserve an adequate secondary education except when it’s time to raise taxes),  socially and technologically savvy enough to make their own entertainment and political choices free from our censorship,  mature and wise enough to choose abortion (but not give birth), and 18 year old babies who need to be protected from sneaky military recruiters and beer.   The rallying cry may be “it’s for the children!” but the only really consistent position I see in the left is that parents do not know best; government does.

Laura also posted on how socialism takes money away from the family:

When we charge people more to earn money via income taxes, regulations, and similar means, history has proved time and again that people earn less money.  Whether that’s by choice, where people like me purposely throttle back our income in order to pay fewer taxes, or by government fiat, where government takes more money from businesses, the bottom line is that productivity goes down and everybody, including the government, gets less money out of the system.

By the way, I notice that Laura has a new post up at Hot Air’s Green Room, (CP link), on how families can send the socialists a message by cutting off their supply of money, legally. She runs a business, so she knows what she is talking about.

Further study

Recently, I blogged about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Commentary

Exploding the myth of “Deadbeat Dads”

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Dr. Stephen Baskerville e-mailed met to let me know about an important article in the Washington Times about the new show on the anti-male “Lifetime” network. If you want to understand why men don’t want to be husbands and fathers any more, read this entire piece.

Excerpt:

More than 90 percent of fathers with joint custody paid the support due, according to a Census Bureau report (Series P-23, No. 173). So deadbeats are in the minority. Also, most so-called deadbeat dads actually are dead broke. Two-thirds of men who fail to make child-support payments earn poverty-level wages, according to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Most of the others are unemployed.

Bruce Walker, executive coordinator at the District Attorneys Council in Oklahoma City, who ran the state’s child-support enforcement program for three years and jailed hundreds of fathers for nonpayment, told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2002: “These men are seldom the mythical monsters described by politicians.”

“Many times I prosecuted impoverished men,” he told the Star-Ledger. “I prosecuted one deadbeat dad who had been hospitalized for malnutrition and another who lived in the bed of a pickup truck.”

On his blog, Dr. Baskerville links to some responses to the article, including his own:

Two powerful letters in response were published Wednesday:
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/20/the-demonization-of-dads/
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/20/love-and-divorce/

My own letter was published Thursday (full letter below):
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/21/the-agony-of-child-support/

All three are worth reading because they are full of statistics that will shock you. Here is the best bit from the third:

Ostensibly created to recover welfare costs, child support enforcement on the federal level has failed and now costs taxpayers more than $3 billion annually. More seriously, it pays mothers to divorce or forgo marriage, thus creating the very problem it is supposed to alleviate.

Mothers are not the only ones who profit from fatherless children. State governments generate revenue from child support at federal taxpayers’ expense. By paying states according to the amount of child support they collect, federal programs give states an interest in more fatherless children. The more broken homes there are, the more revenue for the state.

Don’t forget to read the facts on the lack of male teachers in the schools, which undermines men’s ability to achieve and to be responsible. And when you’re done with that, you can read about the problem of no-fault divorce and the family court system. (A shorter version is linked here)

For those of you who are pro-life or pro-traditional marriage, I want to advise you that this issue is also a very important, although under-reported, issue for social conservatives. Fathers matter, and the state has policies in place that are discouraging men from their traditional role in the family. In the case of a divorce, fathers almost never get custody, and sometimes they do not see their children for years.

Before, I wrote about the fact that 40% of new births are to unwed mothers. Generous benefits provided by the government ensure that fathers are dispensable. Over 20 million children in the United States are raised without a father in the home. And I’m sure you know the social costs to young men and women: violence, anxiety, promiscuity, unwed motherwood, teen pregnancy, abortion, suicides, depression, drug addiction, etc.

And don’t even get me started on the false allegations of rape, harassment, etc., such as the recent Duke University lacrosse scandal. Women who make these false allegations are almost never punished! Over two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women for “irreconcilable differences”. You have to understand that thoughtful men notice these things, and they will make decisions accordingly.

Surprise! Men don’t like being treated poorly by the state. Treat us poorly enough and we’ll find other things to do with our lives than get marriage and raise children. To see what that might look like, take a look at this article on birth rates in countries that are further along the marxist-feminist agenda than the United States.

More in my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.