UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Free Canuckistan! Thanks for the linky, Binky!

The percentage of out-of-wedlock births is now 40% of all births. Does this have an effect on the size of government? FOX News has a story on the breakdown of the nuclear family. (H/T Institute for Marriage and Public Policy)

Excerpt:

…births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend that started years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.

For a variety of reasons, it’s become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University’s S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher.

…And more women – especially those in their 30s and 40s – are choosing to have children despite their single status.

For some reason, and I know what that reason is, society has decided that men are unnecessary to the task of raising children. A man’s job is just to supply sperm and money. And that money is taxed away from men by the government and redistributed, via expensive social programs, to unwed mothers. And this is how the state takes over the traditional role of men as protector and provider.

The House Ways and Means Committee knows about the effect of raising children without fathers.

US House Testimony on Child support and Fatherhood proposals (Hearing 107-38).  June 28, 2001, online House version; http://waysandmeans.house.gov/legacy.asp?file=legacy/humres/107cong/6-28-01/record/chillegalfound.htm) — Father absence, a byproduct of divorce, illegitimacy, and the erosion of the traditional family, is responsible for; filling our prisons, causing psychological problems, suicide, psychosis, gang activity, rape, physical and sexual child abuse, violence against women, general violence, alcohol and drug abuse, poverty, lower academic achievement, school drop-outs, relationship instability, gender identity confusion, runaways, homelessness, cigarette smoking, and any number of corrosive social disorders.

So then why does the government continue to subsidize out-of-wedlock birth? When you subsidize something, you get more of it. When you tax something, you get less of it. Is this so hard for social progressives to understand? Too much compassion, without standards, costs society in the long run, (see Jewish scholar Dennis Prager’s piece here).

More statistics on the cost of fatherlessness here at Fathers for Life..