Life - The revenge of the fatherless
In the last 100 years, there has been many focused efforts to degrade the role and importance of fathers in child rearing. Karl Marx speaks of the dissolution of family in the communist manifesto, claiming it is just an extension of the class war.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital

and when the 1995 Moynihan Report came out, issuing this solemn warning:

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos.

feminists and liberals decried it as 'patriarchal' and 'blaming the victim'. Even the American Psychological Association got into the act in 1999, releasing a paper called deconstructing the essential father with the authors stated purpose being

Our goal is to generate public policy...that supports the legitimacy of diverse family structures, rather than policy that supports two-parent, heterosexual, married family.

Yet study after study consistently shows the vital role that fathers play.

For instance, The National fatherhood initiative has compiled related resource in a book called Fatherhood facts which lists some of many problems with fatherless and single parent households, including significant increases in crime, drug abuse and child abuse. Father Mag reports some very scary statistics

# 5 times more likely to commit suicide
# 32 times more likely to run away
# 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
# 14 times more likely to commit rape
# 9 times more likely to drop out of high school
# 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances
# 9 times more likely to end up in a state-operated institution
# 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

. other studies have also added significant findings such as an increase in sexual promiscuity and teen pregnancy and the lack of fathers and the correlation between broken relationships with fathers and homosexuality (and an recent related study linking homosexuality with an increased incidence in crime). It also seems that many famous militant atheists have a lacked a father or had a detached father.

So how did we get to this? Probably the biggest factor was the sexual revolution of the sixties. With the increase in divorce and extra-marital sex, the proportion of fatherless households has increased roughly 400% (Even with contraception, sex education and abortion). Child abuse is up around 1400%. Thanks to people like Herbert Marcuse, who took Communism and infused Freudian psychology creating the sexual revolution, life has taken a definite downward spiral. Feminists, such as Betty Friedan also played their part. Clearly, Karl Marx's words at the start of this post were taken to heart by many leftists and sympathisers and today we are reaping the results of those ideas.

So my question is this...why do we continue to follow such obviously bad ideas when scientific and sociological research clearly indicates it is harmful?
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, June 14, 2005