The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [59]
It is a measure of how clouded our public discourse has become that illegitimacy, having largely disappeared from the lexicon, would make a comeback in an era when nearly one in three children was born to an unwed mother. But what a powerful comeback. The U.S. Senate, following the election of large numbers of conservative Republicans in 1994, seriously considered applying an “illegitimacy ratio” to determine how much money states were eligible to receive in federal block grants. States with high rates of unwed motherhood or abortion would have lost funds. Although the proposal lacked sufficient support from Democrats to succeed, a couple of years later a bonus system did pass Congress. States with the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rates were eligible for $20 million each in 1998. Even liberals joined in the panic mongering about illegitimacy. “I don’t think anyone in public life today ought to condone children born out of wedlock ... even if the family is financially able,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala told reporters. 19
Newspaper and magazine columnists called illegitimacy “the smoking gun in a sickening array of pathologies—crime, drug abuse, mental and physical illness, welfare dependency” (Joe Klein in Newsweek) and “an unprecedented national catastrophe” (David Broder in the Washington Post). Richard Cohen, also of the Post, asserted that “before we can have crime control, we need to have birth control” and deemed illegitimacy “a national security issue.”20
A national security issue? Images come to mind of children of single moms selling state secrets to Saddam Hussein. Again, when pondering the effects of single motherhood it is important to compare apples to apples. Studies that compare single-parent households and two-parent households with similar levels of income, education, and family harmony find few differences in how the children turn out. The great majority of children of single mothers don’t become criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill, or security threats. A study that looked at 23,000 adult men found that those raised by single mothers had income and education levels roughly equal to those raised by two parents. Research shows that as a group, children of single moms tend to fare better emotionally and socially than do offspring from high-conflict marriages or from those in which the father is emotionally absent or abusive.21
Scare campaigns can become self-fulfilling, producing precisely the negative outcomes that the doomsayers warn about. Exaggerations about the effects of unwed motherhood on children stigmatize those children and provoke teachers and police, among others, to treat them with suspicion. Why do so many children from single-parent families end up behind bars? Partly, studies find, because they are more likely to be arrested than are children from two-parent households who commit similar offenses. Why do children from single-parent families do less well in school? One factor came out in experiments where teachers were shown videotapes and told that particular children came from one-parent families and others from two-parent families. The teachers tended to rate the “illegitimate” children less favorably.22
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
Fear mongering about mothers directs attention away from fully half of America’s parent population—the fathers. Warnings parallel to those about mothers are nowhere to be found. Rarely do politicians and journalists warn about unwed dads, and seldom does the National Honor Society refuse admission to them. On the contrary, wifeless fathers are practically revered. A headline in USA Today in 1997 proclaimed, “Unwed