Tuesday, November 9, 2010
"The Most Depressing Statistic in America"
Joe Carter writes, at First Things:
Forget the unemployment rate or level of GNP, if you want one statistic that reflects the level of decline in our country you have to look no further than the percentage of out-of-wedlock births:
He quotes this report:
The black community’s 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans> were born to unwed mothers in 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate for the overall U.S. population was 41 percent.
Is there anything that is not horribly depressing about these figures? Is there anything to be done -- anything that law can do -- within moral and prudential limits to change the facts they reflect?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/11/the-most-depressing-statistic-in-america.html
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While law/public policy can’t, or shouldn’t, force folks to get married, it can address some structural factors that have some, though certainly not all, influence on such trends.
For example, rates of male employment and incarceration do have some impact on the rate at which mothers marry the fathers of their children. For African Americans in particular, public policy over the last few decades has been deeply flawed in both areas—malign neglect on the employment front and outright racial backlash on the incarceration front (white and black folks commit drug crimes at the same rate, one of our few areas of racial equality, but black males are notoriously the overwhelming target of harsh drug war policies).
So policies long advocated by the leadership of the American Catholic Church in both areas (see Economic Justice for All and the often overlooked but deeply thoughtful Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration) would likely have some impact, though I’ll admit it would be limited and likely just mitigate trends rather than dramatically reverse them.