QUINNSCOMMENTARY;904988 wrote: Somewhere on these pages I talked about personal responsibility and that the decisions one makes are what determines his or her lot in life. I was looking for an example that could have not only personal implications, but an impact on society as well. It didn’t take long, try this, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the US is 38%, 28% of white children are born to a single mother, 50% among Hispanics and 71% for blacks. :-5
Could this contribute to poverty levels, to the number of uninsured, to welfare costs and eventually to crime and who knows what else? But wait, I suspect that all this is the fault of the educational system, hedge fund managers or at least the wealthy in American who obviously have bought up all the birth control devices. If I wanted to sound like a right wing evangelist, I might even suggest some new moral standard has something to do with it.

Holy Crap! Did this thread ever get caught with a side shear wind?!? :yh_sweat
Nowhere in this post do I see anything negative about the parent that stuck with the kid. Single-parenting involves one sticking around and one leaving. The one sticking around can't possibly be held more responsible for the family's level of poverty than the one that left. How anyone can read that different is beyond me.
Also, when talking about single-parent families and poverty, ethnicity is completely irrelevant. A poor hispanic mother is no better or worse off than a poor black father with identical incomes. They have identical incomes!
Are single-parent families contributing to poverty levels? Well, raising a kid and trying to work makes it damned hard to make enough for life and have anything left over for saving up to move up, that's for sure. In such situations, I lay the lion's share of the responsibility at the feet of the "parent" who left. Unfortunately, sometimes a mother chooses not to tell the father, or refuses assistance from him. Sometimes such a mom is a teenager who may or may not finish school while caring for the child. Such people are selfish and deserve what they get, and their children are victims of abuse, imo.
Is the education system et al responsible for the situation? Only insofar that we as a society have discounted the importance of the church as a counterbalance to government and capitalism, and haven't found a suitable replacement for teaching morality (which was the role of the church).