The Moral of the Story

...Polygamy creates a severe cultural disadvantage because it produces a large population of unmarried men...

...These men have little stake in society and form a restless and destructive "bachelor herd" that eventually preys upon the society itself...

...Under Bryant's tutelage, the state has also established Operation Fatherhood, a companion program for unmarried fathers...

...There are basically only two kinds of families, polygamous and monogamous...

...Often pregnancy was simply a way of sealing a bond that already existed...

...Welfare has been the disrupter of family formation...

...But in West Africa, descent is traced only through the maternal line...

...e wag Tn~t irne~ Whitewater verdicts shake political landscape flicker felt heat waiting for jury fury gives probe legal credibility R Family issues closo at U.N...

...Roughly speaking, an unmarried mother is under a ban, a fatherless child is a bastard...

...New applicants are down, however, which indicates that behavior may be changing...

...However, there were cultural weaknesses...

...These three models for marriage-Christian monogamy, Moslem polygamy, and tribal polygamy-are still very much in contention in Africa today...

...This pattern continued well into the twentieth century...

...Each lives in a house of her own rather than sharing one with her husband...

...24 October i 9 9 6 • The American Spectator grows most of her own food in an individually owned garden...

...It is the social foundation of humankind...

...The most common pattern was for a woman to have one or two children out of wedlock (usually to a "father unknown") and then settle into a permanent union with one man...

...Studies have shown that couples who live together before marriage are actually less committed to each other and more likely to divorce...

...Date Phone ( ) Feminism, Politics sa d The Rest Lady A strikin~, correction of the best columns of Suzanne Fields that helped focus attention on the "Hillary Factor...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the other hand, predicted there would be "a million children thrown into the streets...

...The principal goal of welfare reform, then, is not to turn the single-mother home into a viable economic unit...

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...Thus the creation of a single-parent culture with AFDC as its sole economic underpinning...

...Wages of fathers are also being garnisheed...

...As Charles Murray points out, the level of African-American illegitimacy is unlikely to rise much further simply because it has no place left to go...

...Much more important for our national future is whether or not the moral implications of welfare reform take hold...

...Children belong to their mothers and often take their names...

...A simple contrast can be seen in the history of the Suriname Maroons, a colony of runaway slaves who have lived independently in the rainforests of South America since the eighteenth century...

...But they didn't-and that's the important thing...

...Since children belong to their mothers, women can take them and return to their natal families any time they want...

...After the Civil War, in one Virginia County, 6o percent of the adult black women registered marriages in one year-1866-when concerns arose that these slave marriages would not be recognized as legal...

...In fact, anyone who deals with the culture of welfare quickly becomes appalled at the yawning gap in communication and cooperation that exists between underclass men and women...

...The tradition of female horticulture continues to be practiced in Africa today...

...Whereas an African American woman once had one or two illegitimacies and then married, she now has one or two illegitimacies and then goes on welfare...

...In Sweden, where 70 percent of GNP is now controlled by the gov 22 October r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator Reality Check...

...His task is to impregnate the female and then to disappear...

...But it also Christianized Africans and converted them to Western monogamy...

...As one unmarried father in New Jersey said during an Operation Fatherhood class discussion, "These women say they're making it on their own, but they're not...

...In fact, if you examine carefully the primary sources that Gutman uses to prove his thesis, you find it graphically illustrated...

...This is a cultural task-yet one in which our public policy has played a decisive, and disastrous, role...

...Slavery indeed tore apart families in individual instances and denied Africans their freedom...

...She might even use welfare to escape her family...

...Expecting happy marriages to spring out of the soil by abolishing welfare is like expecting a Western economy to spring up in Russia with the collapse of Communism...

...Still, the question remains: Will it work...

...Polygamy was outlawed very early by slaveowners-mainly as a moral offense-and monogamy was encouraged...

...Veblen called such men "the first leisure class...

...she The welfare state spawned itsmost virulent organism:the aggressive bureaucratwho actively intervenes indomestic affairs andencourages family break-up...

...What is most important is that Americans as a whole recognize that we are not going to come up with any "new kinds of families...

...All across Europe and Asia, men adopted farming and once again became providers for their families...

...In fact, it still will - instead of being carved up in Washington, however, that money will be distributed to the states in the form of block grants...

...More rarely, a woman might trap a man into marriage by deliberately becoming pregnant, or even feigning pregnancy...

...Gutman's most telling documents are the careful accounts of births and marriages kept on three major plantations in North Carolina and Louisiana over nearly a hundred years...

...WILLIAM TUCKER is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...

...Given the freedom not to have babies, women at times seemed content to have them without marrying men...

...The significant changes will be in white illegitimacy...

...There were, of course, major problems with family formation prior to the 196o's...

...Perhaps the best place to start is to realize that, historically and anthropologically, marriage among people of African descent simply has not been the same institution as among people of European and Oriental descent...

...As a result, American blacks have a history that is at least as much Western as it is African...

...Studies of American blacks through the 194o's show they were living in twoparent homes that were hardly distinguishable from other ethnic groups...

...A couple might sleep together or even live together until they "made a mistake" and got pregnant, at which point they would marry...

...What Americans should realize is that the nuclear family of father, mother, and children is not simply a Western institution...

...To date, most of this cultural destruction has been limited to black America and remained entangled in racial politics and cultural guilt...

...See "The African AIDS Epidemic," Scientific American, March 1996, for a clearly marked map...

...Box 96601, Washington, DC 20090 For lightning-fast delivery, call 1-800-363-9118 (Mention express code: UJHOSK) ernment, permanent unions are fast disappearing...

...Over the past several centuries, tribal practices have gradually been superseded by Christianity and Islam...

...Soon things become so complicated that family formation is virtually impossible...

...Norms are breaking down so fast that white unwed motherhood has already gone beyond the "tipping point" of ao percent that first alerted Moynihan to the black problem in 1965...

...What welfare did instead was to disrupt the process of family formation, particularly among blacks...

...Studies of the program have shown a decrease in welfare applicants and an increase in the number of women opting out through marriage...

...Families were sold apart, children torn from their mothers and fathers, women raped and forced to bear the children of their masters...

...she often raises children as a single parent...

...The assumption was that these groups were small, self-limiting, and not likely to grow...

...This idea was actually institutionalized after the 196o's by the widely adopted practice of "living together...

...Teenage pregnancy will abate because fathers will be there to protect their daughters from the amorous advances of young men, as well as offering them the emotional security to prevent them from throwing themselves at the first man who comes along...

...Most prominent was the custom-common in matrilineal cultures-of allowing a young girl to have one or two early illegitimacies before she married...

...In light of this history, the story of the people of African descent who came to America takes on a much different hue...

...Women generally provide at least half the sustenance for themselves and their children...

...They have been created by welfare, which is essentially state polygamy...

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...Given the facts of biology, it is always possible for an unmarried man and woman to conceive a child...

...The Times serves up the news from a refreshing, new perspective...

...Girls solemnly proclaimed themselves capable of raising babies without men...

...The single-parent family is born...

...At some point about 8,ooo years ago, however, the game began to run out...

...If the girl were too young, she would mysteriously disappear for awhile into a home for wayward girls and her baby would be put up for adoption...

...Hunting became unproductive and human bands settled into agricultural communities...

...Tired of reading the news the way the liberal media serve it up - diluted, slanted and homogenized...

...The heart and soul of America's welfare program, AFDC had been costing the federal government more than $25 billion annually...

...New Jersey has established similar reforms under the direction of Wayne Bryant, a black state assemblyman from Camden and former Democratic majority leader...

...West Africa-the home of most Africans who came to America-has long been known to anthropologists as the world's "matrilineal belt...

...Millions of "missing men," many of them last sighted at Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, will suddenly come home...

...Family traditions were lost forever...

...They're just living off the government...

...Boys complained their fathers had never been around to help them...

...There is a great deal of truth in this explanation, but it is not the whole truth...

...In tropical countries, however-Africa, parts of South America, and the South Seas-farming became women's work...

...The great irony is that when birth control and abortion came along in the 196o's, both were touted by liberal advocates as tools for strengthening marriage by avoiding these hasty and premature unions...

...Neither of these outcomes is terribly likely...

...That's why The Washington Times' ground-break ing Whitewater coverage, since 1992, has left the media establishment in the dust...

...At this point, AFDC would step in and help out...

...But it won't make a difference unless marriage and legitimacy reclaim their place as the cornerstone of civilized society...

...Yet even this is about to change...

...It is no exaggeration to say that among the American underclass there are very few surviving customs that lead people into stable marital unions...

...And yet in all human societies the father is regarded by tradition as indispensable.The woman has to be married before she is allowed legitimately to conceive...

...Yet at that very moment of sexual liberation, Americans discovered that, given enough freedom in such` matters, people might not marry at all...

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...As one New Jersey welfare worker confided to me: "What we really need around here is a dating service...

...We know this because surviving huntingand-gathering bands have all proved to be monogamous...

...The Earned Income Tax Credit program, which has become a vast, unpoliced subsidy to low-income people, is another...

...By William Tucker hen President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill into law in August, he instanta neously put an end to an entitlement that many on both sides of the political fence had long believed untouchable-the 6o-year entitlement known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...

...As a result, both are considered modernizing influences...

...Studies of working class neighborhoods have shown that, prior to 1970, as many as half the marriages took place under these circumstances...

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...The potential is there but there are many habits to be relearned...

...Each of these declarations was met by thunderous applause from the assembled teenagers...

...Illegitimacy rates are approaching 6o percent and "living together" in shifting and uncommitted relationships has almost replaced marriage altogether...

...The American Spectator . October r 9 9 6 21 to marry, either the father of the child or a hastily arranged substitute...

...Christianity preaches monogamy while Islam allows polygamy, but both emphasize that a man should be the principal support of his family...

...In Europe and Asia, nearly all cultures practice "dual descent," meaning that ancestry is traced through both the maternal and paternal lines...

...Abolishing welfare at least gives us the opportunity to start rebuilding the family again...

...Arriving hand in hand with the age of illegitimacy was the age of big government...

...This is why Aid to Families with Dependent Children has had such a devastating impact on black family formation...

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...Republicans proudly claimed the bill would end "the culture of dependency...

...Welfare mothers are required to work and not granted increases when they have more illegitimate children...

...The state will no longer substitute as breadwinner...

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...Men do heavy tasks such as felling trees, but women do the day-to-day labor of planting, hoeing, and harvesting the crops...

...What the policymakers who made these decisions did not understand was that there are vast cultural differences between African and European/Asian family formation...

...Census figures show that over the last thirty years, the number of children an unmarried woman bears in her lifetime has nearly tripled...

...Now a young woman could have one or two illegitimate children and then go on welfare...

...Bronislaw Malinowski, the century's most perceptive anthropologist, called this the "principle of legitimacy": As far as [a father's] biological task is concerned, he might well be treated as a drone...

...Using European norms, these policymakers assumed a model where people get married, have children, and then occasionally, through choice or calamity, become single parents...

...The black family, according to this interpretation, was fatally weakened by centuries of servitude...

...Thus, the paradoxical result-while almost 4o percent of the children born on these plantations were technically illegitimate, fully 8o percent ended up living in two-parent homes with both a mother and father present...

...The traditional explanation of the historical weakness of the American black family, which led to its virtual dissolution under the welfare system, has been the experience of slavery...

...What we can hope is that, given a more natural constellation of forces-and with a lot of cultural encouragement-underclass men and women will start forming families again...

...Worst of all, the welfare state has spawned its most virulent organism, the aggressive bureaucrat who actively intervenes in domestic situations and encourages family break-up...

...The Maroons practice a form of matrilineal polygamy that is identical with that practiced in Africa...

...Since 1987, AFDC rolls in Wisconsin have been reduced 33 percent, although many of these people have simply been transferred into other programs...

...The generally accepted explanation lies in the division of labor...

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...Without the Damoclean sword of the shotgun marriage, men seem much less willing to make marriage commitments...

...A paper that stops at nothing to get the story first, and get it right...

...A man will build a hut for each of his co-wives and provide land for them to farm, but his relation with his children remains somewhat distant...

...For the first 3 to 5 million years of human evolution, Homo sapiens and their ancestors lived in hunting-and-gathering bands...

...The children of these unions, knowing nothing different, continue and exaggerate the pattern...

...Illegitimacy appears in all cultures...

...Although few people discuss it openly, what welfare reform is really about is illegitimacy...

...The most important moral and legal rule concerning the physiological side of kinship is that no child should be brought into the world without a man-and one man at that-assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the community...

...The ultimate goal of welfare reform is to promote marriage and family formation...

...Now you can do something about liberal media bias...

...This is by no means only a European or Christian prejudice...

...Even today, liberals persist in talking about welfare as a program that "helps people who are down on their luck" get "back on their feet again...

...David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, recently reported being summoned to speak at an ordinary high school in Indiana where 30 percent of the graduating class was pregnant with illegitimate children...

...Bare-knuckled reporting, laser-sharp commentary - even the cartoons pack an extra punch...

...The American Spectator . October r 9 9 6 25...

...Men have very weak paternal claims...

...This is virtually impossible and hardly desirable as well...

...From the essay "Parent hood-The Basis of Social Structure," 1930.] After AFDC became available in the 195o's and 196o's, this pattern was disrupted -for perhaps the first time in human history...

...Biology replaces culture...

...This pattern in turn bred a species of men who have become irresponsible or indifferent to supporting women...

...If it wasn't for welfare, they might need us men...

...Even a cursory look at the anthropology of the situation reveals that marriage in Africa is an entirely different institution than marriage in most other parts of the world...

...This practical guide spells can hots- to multiply the impact of news and opinion you won't find e1-he 1 Make checks payable to: The Washington Times NWE Clip & Mail with payment to: P.O...

...THE 'dORAL OF TKO STORY The welfare reform bill marks the first time the federal government has given up a major entitlement...

...Going on welfare was generally not a respectable option...

...In the offing, crime will also be reduced because fathers will be at home disciplining their boys...

...People will start making long-term commitments and establishing a secure home before bringing children into the world...

...When he began counseling an auditorium full of students about the virtues of intact families he met a wall of animosity...

...and, in the most literal sense, she paddles her own canoe...

...Since she now had an independent means of support, her family lost control over her...

...Getting pregnant prior to 1960 almost always meant a couple quickly married...

...Originally conceived as a small stipend for widows and orphans, it was eventually extended to divorced women and ultimately women who had never married...

...SSI Disability Benefits, now growing faster than AFDC ever did, is a prime candidate...

...Most anthropologists know this but are reluctant to say it out loud for fear of being the bearers of uncomfortable truths...

...As Herbert Gutman documented in his monumental study, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1920, the vast majority of African-Americans established marriages and were raising children in two-parent homes during slavery...

...If nothing else, Blankenhorn's experience shows how, once the culture of illegitimacy gains a foothold, it is difficult to control...

...Both men and women were productive and monogamy and dual descent were predominant...

...Ediodala That Shaped the Debate A talettods treasure of the 2, defining moment Tinier editorials char marked the past (m, years...

...The hope is that the abolition of AFDC will lead people to perceive marriage as the solution to the single-parent family...

...A man can take several wives, mainly because he does not have to do much to support them...

...They drift from woman to woman, having a baby here and a baby there...

...Well, there's one newspaper that's different...

...Strangely, it is almost always associated with polygamy...

...The extreme reactions from both sides showed just how emotionally charged the issue had become...

...This support makes marriage unimportant...

...As Gutman points out, the records show that 8o percent of slave children were being raised in two-parent homes...

...AFDC was shaped around middle-class norms...

...Forgotten in the great abortion debate was the fact that many couples were forced into marriages by early pregnancies...

...As far back as the 1920's, Bertrand Russell argued for "trial marriages" on the grounds that they would help people make better choices...

...Even so, the measure was the first significant welfare reform since the program began in 1936...

...Parents would hand down their wisdom while providing a protective environment for their children...

...In fact, the two seem inextricable...

...The hordes of unattached males who inhabit the streets of American ghettos are in fact this same bachelor herd...

...Left to themselves, African-American immigrants in North America probably would have created a similar society...

...States that have already waded into the effort at welfare reform have quickly reached this conclusion...

...As anthropologist Sally Price wrote in Co-Wives and Calabashes: "Maroon women are strikingly independent...

...Yes...

...Neither did the practice of living together pan out...

...By adopting Christianity, African-Americans became culturally indistinguishable from everyone else...

...Yet traditionally, the solution has been for the woman...

...But they also show something else: These children were not always born to the same mother and father...

...How did this come about...

...Yet even if we beat back the welfare state, we are still left with the thorny question of what to do in a situation where marriage and family formation have virtually vanished as social institutions...

...Such marriages are extremely weak and vulnerable...

...it is the attitude found amongst most barbarous and savage peoples as well...

...Most of the money saved by the bill comes from cutting off benefits to illegal aliens, and it is more than likely that millions of current welfare mothers will simply find another state or federal program to subsidize them...

...In many tribal cultures, men are preoccupied with ceremony and/or warfare, while women practicing "horticulture" (gardening) are the sole source of food...

...Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson, the most experienced navigator in these uncharted waters, has instituted "bridefare," which allows them to marry and keep Medicaid benefits...