H’wood Spawns Single Mother Baby Boom: Got to Imagine that Coulter Will Be All Over This One

A recent NY Post article online read: “Hollywood Baby Boom Spawns National Crisis”.

My first question was, “Why is it considered a crisis?” Especially when you have the women from “The View” chastising people like Mike Huckabee for commenting on Natalie Portman’s pregnancy out of wedlock (granted, if one is criticizing single motherhood as a matter of economics, a Hollywood millionairess is a bad target to pick) and people everywhere who see single motherhood as something to celebrate. For most people, single or unwed motherhood is perfectly OK – most except Ann Coulter.

Personally, I know what the statistics say and I agree with some of Coulter’s points, but I also say damn the statistics. It’s not just about the parent being single or some religious argument that makes this a “crisis”, it’s about the grandparents, the relatives, the community, the mindset of the mother, etc. etc. etc. when it comes down to the question of will the child grow up healthy.

For that, at the risk of sounding simplistic, I believe it simply comes down to a parent who loves her kid, and loves herself first. If that’s the case, I think most single mothers can overcome the majority of hurdles put before them and the kid will end up just fine. Time will tell.

My Definition of “Middle Class”

I have been questioned on what I believe to be the “middle class”, and do I define it only by income. My answer is no. Although I used median and average household incomes in my post re: middle class whining, I personally do not consider middle class to be based on incomes. Nor, for that matter, do I personally view people in general as part of a class based on their income. Instead, from the perspective of economics and politics I tend to consider groups of people based on their adversity to risk, which I allude to in that same post.

For instance, I consider the ditch digger to be far higher in class than a Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who is apparently doing “God’s work” even though the ditch digger earns a mere fraction of Blankfein’s annual income. To that ditch digger, a mortgage on a modest home may be a risk but he’ll work 20hr days between three jobs to pay for it if he has to. Same goes for a single, working mother, who will do the same. I have tremendous respect for both of them, and others like them, and hold them in very, very high regard.

The people whose opinion I have little respect for are those who want zero risk and yet want all the returns. They seem to be the ones doing the most whining when it comes to the economy, jobs, and bailouts. They are those who are not willing to make the sacrifices that our parents and grandparents made and yet expect others to do it for them along with providing some sort of guarantee as to their living or security.

The Founding Fathers took risks. Present-day entrepreneurs are taking risks. Military service men and women are taking risks. When I look at and talk to many “middle class”, it seems they hardly take any. They are also much more likely to spend their discretionary income on material things and creature comforts only to turn around and demand more from their employers (more income, increased benefits, more time off, etc.), or their government (more handouts, lower taxes, etc.) when they realize that looking rich, and feeling rich, isn’t actually being rich.

The “middle class” then, as I see it, are those who risk a modest amount of their certainty and stability to achieve something greater. The “lower class” wants no risk at all and expects others to take it on for them. The Ken Lays, the deadbeat dads, and the welfare queens are those who I consider to be in this category. The “upper class” to me are those who bet it all – the Fred Smiths, the Sam Waltons, the Steve Jobs, the Steve Wynns, the Bill Gates, and the Richard Bransons of the world. Those who have done far more for putting food on peoples’ tables than any government or charity ever has.

Adoption vs. Conception

In his email today (Feb 03, 2009), Glenn Beck brought up a not necessarily new, but very interesting question: If there are people who couldn’t qualify to adopt even one child, why is it that we allow these people to have 4, 8, even fourteen kids through conception to be footed on the taxpayer’s dime?

A simple fact that no Liberal seems to ever want to admit to is that there are a significant amount of low-income and low-educated people who have kids simply for the cash first, and to be a parent second.

Now of course, I appreciate the fact that it is difficult (if not impossible) to prove intent in these cases. so there will of course be those liberals who say, “Show me the statistics!” and will rest their case at that. But what those liberals will never do is put 10,000 of America’s top social workers on national TV and have them tell us in just how many of their cases they see this in.

I know over a dozen social workers and teachers who have at least 10 stories each of having to deal with this class of parent on any given day. There are so many levels on which this is wrong – why is there no real attention being paid to this issue except when a welfare-recipient single mother decides to have 14 kids? (Ann Coulter must be dying to get back on “The View” to argue this one!)

Either way, conception should be a priveledge, not a right. If I should have to show some sort of stability in my life to adopt, I should have to show it to have a kid, too.

Ann Coulter “Attacks” Single Mothers? I Don’t Think So…

Although not released yet (January 16, 2009), Ann Coulter's new book, "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America" is coming out in a flurry of controversy. With it, Coulter is being accused by the mainstream media of attacking single motherhood, allegedly blaming the offspring of single mothers for much of the murder, rape, and other crimes and social ills that currently plague our society.

Love her or hate her, there's a thing about Ann that taunts you to ask yourself, "Is what this woman saying actually true?" Part of you wants to simply dismiss her rants as marketing ploys, but there's another part that wants to hear her back it up. What surprises you about Ann in the beginning is that she does back it up - and her bite is much worse than her bark. Coulter makes sure that if you're going to have any chance of winning a battle with her on the issues at all, you'd better have some pretty strong facts in order to do it.

I'll be the first to admit that Coulter's shockjock-esque bantering, while being part of her shtick, is annoying at best. It runs a high risk of failure of simply turning people off and negating her point as she often comes across as an over-emotional, egocentric, bitter primadonna when she speaks. When she writes, however, I believe she's brilliant and hits the nail right on the head with an intelligent, thorough, well-researched, argument.

So back to her point. When I first heard that she was attacking single mothers, I thought, "Here she goes again..." Blaming single mothers? How could she? I saw the Kathy Lee Gifford interview, the Hannity & Colmes interview, and others where Ann was challenged on her points and time and time again the same question came up from the interviewer: are you seriously blaming single mothers?

I thought the answer from her would be "no", and was waiting for her witty 1-2 counterpunch in return, but unfortunately, Ann never delivered it. She had barely little time to respond to their question in the first place and even when she did have time, most of it was used to talk about how wrong/stupid people were on another point, and how many books she's sold in the meantime.

At times she seems to try and make the point that because her books are bestsellers, people must agree with her or she's simply right. However, the reason she's sold so many books could be simply because they're entertaining. The success of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" was not due to the book's facts, but instead that it held an intriguing opinion wrapped in entertainment value in quite the same way. Much like we are with Ann, in Brown's book we kept asking ourselves, "Could what this person be saying really be true?"

Perhaps her intention in straying off her point and leaving things vague is the hope that people will buy the book and go to the chapter to read what she's really saying. If so, it's a risky one. To help out, then, I'm going to offer my opinion here:

Coulter's statistics, assuming they are not misprints, speak for themselves. In 1996, 70% of juvenile inmates had been raised in a single mother or single parent environment. The courts have increasingly over the years handed down decisions which go against a two-parent or nuclear family. By stating these facts and statistics, is Coulter really attacking or blaming single mothers?

Not the way I see it. Ann's attack appears to be on the liberal thinking and governmental policies which not only support single parenthood, but praise and even worship it while seemingly condemning the institution of marriage and a two-parent family.

Raising a child on one's own is an extremely difficult task and by itself deserves to be praised, but only if done successfully. We should not be blatantly handing out money and pats on the back to those who became single parents through nothing other than their own ignorance or irresponsibility. We also shouldn't, however, be forcing single parents to stay in a bad relationship or attach to some loser just for the sake of having another parental figure in the household.

I'm all for women celebrating their independence, but only to the point that it keeps them from becoming financially and/or emotionally dependent on some loser or abuser. What I'm not for is going so far as to encourage such a degree of independence and be teaching single teenage mothers that they in fact don't need a man in their life, or more importantly their child's life because as Ann shows, over 30 years of research and facts show the opposite.

Using Hollywood award acceptance speeches as just one example, I believe Coulter is arguing that we as a society are too quick to "celebrate" single motherhood and that we also take it much too far - consequently encouraging single motherhood as a healthy form of independence, when in fact it isn't. Coulter appears to consider this view extremely selfish, ignorant, and harmful. I agree. As for her approach to discussing the issue, I couldn't disagree more.