With an unprecedented amount of freedom in regard to personal moral choices, barely half of all adults in the U.S. are married. Bastardy is a word now only read in historical novels, it is no longer a social reality. But with the removal of the power to stigmatize comes the lessening of social and even legal pressures which direct young people toward marriage.
The casualties of this freedom are our children. Mothers struggle to be both sole provider and sole nurturer and fathers often lose contact with their children despite their best intentions and legal provisions. Children are then deprived of the security of having both parents in the home and are subjected to unknown risks when a stranger enters their home as their mother's* new beau.
Read Rick Banks on the costs to our children here.
*the majority of single-parent homes are headed by mothers
The risk you touch on at the end there is really frightening. There is a move to group natural/adoptive fathers along with step-fathers and boyfriends, I think so the claim can be made about how dangerous fathers are. Nine times out of 10 when we read a news story about a child murdered, raped, abducted, abused, neglected, you find out that it was a home in which there was no father. There was nobody to work extra hours and pay the electric bill so they wouldn't have to use a make shift fire to heat the house which caused a house fire, or a father to take over for the sick mother so the children weren't left at a neighbors' house and one brutally murdered, or a mother is desperately trying to impress the new boyfriend and offers her children either as a living (sexual) sacrifice or a burnt offering by killing them herself. Rich has gotten to where he will call it, I'll tell him about some horrible circumstance and he'll ask me to see if there was a dad anywhere in the picture. Most of the time there isn't. These women and children are left to poverty, to ill health, to poor living conditions, to abuse and tragedy, all so we can have license to cohabit and part as we see fit, so we can fornicate with whomever and whatever we wish and so we can have no-fault divorce (which, let's face it, is really only necessary to support the first two things).
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