Very rarely is a "love child," the accidental
biological result of two unmarried people "in love,"
mentioned in a newspaper headline. That was my first reaction to
reading about Isiah Thomas's alleged indiscretion from 20 years
ago, which was uncovered during the ugly glare of publicity
surrounding a former employee's recent sexual harassment suit
against the president of the New York Knicks. My second reaction
was weariness at yet another instance of lives being destroyed by
indiscriminate sexual behavior.
Pope Benedict XVI recently released an encyclical, Deus Caritas
Est, meaning God Is love, which warned that sex without
unconditional love risked turning men and women into merchandise.
Amen to that, your Holiness, but far more important is that it
has also turned children into collateral damage.
Isn't it time that we stop pretending there are good substitutes
for the traditional nuclear family? Surely there have been enough
studies of child abuse to confirm that the majority of abusers
involve nonbiological guardians.
I'm not suggesting that we revert to "Leave It to
Beaver" or "Father Knows Best," because that
sitcom world was never real. It did, however, represent a
standard that made sense and was something to strive for. A good
many of us who grew up in the inner city prior to the
revolutionary 1960s are products of broken homes. My parents
separated when I was 6 years old. The difference between then and
now is that our mothers generally did not bring home a succession
of substitute father figures and bedmates, because women then had
morals and a respect for wedding vows. The idea of bearing a
child out of wedlock still bore some shame. We've come a long
way, baby, but it's been downhill for many.
The death earlier this month of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown has
created a firestorm of protest against the Administration for
Children's Services, which allegedly neglected the child's abuse
by her stepfather. The response, of course, has been calls to
flood the city agency with more money to hire more caseworkers to
monitor at-risk children.
Most commentators on this tragic case can't relate to any of the
participants. They tend to categorize the alleged perpetrators as
"lowlifes" or just plain evil. This is much easier than
delving too deeply into the factors that create dysfunctional and
dangerous families for children to grow up in.
Having lived most of my life in or near neighborhoods like
Nixzmary Brown's, I can trace the decline of morality in them to
the day it became fashionable to claim God was dead. Oh, I can
hear my critics moaning, "There she goes again, bringing up
religion." But I know the people who live there, and though
many of them are about as low as humans can sink, no one starts
out that way in life. Alcohol and drugs may release the inner
demons, but those demons thrive where there's a spiritual vacuum.
And that emptiness began when welfare began offering young women
long-term support for their children - but only as long as there
were no fathers around. What did we expect the results would be?
Now we have generation after generation of children who were
raised by single mothers dependent on government subsidies for
their livelihood.
Ending welfare under President Clinton just drove many unwed
mothers to find other ways to secure support for the "love
children" resulting from their frivolous relationships.
Consider my son's co-worker, a Hispanic man who's been paying
child support for the past six years, only to discover the child
is not his. Since he always denied parentage, he's had no
relationship with the boy, yet he was deemed responsible merely
on the mother's say-so. His case is not unusual. Exploitative TV
shows frequently feature segments offering paternity tests to
doubting lovers, in order to prove or disprove the mother's claim
for child support. Fueled by drugs and alcohol, the resentment
felt by men involved in these loveless relationships can boil
over into acts of violence against the innocent children in the
household.
Perhaps we should enact legislation requiring mandatory paternity
tests upon the birth of any child. At the very least, they might
limit deceptive attempts to entrap an ex-lover.
How does society deal with the wreckage it has spawned through
misguided social programs? We've witnessed the damage that a
sexually liberated culture inflicts on children. When the Bush
administration proposed advocating the benefits of marriage,
liberals snorted at such a naive notion. But the nuclear family
of husband, wife, and children is best for a stable society. In
his encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI describes unconditional love
between a man and a woman as "the epitome of love."
Children born from such a union are unlikely ever to need the
services of ACS.