Phyllis Schlafly is out with another article on the rise of single motherhood. According to Schlafly, the usual culprits are to blame: feminists, Barack Obama, ‘big government,’ and gay people who want the right to marry. Schlafly also says that single motherhood is increasing and marriage is declining because the legalization of abortion is “diminishing the custom of shotgun marriages, which in earlier years was often the response to surprise pregnancies.” Schlafly’s nostalgia for forced marriages shouldn’t be a surprise, as she is also a long-time apologist for marital rape.
Schlafly writes:
Prior to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, husbands and fathers provided for their families. The 1.7 million out-of-wedlock babies born last year and their unmarried moms now look to Big Brother as their financial provider.
The left is content to let this problem persist because 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama for president. They vote for the party that offers the richer subsidies.
…
Among other unfortunate effects, the trends toward non-marriage and toward same-sex marriage are a direct attack on fathers. The bond between a child and his mother is an obvious fact of nature, but marriage is the relationship that establishes the link between a child and his father.
There are many causes for the dramatic reduction in marriage, starting with unilateral divorce, which spread across the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, putting government on the side of marriage breakup. Then came the legalizing of abortion, diminishing the custom of shotgun marriages, which in earlier years was often the response to surprise pregnancies.
The feminist notion that women should be independent of men, followed by affirmative-action/female quotas in employment, tended to carry out the goal stated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the concept of husband-breadwinner and wife-homemaker “must be eliminated.” These feminist ideas and practices demean marriage by discriminating against men and also against fulltime homemakers.
