Totally agree with Kristoff article today - " When Liberals Blew It "-
I am Asian - and we have among the lowest out of wedlock birth rates and big part of that is our culture that emphasizes on a conventional order of priorities for education, career, marriage and children - so my views are obviously biased.
I really feel the Republicans have a valid point when they say "we need to have to policies that discourage single parenting among minorities".
I know this is a very sensitive topic - but this is conversation we need to have among ourselves...
When Liberals Blew It
Fifty years ago this month, Democrats made a historic mistake.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a federal official, wrote a famous report in March 1965 on family breakdown among African-Americans. He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.
“The fundamental problem,” Moynihan wrote, is family breakdown. In a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families ... never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”
Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist. He himself had grown up in a single-mother household and worked as a shoeshine boy at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street in Manhattan, yet he was accused of being aloof and patronizing, and of “blaming the victim.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/opinion/when-liberals-blew-it.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region.
= new reply since forum marked as read
when we have exhausted all other possibilities 
The modern version of the right wing "welfare queens" meme.
I thought they had "values"? 
Judge not lest thy be judged.It has devastated the lives of thousands of people who live in my little area of Appalachia. The use of the divide and conquer techniques to prevent folks from realizing who are their true enemies has been hideous and pernicious. People, who work low end jobs, are fooled into believing people receiving benefits are their enemy and that people are color and women are coming to take away their jobs. It has been an amazing job of propaganda.
However, I do believe you on incorrect about Warren being our only hope. The GOP are in a desperate frenzy to stop HRC from running. Why are they so terrified of her becoming POTUS? They think she will stand up for ordinary Americans and stop this slide into desperation. We will just have to disagree on that point.
Otherwise, great post.
She still seems like a "triangulator" to me. Also, she can't get out of her own way as a campaigner.
I hate to say it, but on some cynical level, it's all about which Dem can win. That is the bottom line. As far as HRC's true leanings at this point in her political career, it still remains to be seen, for me. I think she is not as bad, and not as good, as some would make her out to be.
More funding should have gone into strengthening the economic and educational position of single women to improve THEIR prospects and thus reduce the likelihood they would choose to have children.
Instead since the 1980s this country has TOTALLY FRAKKED UP social services to make it impossible to avoid homelessness as a single person unless A) you are disabled or B) you have children. Women at least have option B. In other threads on DU people have even said that some social workers hint to women that they *should* try to have children in order to avoid homelessness. This might be an urban myth (like all homeless people are mentally ill or drug addicts), but having engaged with this system myself, I can vouch that it COULD be true - especially in less formal areas of the country where social service workers can have more interaction with the community and can actually have a conversation with clients. (Where I live they just process paperwork).
People who are speaking from a stable living situation can easily opine whether it is a a "bad decision" for someone someone else to burden themselves with a child or not. But if you are at the bottom of the heap and you have consistently had trouble finding employment, and you have good reason to fear homelessness or have actually been homeless for stretches of time, it might seem reasonable to work with the fact that this society has mercy on children. Mothers with children are also stronger advocates for themselves because "defending your child" is seen as proper cause of assertiveness in our society, whereas just about every other form of assertiveness in women carries high risk of being punished in some way for being a "bitch".
Progressive Democrats could have changed the world by investing heavily in women. When they have prospects for themselves, they put off child-bearing. They often put off marriage. Sadly they chose to buy into the same "torture the poor until they spontaneously produce work for themselves" line of BS that the GOP HAD BEEN FEEDING THEM!!! And what did we get for it? An expanding underclass, and a sinking middle class. Way to go.
It is shocking how incredibly judgmental these people are about everyone else. The inability to understand the true causes of poverty shows a lack of intelligence. Empathy is an important indicator of intelligence.
Thank you very much for your post. Your testimony is powerful.
Why only minorities?
Never having any stable relationship to male authority?
Yeah cause without male authority kids grow up in chaos unable to plot a decent life or develop values. OMG, seriously? This entire OP would fit in better at Free Republic. Sexist, racist and blame the victim all rolled into one, not your typical DU fare.
