As a PhD in History, I can say this. Since the days of recorded history, there has been some form of marriage. Also, there has been unmarried mothers for a multitude of reasons. African Americans of today are but a spot on a pinhead of history in that subject. What has been found in all times in history is the breakdown of family or in many empires, nations, tribes, no family at all, rather a ritual of manhood and womanhood.
In various times in history there has been rituals where a child is removed from a family at a certain age and trained in various subjects. Christians are but a pip of time as it pertains to historical development to today.
A previous posted chart depicted the rise of unwed mothers in various nations. If you look at the ones with the largest rise, you are looking at secularism and socialism taking rise over religious dogma and principles. The principle of Christian marriage and family is reversed to doing what feels good and the government will pay for it. Why is it not that way is Japan. Because of the remnents of a strong training of family where honor and respect comes first and foremost. I spent several years in Japan. I learned to respectfully bow very often and that women are trained from birth to still be subserviant, even with all the trappings of today’s world society. Even the professional women, those who are to please men, are trained in the ways to do just that.
So, this is not an African American problem in America. It is a national problem. We cannot go back to one event such as the War on Poverty and place a finger on a beginning. We can however, go back and trace the slipping of our country towards a “nanny state” where the federal government is in control of everything. The worst case scenario of that in modern history is Hitler’s Germany where “lebensborns” were created where Aryan men of military stature would be paired with a nubile fertile Aryan woman for nothing more that the purposes of developing an Aryan child for the Hitler Youth, the future leaders of the Aryan Nation. No marriages, just bedding, pregnancy and birth. Each girl was praised at birth and given higher status, much akin to the female slaves of the plantations in both the North and South were rewarded by their masters for the making of another slave.
Now, we have increasingly secular federal, state, and even local governments to make laws that disregard family. Some in the name of women’s rights, some in the name of child rights, some just for profit of the pill making companies.
Instead of countering these secular socialistic efforts, we embrase them. So, the younger generation now understands that there is no stigma attached to fathering or mothering a child out of wedlock, in fact it is rewarded with both laws and entitlements.
When I was in high school, my best friend, a girl, suddenly stopped coming to school. She just disappeared. A year later she returned, and was shunned by all. I was so niave that I honestly didn’t understand why and no one, including my mother and father, explained it to me. I asked her out on a date. On that date she explained to me the she was a mother now. I had known this girl since we were two years old. I understood how a baby was made. I understood that some girls and boys did “the dirty thing” as we called it. But I could not understand why my friend would do that. I thought I was in love with this girl. For years our parents thought we would grow up and eventually marry. My honor said that night to her that I would marry her and take care of her and make her child our child. She kindly refused and a few weeks later, the family moved away. I never saw her again. I received a letter almost thirty years later from her. In the letter she explained that she wished she had accepted my offer of marriage, at sixteen, both of us, all those years ago. Her life had been hard but successful in a worldly way. She never married, raised her son, and she was now a very successful business owner. That was in the days before all the govenment entitlment programs encouraging girls to have children out of wedlock. However, she very much missed the home with the white picket fence, and a husband coming home each evening after work to the smell of a meal she was cooking. Her son had gone to Notre Dame and became a pilot in the USAF after graduation. He had a fine family, something she never had. She thanked me for that offer those many years ago saying it remained one of the highlights of her life.I still have the letter, my beautiful and gracious wife kept it, even read it to our daughters.
I tell that to say this. That mantra of my time no longer exists. It is not one single event that changed our American Ideals, but a ever increasing idea that young boys and girls have the right to act as adults and the consequences is now covered by a federal law that states that that unborn child may be killed at taxpayer expense if the girl so chooses; and the children who are born are entitled to “free” meals, free housing, free education paid for enacted legal entitlement programs of our secular federal government at, again, taxpayer expense.
