True conservatives are generally against identity politics. Because we do not believe in picking out particular groups for special treatment, we simply do not engage in actively pursuing a group based on their ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, whatever. We need to recognize though, that a large segment of the population does indeed identify themselves as a group defined partially by these parameters.

I hate pandering. I hate the way that a group in the federal government can hold sway over a segment of the populous by promising them special treatment. I hate the divisiveness this practice causes. The Left promises us in this new administration there will be a new uniting fashion of politics yet they still promote class warfare. Today a new task force was launched to focus on the middle class. We were informed by Obamassiah that there is no conflict between labor unions and business. “Those are the old rules,” he said. So He speaks and makes it so?  Labor unions are committed to getting the most money for the least productivity; businesses to getting the most productivity for the least money. Nope, no conflict there.

This is one reason I am a conservative. I do not believe a politician, however his pectorals glisten (I am talking to you Washington Post), can speak and make it so. If there is conflict to be resolved, it is not between one class and another or one sex and its employers or one race and its oppressors. Conflict happens on an individual scale. Conflict is between one unique individual and the struggles he or she encounters during the course of the adventure we call life. Washington bureaucracy attempts to offer one-size-fits-all solutions to disparate situations involving millions of people these politicians have never met. Better for the individuals to be free to solve their own conflicts.

The Left comes from a position that there is such a thing as too much freedom. Of course, this never applies to mocked up CGI children having sex online for the pleasure of future baby rapists. The pornographers, degenerates and criminals can never have enough rights for some reason. The real danger is the freedom of a single mom to put a sign outside her house offering to do taxes cheap. The Jamaican couple braiding hair without a cosmetology license in D.C. These are the folks exercising too much freedom.

The Left claims they want to help the little guy but every choice they make benefits the behemoths. They keep the poor quiet with some welfare and food stamps and then they regulate every breath you take so that the poor will always be that way. The Left does not follow policies that will make everyone prosper. They follow policies that will allow the government to decide who will prosper and who will not. 

While I abhor identity politics, I also believe the Republican Party has done a deplorable job of recognizing that there are people in this country who do identify themselves strongly as part of a particular group, and that it is not pandering to address to those particular groups the ways in which conservative ideals will benefit them. 

It saddens me that the great hope for blacks in our nation holds the very ideals that will stop the poorest blacks from ever escaping the cycle of poverty that ensnares them. While I cannot help but feel proud for African Americans who rejoice to see Barack Obama and his family in the White House, I also recognize that the very policies he supports are the policies that will make sure the most underprivileged of his racial brethren never have the opportunities he has had. No one ever got rich off welfare. Redistribution of wealth only moves a limited quantity of cash around from one place to another. Persistently high taxes on businesses drive higher prices, reducing the purchasing power of everyone, including the poor. They also drive businesses overseas, robbing the unskilled of job opportunities here at home. The Left likes to play the “Tax the Rich” game, without ever recognizing that eventually there will not be any rich left to support these social programs. 

In contrast, allowing the rich to get richer and invest more money in jobs here at home that must be filled by unskilled workers gives the poor a chance to better themselves. More importantly, it actually creates wealth rather than moving some from here to there. The family income of Joe Shmoe is not lower because Exxon made record profits this year. If Joe happens to be a roughneck, he is glad Exxon made record profits because it means he will probably have a job next year. 

The first woman ever to become a millionaire by her own achievements (and no John Kerry, marrying money is not your own achievement) was Madame C.J. Walker. This first freeborn child in her family was born December 23, 1867 and hailed from a plantation in Delta, Louisiana. At 14 she married and at 20 she was widowed with a young daughter. She worked as a laundress, but eventually began her own line of hair care products for blacks. She died, with over 3,000 employees in her business, at the Italianate mansion she had constructed in Rockefeller’s neighborhood in New York. Tell me if you will what inner city youth faces a greater challenge than this child of slaves who became the first woman white or black to earn a million dollars? Well they do have a greater challenge, but it is not the bogeyman the Left leads you to believe it is.

The fact is that today, Madame C.J. would probably stay a laundress. How could she possibly afford to start a business? Would she have the money on her $1.50 a day laundress wages to pay a CPA to ensure she complied with the tax codes? Who would verify she was in compliance with the 75,000 (yes that is thousand) pages of codes regulating business owners in the country today? In a time when there really was institutionalized racism and there really was an effort to oppress blacks and keep them from prospering, Madame C.J. Walker had the freedom to go around the ‘man’ and put her own God-given talents to work as her own boss. Today, when the KKK is a joke to any thinking person, when there are laws, entitlements, and pandering politicians, the very interference of the government ‘for our own good’ would succeed where racists failed. Madame C.J. would have to settle for Food Stamps.

Genuine conservatives want these regulations to go away. We want the Madame C.J.s of our generation to have a clear path to prosperity, not a front row seat mired in the public dole. Where are the conservatives who will recognize that it is not pandering to express the benefits of your ideals for those people who feel the Republican Party has abandoned them? We do not need to change our beliefs, we need to change the way they are communicated. I believe there is only a very small contingent of citizens who would rather be guaranteed bread and water, than have the possibility of earning lobster dinner. We need to frame the discussion in that way and reach out to those who feel they are marginalized by our beliefs. Real conservatives are not the friend of big business, liberals and the regulatory standards that can only be met by the incredibly wealthy are. God willing the new chair of the RNC will recognize this and more importantly help us to communicate it to those who need to hear.

Governor Blagojevich is like a fantastic caricature of the entire cabal of life-running, business-meddling, rule-bending Leftists. Caught on tape trading favors for cash, he spends hours delineating his Gandhi-esque sacrifices for the people of the state. The Left really convinces themselves that every pursuit they undertake is for the best and if they benefit politically or financially that is just a bonus. 

The businesses in this country are bleeding jobs like a drive-by victim, and the solution of our resident social engineers is to take another pass and pump a few more rounds at them.  The White House website promises that the minimum wage will be $9.50 per hour by 2011. Just today, Obama signed a bill allowing an extension of the time for an employee to sue their employer for unfair wages. Billions of dollars taken from the taxpayers of the future will be invested into government projects with limitations such as the 2.225 Billion dollars allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers to be used only for projects that were previously funded but were never completed for some reason. Might that reason be that the projects were inefficiently run in the first place? Alternatively, perhaps they were improperly funded in the first place. In either scenario, throwing two and a quarter billion dollars at them seems unwise. The bill is full of ideological outlay including:

2.825 Billion for Broadband access in rural communities

350 Million for salaries to map broadband availability in the country

650 Million for Digital conversion education, outreach, and coupons

300 Million for building science research facilities

400 Million for habitat restoration and migration activities

600 Million for climate research, provided at least 140 million is used for modeling Will the long term unemployed be modeling?)

400 Million to NASA (250 Million must be used for climate research)

18.5 Billion for energy efficiency projects

800 Million to Amtrak

In addition to the nearly twenty-five billion listed above, just about two hundred fifty million is allocated in the very first pages for the oversight of all of these projects. Then every project’s little section in the bill says they can use three percent of the allocated funds for oversight!

The bill itself is six hundred forty-seven pages long. What I have listed here comes from the first 60 pages of the bill. Does any cognizant citizen of this country believe that the people who voted on this read it all? Or that a great deal of thought and calculation went in to the decision of say 800 million for Amtrak versus 350 million for broadband mapping? Where is the research justifying that this money will provide jobs for the jobless? 

Answer:  There is none. Not one expenditure in this bill was broken down and weighed pro versus con to say “This much is what we need to do x and result in y.” A business owner has his own money at stake. If he launches a business venture, he sits down and scrupulously studies the costs and benefits of that venture. These people in Congress are literally pulling numbers out of their hats. 

Let me take a moment to say that I am equally disgusted with the Republican majority during the Bush Administration. They behaved like Leftists themselves and not the fiscal conservatives the base desires. Bush, with his compassionate conservatism allowed the 40% expansion of the federal government, but for the Left to attack him for the economy is the pot calling the kettle black. The Left is looking at this election cycle as a mandate on their policies, blind to the fact that they won because the Right spent like they do. 

What good is it to mandate a minimum wage? The Left will say that every person is entitled to a “living” wage. There are two problems with that philosophy. First, a living wage in Lufkin is different from a living wage in Austin, which is different from a living wage in New York City, et cetera. Second, once a business owner is forced nearly to double the wage he pays each worker he has only three options:

a.       Cut the labor force and add to the unemployment lines

b.      Raise prices to compensate for higher expenditures

c.       Profit less from his business

The first is obviously not a desirable effect of this policy, and if the second choice is taken, how long exactly will the new minimum remain a ‘living’ wage? The Left of course expects all business owners to take option c., but why exactly should he? What capitalist would? The only way to make the minimum wage work out the way its proponents want is to forbid employers to lower wages or fire workers thereby forcing them to profit less. This experiment has already been tried during the descent into what is now known as “The Great Depression.” Sounds like a plan!

What about suing your employer for unfair wages? This is the most ridiculous issue. If you do not like what you are paid, leave. These are not Civil Rights issues. This is not Jim Crow America where the opportunities afforded one race of people are categorically denied others. The ability for a woman to sue because her employer pays someone else more than she for what she may consider the ‘same work’ will do nothing for women as a sex. It will make employers less likely to want to hire a woman. It will make employers less likely to afford women the sort of flexibility many of us happily trade for higher pay. It is yet another Leftist blanket solution for an individualized problem.

The Left comes from an ideological foundation that says government’s job is to engineer happiness and stability for the most people possible. This position is so intolerably arrogant as to be nearly sociopathic. What sort of individual believes they have the solution to the problems of 300 million people, 299,999,900 of whom they know absolutely nothing about on a personal level? There is only one solution, and that is to let people solve their own problems. Get out of their way. Get out of their wallets. Get out of their business transactions.

Every day employers, employees, venture capitalists, stockholders, hairdressers and Hollywood agents make literally billions of small, outcome-oriented, goal-targeted, precision-focused decisions about what is best for them. The Leftists believe that a couple dozen lawmakers can better manage those billions of decisions than the millions of individuals involved. 

What about Federal Regulation of the steps taken by Emergency Room physicians? Would you support ER doctors being told that a gunshot victim must have a certain order of treatment? Say, he must have the bullet removed first, and then the wound closed, then a transfusion? Would you not prefer the doctor who is standing there directly observing the situation have the authority to triage the patient based on the unique conditions that present themselves? Of course. However, when it comes to the economy, triage goes out the window and a one-size-fits-all solution from on high is forthcoming.

The excuse for regulating business is always to protect the little guy. Well who protected those that put their faith in Made-off’s ponzi scheme? Maybe if those people had not been counting on the SEC to do their homework for them they would have covered their own butts and done their homework. Will there always be unscrupulous people in business? Yes. Can we ever legislate risk out of capitalism? No. Nevertheless, we have seen the alternative and it involves breadlines and gulags. It involves idealists who are impressed at how everyone is ‘equally poor together’. Lovely. This is what we will get for the social engineering of the Left: Everyone poor together. Thanks anyway. I will take the chance to be rich against the risk of being poor over the guarantee of government-induced poverty any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The Federal Government is like the Blob. It keeps eating up more and more and the more it eats the bigger and hungrier it gets. The Journalist Charlie Reese once said, “Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.” It is time that our elected officials use their power to kill some of the bureaucracy then relinquish some of their power back to its rightful possessors: The People of the United States.

Just a little rant today. 

Is anyone else out there being spammed by Obama, his wife and David Plouffe? I can’t wait until the first daughters start filling my inbox with invites to their Facebook pages or whatever they do. 

Look, I have never voted Democrat. I have never opted to ‘receive more information’ about change I can believe in. I never attended a Democratic meeting or anything like that but still, I get a call on my cell phone from his campaign and I must have a thousand pleas and updates from everyone but the family dog.

At least when the Republicans send me an email (which they do with about one third the frequency of the first family and their cabal) it has the potential motivation behind it that I have donated to, written to and voted for Republicans. 

This  practice shows that about the same level of internet courtesy is practiced by the H&C (Hope and Change) crew as is practiced by jennyhotcam.viewmenow.freexxxpics. Also, the instinctive recoiling in disgust and irritation is approximately comparable when I receive unsolicited mail from either of these sources. Sorry ‘Jenny’.

The family of a Veteran of Iraq will receive a $350,000 settlement for the suicide of their son two weeks after he was turned away from a VA medical center. While this may be a small comfort to this one devastated family, what exactly will this money do to change the plight of those who earn our freedoms with their sweat and blood? I have heard that for every one citizen who makes a call to their congressman, they represent one thousand citizens who feel the same way but don’t bother to call. How much more true might this be of our proud Military members, who are trained to be tough and not give weakness any quarter? Nonetheless, the Military.com website is registering many comments from Veterans who have fallen through the cracks of the federally-run medical care they are supposed to receive as compensation for their service.

While the New York Times focuses like a laser-beam on the disturbing trend of Iraq war veterans committing violent murders at about one-fourth the rate of average citizens, these men and women are frequently treated like so much annoying busy-work by those our government employs to help them.

Is the mainstream media simply populated with such pathetic wusses that they fear and must demonize the brawny sorts who provide them the safety to exercise their First Amendment right to disseminating partisan propaganda? What sort of neurotic, brain-damaged, pansy writes an article claiming our returning heroes are psychopathic killers, citing 121 cases of murder (20% of which involved drunk-driving) and never mentions to the reader that these 121 cases come to about 7.08 per 100,000, while the category of citizen New York Times reporters belong to (non-veterans) commits murder at a rate of 26.5/100,000?

How about a headline like “Iraq War Veterans: Most Peaceful Males in the Nation”?

This is what the media means when they claim they support our troops but not the war. What they really mean is they hate the war and they will throw our troops under the bus to make it look as bad as possible.

What about an expose on the fact that the federal bureaucracy fails miserably to take care of these men and women when they return from defending us with their very lives on the line? Inasmuch as combat veterans are the only people in this country who have ever genuinely risked their lives to protect the bastion of freedom that is the United States of America, they should be treated with the utmost respect and honor. They should never pay an income tax again, and instead of this make-work B.S. VA that the government has let rot for years, they need to be granted cash vouchers for the rest of their lives to pay for any medical treatment they require. The cost of the benefits and salary paid to the legions of doctors, staff, civilian workers and bureaucrats would diminish if a veteran could simply pay individually on a cash-like basis for his chosen medical care. 

The VA, with its captive clientele has no reason whatsoever (unless out of the goodness of their hearts) to treat our Veterans with the dignity and respect they deserve. Individual private-sector doctors would treat them well or lose their business. Those doctors would not turn away a client, because the client would be paying. 

This issue here is one of philosophy. As in all areas of progress, the Left believes Big Government can do it best. After all, how can you trust a man who defends liberty and defeats the enemy while risking life and limb, to choose his own doctor? The truth is the Left is categorically opposed to capitalism and deeply mistrustful of the profit motive (except when they are the profiteers). Maybe they are so arrogant that they are insulted by the idea that anyone would treat them well because that person is paid to. Maybe they are convinced their immigrant nannies and the sycophant Press just love them because they are so fabulous. Being Socialists at heart, they cannot admit that when you stick two parties in a forced transaction monitored by a third party, those two parties have no reason to please each other. Because they don’t recognize the fallen sin-nature of all human beings, they cannot admit that people are not generally going to try to please one another ‘just because’. Most people in the general populace, Veterans included, would be happy to receive good service even if the Benjamins they were forking over motivated the quality of it. 

But Veterans won’t have that choice because it would ruin the fun of the social engineers on the Left. So the next time you are getting crappy service at the Division of Motor Vehicle, count yourself lucky and say a prayer for our service members.  Their health, sometimes their life, is at the mercy of the very same bureaucracy.

While perusing a webpage titled “Things I Wish I had Said”, a terrific resource that can be found at http://www.geocities.com/fountoftruth/quotes.html , I stumbled upon some quotes that I wish someone had said to Congress and the White House these past months. We have been duped into agreeing to throw good money after bad by the heart wrenching tales of people losing their jobs and homes because of bureaucratic and economic malfeasance among the most powerful banks and those paid to regulate them. 

It has seemed insane from the beginning to hand over what is approaching multiple trillions of dollars of our money to those who have so poorly managed the money of their own institutions. Even more of an insult is seeing the same Congressional ‘watch dogs’ who encouraged bad loans, hid crumbling systems and lined their pockets with money from the perpetrators, dole out our hard-earned cash and promise that they can be trusted to ensure it is properly used. While Americans must waste countless hours every year assiduously accounting to Big Brother for every penny they earned and spent, banks who recently walked out of the Capitol with billions of our IRS-confiscated income are brazen enough to announce that they simply will not or cannot tell us where they are spending their bailout money.

According to Washington AP, December 22, 2008:

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking," said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Ga.-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Some banks said they simply didn't know where the money was going.

"We manage our capital in its aggregate," said Regions Financial Corp. spokesman Tim Deighton, who said the Birmingham, Ala.-based company is not tracking how it is spending the $3.5 billion it received as part of the financial bailout.

Well. Try that with the IRS. “Sorry Mr. Auditor, but look, I don’t owe any taxes. Well no, I am not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking. I manage my income and spending in the aggregate and all I can say is I have nothing left so I must not owe a dime.”         

But we have all seen the anecdotal evidence which demanded action, some action, any action as long as it is expensive action. We must save Main Street! By bailing out Wall Street? We took a bunch of fat-cats who should have known better, who lost their clients’ life savings, and instead of using the money to maybe try and give these individuals (some of whom were probably the victims the press claims they all are)a second chance, we will give a second chance to the culprits. What brilliance! Yes, the penalty for malfeasance with other people’s money shall be to give you even more of the people’s money. This time without even the people’s consent. That’ll teach you!

Would that some conservative soul had shouted the words of Andrew Jackson in the halls of Congress!

Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out. 

And yes, had the banks all failed people would have been ruined. But now we have given the very culprits of those people’s ruin not only the ability (by saving them from failure) but the means (by flooding their coffers with taxpayer money) to continue unabated in ruining even more lives. 

And to those who offer more government oversight as the answer I have another fine quote:

The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? – Frederic Bastiat

Why do people behave as though a legislator is less apt to be bribed than a CEO? What idiocy is it that pretends having the wolves in the Capitol protect us from the wolves on Wall Street is any sort of solution to the problem of fallen humanity and the greed and corruption that accompanies it? Why are we shocked that billions were mishandled, misappropriated and outright stolen? And where is the outrage that victims of corporate theft now line up to receive the largesse of bureaucratic theft?

Washington’s answer to the plight of those who willingly entered relationships with banks they thought they could trust and lost their shirts, is to steal the shirts off the back of every working American to give these investors and mortgage holders a second chance through the propping up of failing private enterprises with confiscated funds.

We have become a people who have traded the rights to the bread of our own labor for the fleeting sense of security provided by a government safety net.  William Pitt once said “The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” Today, in order to have a nicer home than we can rightly afford, a newer car than we can assuredly pay for, bigger grocery lists, better hobbies and the assurance that the ‘King’ will care for us as corn stalks in a money-bearing crop, we allow him to dictate what portion of our bread we may keep, what lessons our children shall learn, what words we may or may not use on a college campus, what safety devices we shall wear, what our preacher may speak on from the pulpit, and on and on. The king marches into our homes concealed in the pay stub missing 33% of our earnings and hangs over our shoulder demanding to know how we made what we did in a private transaction between our employers and ourselves. For some of us the King arrives in a monthly welfare payment or appears through our food stamp allowance, ensuring that for his meager crumbs we will dutifully bow like the herd we are and vote for yet more promises of security never thinking of how they encroach our liberty.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were men with much to lose, not only their money but their families and their lives. Many of them lost all of those things. Today we love the conveniences of our bountiful lives so much we are trod upon in the most disgraceful fashion by those whom we elect to be the arbiters of good government and we raise not a whimper. To all who read this I urge you to take sides now with those who would love liberty or those who would love convenience. I urge you with the words of Samuel Adams:

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.                    

 

As I tore through the new Coulter book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Attack on America, I knew the single mother chapter would draw fire. Having become a single mother at age 24, I read every book on the topic. I even read some of those cited in Coulter’s latest literary adventure. Looking back, I recall the uplifting stories of single-motherhood success that were meant to comfort the reader. Several well-known children of single mothers are paraded through the pages to assuage the reader’s fear that she has doomed her child to a life of fewer possibilities, greater challenges and harsher circumstances. 

That Bill Clinton is cited repeatedly as a success story should tell you all you need to know about how these authors judged success.

Was I encouraged by these books? Well the prospect that my child could become a serial adulterer, sociopathic drunk, compulsive liar and possibly a rapist did weigh heavily against the hope that he might juggle being President along with these other endeavors. The most useful advice came from just one book, which started out condemning the idea of victimhood. You needed to stop moaning about how you got where you were. It criticized the notion of blaming others, insisting the very first step toward healing and providing your child the healthiest home possible was to let go of blame, acknowledge your role in arriving where you had, and make adjustments to your behavior accordingly. This book talked about some of the most difficult sacrifices that many women never consider they will have to make before hopping into bed for a little recreational sex.  In my personal situation the father refused to tell his parents. He insisted I give the baby up. I refused. He moved several states away. He demanded a paternity test even though we had lived and worked together for six months. He saw us in a store one day and cooed at his son like he was some stranger’s child. My heart was filled with loathing for a man who had talked with me of marriage and children but ran when they were an eventuality. 

But I could not indulge that loathing. I had decided I would raise this child alone. Unlike many single mothers I have known through the years, I had no illusions that me and baby would coast through life on a cloud of happy peek-a-boos and powder scented naps. Maybe because I had siblings eleven and thirteen years my junior, I did not see my imminent motherhood as a fulfillment of myself or as an opportunity to have someone who would adore me unconditionally. Rather, I saw it as a logical consequence of my personal decisions. I recognized that these decisions had been influenced by an upbringing with an absentee, alcoholic, abusive father. More importantly I recognized that I could never change the circumstances of my life, only the decisions I made. I owned my wrongdoing. I admitted to myself that influence and coercion are two drastically different things. No one coerced me into a youth of promiscuity in search of affection; that was my decision alone. I recognized I had lived a self-destructive life and that self-destruction is self-indulgent.  I saw the pitfalls that lay ahead of a self-indulgent single mother: Expecting my child to fulfill me, clinging to him, denigrating his father to him, martyring myself…the list went on. When I decided I would raise my child alone I also decided that never again in my life could I be my first priority. While my child would not be spoiled, I myself would always have to come second to what was the best for him.

Things today are terrific but it has not been easy. In a desperate desire to make a ‘complete’ family, I married a man who descended into abusive paranoid schizophrenia. We had a son together before he became completely unstable and dangerous. He refused to work and I couldn’t trust to leave my children with him. There were times when we didn’t have electricity in East Texas at 105 degrees.  After I had him removed from the house there was a period when we couldn’t afford the bills and had to close down the house we lived in and sleep on a relative’s floor. Not only did I subject my son to a fatherless home initially, but when I had the chance to choose a father for him I was so panicked to ‘make things right I made a hasty and terrible choice subjecting him to four years with a terrible step-father. My next decision was to become completely self-sufficient, leaning only on God for support. Today I am happily married to a fine Christian man who treats my sons as his own. We have a two-year-old baby girl and she is the bees knees as far as her big brothers are concerned.

Yes things today are great, but there is always a shadow. Recently I had to explain to my nine-year-old what a biological father is, and how the man he knew from infancy was not his. I had to tell him that thousands of miles away lives a man who is his father but does not want to be known to him. I had to issue the ‘it’s not about you’ platitudes that I know feel hollow. I have a six-year-old and a nine-year-old versed in the consequences of paranoid schizophrenia, so they will understand that the daddy who had to leave them did so because he was ill and not because they are unlovable. Still they wanted for some time to know why he wouldn’t take his medicine if he loved them. I have heard my eldest at age five scream that he hates me because I made his daddy go away and now we are ‘poor’. I agonize over how to explain someday that sex before marriage is dangerous, that my promiscuity was a mistake, without making my eldest feel as if he was a mistake as well. So many things would have been different if I had followed God’s model of sex between one man and one woman within a covenant marriage. That seems so old-fashioned and out of date. I don’t care. 

People will say “You wouldn’t have them if things had been different.” I know that. More importantly, they wouldn’t have had me. Have I come through for them? Yes. My children are bright, well-behaved, loving and happy. But they have struggled to get here. I am sick of hearing how resilient children are. What a callous thing to say. Women leaving their husbands because they just aren’t in love anymore tell themselves and each other how ‘resilient’ children are. Lovely…let’s see how much they can take!

Is a single mother capable of raising a well-adjusted child? Yes, rarely, though I confess that I don’t believe my sons would be as happy without my husband. He is a daddy to them and they need it. Certainly there are women capable of going to the incredible lengths required to give their children everything they require financially, emotionally, educationally and spiritually. The problem is that the glorification of single motherhood;  the acceptability of a fifteen-year-old plopping her kid in the day-care facility at her high school, has attracted a deluge of pregnancies in those least prepared to care for someone else more than they care for themselves.

God Bless Ann Coulter for standing up for the children, mine included, who have suffered from the destigmatization of casual sex, unwed pregnancy and single motherhood.