Facing Politically Inconvenient Facts
Stories of children shooting up their schoolyards send a new and frigid jolt up our spines.
We thought we had seen it all. Inner city children stabbing their playmates for their high-fashion running shoes. Youngsters killing teachers.
Still, we were not prepared for junior high students attempting to massacre entire schoolyards. Furthermore, we were not expecting the perpetrators. They are white and middle class. They reside in small towns. Their mothers are married. Most of their families go to church.
Who, then, were Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, the killers of four schoolmates and a teacher in Jonesboro, Ark.? And Andrew Wurst, 14, who murdered a teacher at an eighth grade dance in Edinboro, Pa.? Or Luke Woodham, 16, who killed his mother and two girls at his school in Pearl, Miss.? Or Michael Carneal, 14, who shot three students to death in Paducah, Ky. The horrible list goes on.
This writer recently suggested that we don’t know who these violent young people are because we prefer looking in black and Hispanic neighborhoods for social dysfunction. And she specifically cited the conservative Heritage Foundation’s selective views regarding which kinds of families are raising monsters. This assertion brought a strong protest from Patrick Fagan, an analyst at Heritage. I can only suggest that readers look for themselves in Fagan’s Heritage report, “The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family and Community.”
Had the paper been titled, “Violent Crime and Out-of-Wedlock Births in the Inner City Neighborhoods,” I would have had few objections. He properly lays out the link between high inner-city crime rates and the preponderance of families raised by an unwed mothers.
Fagan says that white children born into these circumstances have much the same pathologies.
But by emphasizing illegitimacy, which is a bigger problem among minorities, he moves the spotlight off the kinds of messed-up families that whites tend to live in.
In the above list of violent white teenagers, there is not an illegitimate birth among them.
There were many divorces, absent fathers and neglect. Mitchell Johnson, for example, was born to two married people, but then separated from his father. His mother moved him halfway across the country to join her new husband, an ex-con. Take away the fact that she wore wedding rings and Mrs. Johnson had much in common with the welfare mother who brings a series of problematic males into her house.
In his introduction, Fagan uses the word “illegitimacy” three times and “divorce” not once. He ends the opening section as follows: “If policymakers are to deal with the root causes of crime, therefore, they must deal with the rapid rise of illegitimacy.” He does tuck in some discussions of divorce elsewhere. But the word again disappears in the section titled “What Government Can Do.” Of dozens of suggestions, only one would touch on Mitchell Johnson’s “family.”
Why all this pussy-footing around?
The reason is that divorce is everywhere, including the sections of society that consider themselves conservative. You don’t get votes by pointing out the failings of your constituents.
This observation is not original to me. Chester Finn of the Hudson Institute wrote: “Whereas illegitimacy happens mostly among people who live on the other side of the tracks, much divorce and separation takes place in ‘our’ own neighborhoods, indeed among our friends and relations, and sometimes even ourselves.”
Actually, it is to The Heritage Foundation’s credit that this quote appeared in an article in one of its own publications, Policy Review. The piece titled “Why Aren’t Conservatives Talking about Divorce?” was written by William R. Mattox of the Family Research Council in Washington.
Former vice president Dan Quayle gained notoriety for criticizing the TV series “Murphy Brown” for portraying an out-of-wedlock birth as no big deal. After the speech, Mattox notes, Quayle “was quick to point out that when he spoke of the problems surrounding single-parent families, he wasn’t referring to ‘households where the father has died or even where he is separated by divorce.’ Rather, Quayle said, he was referring to ‘those households that have never known a father.”’
Thank you, Mattox. Here is a social conservative unafraid to offend Middle America. We look forward to hearing more such truths, even when they hurt.