Close window | View original article
As the Supreme Court considers California's voter-approved ban on gay "marriage," some writers have expressed hope that the Court has learned not to inject itself into overly controversial issues. In somehow unearthing a Constitutional right to abortion in Roe v Wade, for example, the court touched off a low-grade civil war in which real people die - and not just the fetuses. In the earlier Dred Scott decision, the Court forced the North to confront the realities of slavery and touched off a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands died.
Government-anointed homosexual unions probably won't lead to anything quite as tragic as the Civil War, but it's a serious matter nonetheless. The power to regulate is the power to destroy. We've seen that in many areas of commercial endeavor:
Regulation isn't the government's only tool to destroy social institutions - government help is just as damaging.
Consider K-12 education. The federal government threw money at schools with the goal of improving students' test scores. As a result, teachers are going to jail for faking their students' scores by changing answers, sometimes "earning" thousands of dollars in the process. Federal involvement in education is not permitted by the Constitution; the outcome suggests that it should be ended based on results.
Consider colleges. Our government decided to help students get college degrees by lending them money to pay college bills. Given that government was throwing money at them, colleges raised their fees to the point that many students now graduate owing far more money than they can ever hope to pay back. Programs which were supposed to help students ended up transferring taxpayer money to colleges while leaving students worse off..
Government help to the poor destroys families. In his article "Liberalism Versus Blacks," the great black economist and writer Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote:
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.
How does this work? Women know that they'll need help raising their children. Back in the day when women depended on husbands for help, they'd demand marriage and commitment before taking the risk of being stuck with the baby. Today, a woman's welfare payments go down if she's married.
Government throwing money at single-parent families has had the predictable result of making more of them. As the Wall Street Journal put it:
Low and middle-income single moms would rather be married to big government than to a human being. Big government incentivizes them with Medicaid, the child-care credit, utility assistance, the earned-income tax credit, Head Start, housing assistance, and other programs. Human men must compete with Big Gov on the marginal utility of their income.
March 25, 2013, p A16
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Women have always favored rich men over poor men. It's hard to figure out how much welfare benefits are worth because there are so many different programs, but people try. Some estimates of the value of welfare income, various tax-free benefit programs, fee health care, etc., found that a family of four would need an income of about $60,000 per year to have the same amount of disposable income.
Wikipedia says that median income of American families was $50,502 in 2011. In other words, more than half of American wage earners earn less than they would need to have as much disposable income as a welfare mother. Our government offers unwed mothers more money than most wage earners can.offer their wives. Is it any wonder that women are choosing to have kids out of wedlock? If they get married, their income drops a lot.
Although the welfare system destroyed black families first, the New York Times reports that most babies being born to white mothers under 30 are born out of wedlock. A child born into a single-parent home has an 80% greater chance of growing up in poverty than a child with two parents in spite of all that government spending!
Throwing money at fatherless births multiplies child poverty but there's no way most men can compete with government in terms of providing stable, long-term support. Women are voting with their wallets and raising fatherless children.
Government regulation kills socially useful functions, and government subsidies are equally deadly.
As for gay "marriage," history shows that societies with too many weak families fall apart. Any government recognition or promotion of family structures other than traditional marriage will weaken marriage in favor of alternate structures which are known not to work.
Let's hope that the Court decides that this decision ought to be left to the democratic process. If they do that, they'll reinstate the California ban gay "marriage" ban because that's what the California voters wanted - while permitting extremists in Vermont and elsewhere to tinker with the wisdom of millennia to their own demise and everyone else's cautionary edification.
Voters' decisions can be changed in the future, but as the ongoing Roe v Wade civil war shows, it's much harder to reverse a Supreme Court decision or negate the creation of a new and previously unheard-of "right". Let's hope the Court stays out of this controversy and reaffirms democracy.