Leaving the Left

I don’t have much affection for George W. Bush. Aside from his economic policy, including using tax cuts to stimulate growth as was done by Kennedy and Reagan, I find a whole lot of reason to criticize the man.

What caused my slide away from the political left was a realization of the utter failure of liberal policies from Affirmative Action to the Great Society. Liberals will often look at the 1960s as the time when discriminatory policies were taken down and replaced with sensible policies that encouraged racial equality. The facts play a different story.

Once the ideologies of liberals had been enacted into legislation in the 1960s, many beneficial trends in American society began to reverse. African American economist Thomas Sowell, in a recent column called “Preserving a vision,” cited that before the end of the 1960s, teenage pregnancy had been declining, murder rates had been dwindling and the most major reduction in poverty among blacks had already occurred from 1940 to 1960.

During that time, liberals pushed forth sex education, condoms in schools, Affirmative Action and the numerous government programs of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” But since then, the black family structure, which had withstood the post-slavery era of overt racism, has collapsed, with 62% of black children being raised in single parent households according to data from the Population Reference Bureau.

Facts show that children raised in single parent households are more prone to problems than those raised in two parent households. A report by the Centers for Disease Control showed that boys raised with only one parent are far more likely to have sex at a young age than those with two parents. The report also said that about a quarter of black men had a child before age 20, compared to slightly more than 10 percent of the white men. I view this as vindication that the institution of marriage is vital to a functioning society, and that abstinence should play a huge role in what we tell youth about sex.