Dan Quayle was right

Dan Quayle was the Vice President during the first Bush presidency, just in case you’ve forgotten.  He gave a number of speeches decrying single-motherhood, and liberals jumped all over him.  I shocked one of my political sciences classes when I announced that Dan Quayle was right.

Liberals generally don’t like to make moral judgements.  There’s nothing wrong with single-motherhood, and if that is a woman’s choice, who are we to say it is wrong?

Well, it might not be morally wrong, but it leads to some societal difficulties.  Columnist Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column entitled “The one privilege liberals ignore.” He quotes an economist from the U. of Maryland, Melissa S. Kearney, “Two-parent families are beneficial for children.  Places that have more two-parent families have higher rates of upward mobility.  Not talking about these facts is counterproductive.”

91% of conservatives agree that “‘children are better off if they have married parents.”  Only 30% of college-educated liberals agree with that.  Interestingly, most college educated liberals have children after they are married.  They raise their own kids in two-parent households.  As one family researcher says of liberals, “They talk left, walk right.”

Incidentally, the data shows that if the two parents are gay, the advantages for children are the same. 

One way to increase the number of two-parent families, by the way, is to lift the earnings of men with low levels of education.