Hobby Horses And Make Believe

Yesterday, Tim correctly pointed out in the comments on this post that I wasn't really dealing with the details of what Sandra Fluke testified. That's certainly true and I know my blog posts have only tangentially dealt with the issue at hand - insurance for contraception and abortifacients - and instead I've used them to ride one of my favorite hobby horses - illegitimacy and single parenting.

The Scratching Post being an exercise in learning through writing, my favorite issues have matured a bit over the last week or so. Here's some random thoughts.

Isn't it amazing that we've gotten to the point that men aren't brought into the contraception discussion much at all these days? We've punted on the issue of men being men and have instead contented ourselves with men being drones.

A man.
We console ourselves by "empowering" women to control their own fertility without admitting to ourselves that as mammals, controlling it is dicey at best. Instinct tells us to procreate and once pregnancy arrives, there are hundreds of millions of years of evolution on one side and free abortifacients on the other. Betting on rationality to defeat evolution is a fool's errand and the statistics show it.

We ignore the evidence that this hasn't worked and then we proceed to make believe that all family structures are equal. Children being retail products that take 18 years to produce*, we pretend that you can maintain quality while slicing your workforce and budget in half. When none of this works, we stick our fingers in our ears and yell that we need yet more support for "women's health".

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The web is a marvelous tool. It's one thing to see the census statistics about income and marital status, it's another thing entirely to be able to pinpoint the cities where the problem is concentrated and then find all kinds of videos made by the locals that allow you to see how they live. It makes the issue personal and real, taking it out of the dry data tables.

Watching the video from East Cleveland I linked yesterday, the thing that strikes me the most is that if any of those lads were my boy, I'd take immediate and drastic action to get them to speak properly, stop using self-racist references, find something more productive to occupy their time and otherwise become people I'd want to hire or my daughter to marry. Under no circumstances would that behavior be allowed to continue.

The kids in that video were made in God's image just like our sons and daughter here in the Catican Compound. Surrendering to the barbarism that locks them into an underclass can't be the right thing to do.

* - someone is going to "buy" your child as a spouse or employee.