Santorum Was Right (About Families)

If you throw enough pitches, some of them are bound to be strikes. And even though Rick Santorum is a loathsome politician who cares way too much about gay people and pornography, he was right about one thing: It starts with the family.

Child rearing is something that preoccupies the minds of upper middle class people everywhere. Even as marriage is fraying as an institution (single mothers are the majority among mothers under the age of 30), it seems that interest in being a good parent has never been higher.

Early this year, Charles Murray came out with a book entitled "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2011" and it caused another bout . The statistics were frightening and represented an increasing divide between the working class and the upper classes. Not just in terms of material wealth, but also in cultural attitudes and social behavior.

I just wrote on how to get into the upper middle class two days ago, but I never really wrote on what it means to be upper middle class. We watch vastly different television. We read much more. But most importantly, we marry people in our same socioeconomic strata. And we're more likely to marry and less likely to divorce or have a child out of wedlock.


That is the key issue here. When you have two groups of Americans, one group who marries and raises children between in a two parent household and another group who have children out of wedlock and are often forced to raise them in a single parent household, the average child from each group is going to vastly different from one another.

I don't think anybody can argue with a straight face that the average kid in a two parent household is going to turn out better than the kid who was raised in a single parent household. It's so tough to financially and emotionally support your children if you're just by yourself. Just having another person around in the household to lighten the workload would be of tremendous help to single mothers (let's get real, the vast majority of single parent households are headed by females).

This is the first generation where single parents aren't treated as moral lepers. Some are even proud of their state. But Charles Murray doesn't think this is going to be a generation that turns out well. One of the primary arguments that Murray makes is that we already know how this story plays out. All you have to do is look at the average single black mother and her household.

During the GOP debates, Rick Santorum got his biggest applause lines when he started talking about the importance of the family. And when he was talking about familial affairs, he actually looked and sounded like a reasonable person rather than the virulent homophobe he really is. The best chance a kid can have to succeed in life and be well adjusted is if he is in a home with two parents, be it a traditional father-mother marriage or a same sex couple. We need to stop pretending otherwise.