Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9401150014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William Raspberry
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Others can be embraced as prophets or dismissed as dangerous ideologues, depending on whether you agree or disagree with their philosophies. Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, begins where you are and drags you, often kicking and screaming, much closer to where you thought you'd never go. Even when you see where his train of thought is headed, you may fail to find a convenient stop at which to exit. (I speak here of people willing to think about difficult issues; the rest can either embrace or dismiss Murray for what he is, without bothering to consider his arguments.)
He begins a recent Wall Street Journal piece beguilingly, by citing statistics suggesting the rapid development of a white underclass, bigger and more disruptive than the much-analyzed black underclass.
Out-of-wedlock birthrates are up among whites - now about 22 percent, according to a recent Census Bureau study. ``Murphy Brown'' notwithstanding, women with college degrees account for only 4 percent of illegitimate births among whites. The bulk of those births - 82 percent - are to women with a high-school education or less. Fully 44 percent of births to white women who were below the poverty line the year before giving birth are illegitimate.
This illegitimacy begets illegitimacy - and crime, violence, school failure and all the other social ills associated with the underclass. Thus, the anticipated emergence of a large white underclass.
That's where he starts. Here's where he goes: to cutting out welfare, leaving poor women to scuffle to take care of their own children or, if they cannot, to place them in orphanages. Nobody wants to go there.
But listen:
``The ethical underpinning for the policies I am about to describe is this: Bringing a child into the world is the most important thing that most human beings ever do. Bringing a child into the world when one is not emotionally or financially prepared to be a parent is wrong. The child deserves society's support. The parent does not.
``The social justification is this: A society with broad legal freedoms depends crucially on strong non-governmental institutions to temper and restrain behavior. Of these, marriage is paramount. Either we reverse the current trends in illegitimacy - especially white illegitimacy - or America must, willy-nilly, become an unrecognizably authoritarian, socially segregated, centralized state.''
And how would he go about reversing illegitimacy? The old-fashioned way: by letting such improvidence be its own punishment. Societies historically have added some measure of social stigma to the obvious economic difficulties of units consisting of a single woman and her children. Our great mistake, says Murray, has been to remove both types of sanction. He thinks we need to reimpose them.
Restoring the economic stigma means ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children, subsidized housing and food stamps (but not health insurance). The social stigma will follow automatically.
He won't have much trouble convincing you that while AFDC may not cause illegitimacy, it surely subsidizes it - or that it's absurd to expect both to subsidize a behavior and decrease its prevalence. You're also likely to agree that while hardly anyone will have a baby for the welfare check, a lot fewer single women (and girls) would have babies if welfare weren't an option.
But you won't let babies starve in order to teach mothers a lesson.
Well, neither would Murray. Listen: ``How does a poor young mother survive without government support? The same way she has since time immemorial. If she wants to keep a child, she must enlist support from her parents, boyfriend, siblings, neighbors, church or philanthropies. She must get support from somewhere, anywhere, other than the government.''
And then, according to his theory, the whole dreadful cycle reverses itself. Enlisting the support of others increases the likelihood that a responsible adult will be involved in the child's upbringing. Few babies will be born to children looking merely for someone to love and cuddle. And the difficulties that befall the young women who get pregnant anyway will serve as a deterrent to their siblings, cousins and peers.
All these things taken together will regenerate stigma.
And if none of it works, and the mother is unable to take care of her child? The last stop is adoption and what Murray euphemistically calls ``24-hour preschools.'' Orphanages.
I could state my objections and disagreements, but I think I'll wait, hoping his unrebutted analysis will draw the rest of us into a desperately needed debate.
\ Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB