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10/09/2013
Dear Dr. Laura,
More and more, it seems like there is a disconnect in society, a bifurcation of people who are marriage-and-family minded and people who are self-minded.
Sex outside of marriage and getting pregnant outside of marriage are nothing new. What is new is the attitude and reactions, which has made these problems much bigger in our culture. It used to be common that women who got knocked up outside of marriage already had a wedding date planned out, or soon did! Or, they relocated, even if only temporarily, to be with out-of-town relatives or "homes for unwed mothers". People used to be discreet, even embarrassed or ashamed of unmarried sex. Shacking up was scandalous. Now, people are PROUD of casual hookups, getting pregnant out of wedlock, shacking up, etc. Some parents even encourage all of this.
These people look at you or anyone with your wisdom and moral clarity and the guts to speak it aloud as bizarre. It simply does not compute in their "reality" television-addled minds that they don't have a moral right to sex anytime with anyone, or a "love life," regardless of how many minor children they have with multiple different partners. They don't understand there are benefits to a child having a married mother and father. Marriage, pregnancy, and divorce are all about the whims and wants of the adults, not about the needs of the children.
These people either do not believe that men and women are different and that both bring something of value to children, or they think men/husbands/fathers are destructive at worst, inferior superfluous duplications of mothers at best. Just look at how boys are! That's why boys need to be drugged!
So when you tell them the truth, it is like you are speaking a foreign language they've never heard. They don't know that children raised out of wedlock without fathers have more problems. They don't know that day care is inferior to mother-love, and there are plenty of "experts" willing to tell them it isn't. They don't know that exposing a minor child to their new lovers increases that child's risk of being abused. They don't know that second marriages with minor children have a 75% divorce rate, and even if they did, they don't believe divorce is bad. They have no clue! And they dismiss the people who tell them these things as extremists, or old-fashioned as if that makes it wrong or bad, or somehow "forcing religion" on them. It is all about "I feel..." and "I want..." and "I'm entitled to have someone who makes me happy", with "happy" being that rush they feel with a new relationship.
What are we doing to our children, and does anyone other than the "old fashioned" care?
Kenneth
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