The Fatherless Effect

Over the last several months—and especially the last few weeks—much has been made of the “Ferguson effect.” The phenomenon is now so widely discussed that it has its own Wikipedia page (though I wouldn’t suggest visiting it for an explanation). St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson coined the phrase in November of 2014, but Heather MacDonald popularized it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2015. In early 2016, she again described the Ferguson effect:

Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated media and political discourse, from the White House on down. Cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities have responded by backing away from pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the vacuum.

In other words, because of the lies of liberals, many American policeman have taken their nightsticks and their nine-millimeters out of some of the most dangerous areas in the U.S. and criminals are taking full advantage. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, given that black Americans typically live in the most dangerous parts of our nation, it is black Americans who are suffering the most from police disengagement from “discretionary enforcement activity.”

In my last piece I barely mentioned the effects of the absence of fathers on black children in America. The current political and moral climate in the U.S. demands that we give this grave issue more attention. Again, out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. are at historic highs, and the vast majority of black children in America are born to single mothers. And just as criminal gangs and other undesirables fill the void of absent police officers in American neighborhoods, the same thing happens—but on a much larger and more destructive scale—when fathers are absent from the family.

There are over 100 cities in the U.S.—from Atlanta to Utica—with populations north of 50,000 in which more than half of the households are headed by single parents. Of course, the vast majority of these households are led by single moms. These cities are the most dangerous places in the U.S. Given the rate of black out-of-wedlock births, and with most black Americans living in large U.S. cities (about 75%), millions of American black children are growing up fatherless in the most crime-ridden places in America.

Among many other sad outcomes, fatherlessness is one of the leading predictors of future criminal activity. Children living with their married biological parents are the least likely to commit criminal acts. On the other hand, children from single-parent homes (almost always without a father) are “more likely to…engage in questionable behavior, struggle academically, and become delinquent.  Problems with children from fatherless families can continue into adulthood. These children are three times more likely to end up in jail by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in intact families, and have the highest rates of incarceration in the United States.”

As the breakdown of the family has been hotly debated in the U.S. for years now, you’ve almost certainly heard the above stats before. However, long before the rampant disintegration of the family in America began, researchers were revealing what common sense and sound morality always knew. As authors Kevin and Karen Wright point out:

Research into the idea that single-parent homes may produce more delinquents dates back to the early 19th century…. [O]fficials at New York State's Auburn Penitentiary, in an attempt to discern the causes of crime, studied the biographies of incarcerated men. Reports to the legislature in 1829 and 1830 suggested that family disintegration resulting from the death, desertion, or divorce of parents led to undisciplined children who eventually became criminals.  

Fatherlessness is the single greatest cause of poverty in the U.S. As Robert Rector pointed out years ago, “Being raised in a married family reduced a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 80 percent.” In order to further their big government agenda, modern liberals often point to education as the answer to poverty in America. However, marriage is a far better weapon against poverty than is education. Again, as Rector points out, “being married has the same effect in reducing poverty that adding five to six years to a parent’s level of education has.” In addition, a child living in a single-parent home where the parent is a college graduate is nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as a child living with their married parents whose highest level of education is completing high school.

Marriage provides the safest environment for children. In addition to being much more likely to live in crime-ridden communities, children born to single moms face much more danger inside the home than do children living with their married parents. As marripedia points out:

• The rate of physical abuse is 3 times higher in the single parent family.
• The rate of physical abuse is 4 times higher if mother is cohabiting with the child’s biological father (unmarried).
• The rate of physical abuse is 5 times higher if the child is living in a married step family.
• The rate of physical abuse is 10 times higher if the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.

The rates for sexual abuse are even worse than physical abuse:

• The rate of sexual abuse is 5 times higher in the single parent family and when both biological parents are cohabiting (i.e. unmarried).
• The rate of sexual abuse is 8.6 times higher if the child is living in a married step family.
• The rate of sexual abuse is 20 times higher if the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.

Contrary to popular belief, the most likely physical abuser of a child in a single-parent home is the mother. Because they lack the financial, emotional, and other support of a husband and a father in the home, single moms are more likely to experience anger, impatience, anxiety, and feelings of helplessness. Additionally, single moms are more likely to be depressed and feel rejected by their children than are women who have a husband.

As tragic as the outcomes of the Ferguson effect are, the fatherless effect is much more wide-ranging, common, and deadly in American society. The good news, though: if we solve the fatherless effect, there is not even an opportunity to experience the Ferguson effect. 

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2016, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

We Have a “War on Cops” because of the War on the Family

Just so we’re clear, here’s the left’s narrative on the police in America: There’s widespread and institutionalized racism inside America’s law enforcement agencies, and black Americans are especially targeted. This racism has led to the deaths of a disproportionate number of innocent black Americans. In order to stop this heinous activity, we need more gun control legislation, more wealth redistribution, more job and education programs, and thus Americans need to elect more Democrats.

Heather MacDonald (more than once), Larry Elder (more than once), and a host of others have provided mountains of evidence that prove beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no widespread special targeting of blacks by U.S. law enforcement. In addition to the crime statistics, consider: Of the 50 largest cities in the U.S., 30 percent have a black police chief. Of the 50 largest sheriff’s departments in the U.S., 12 percent were led by black Americans. (Remember, blacks are about 13 percent of the U.S. population, and sheriffs are usually elected.)

Barack Obama, the U.S. President and Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military—the largest, most powerful military in the world—is a black man. The U.S. Attorney General—the chief law enforcement officer and chief lawyer of the U.S. government—Loretta Lynch, is a black woman. The previous U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, is a black man. No doubt there are racists within U.S. law enforcement—as there are in almost any agency, institution, or organization in America—however there is no way a nation achieves the racial diversity detailed above if widespread, institutionalized racism exists.

In spite of this information, whenever the national conversation turns to confrontations between white cops and black suspects, the narrative at the beginning of this piece—the narrative of Black Lives Matter—dominates the mainstream media. Remember, the Black Lives Matter movement gained national attention because of a lie. Black Lives Matter was founded after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. However, the movement became known nationally after the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

After Brown’s death, the supposed gesture and words of surrender by Brown—“Hand’s Up, Don’t Shoot!”—became a frequent rallying cry for those protesting Brown’s death. However, after a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, it was concluded that Brown didn’t have his hands up and didn’t cry “Don’t shoot” when Officer Wilson shot him. Even liberal apologist Jonathan Capehart had to admit that, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie.” Nevertheless, as we see today (scroll about one-third the way down), the narrative continues.

One of the reasons the deceptive liberal narrative about black lives is so doggedly defended and regularly repeated is that the truth about the very real suffering in the American black community runs counter to modern liberal dogma. The biggest reason for the rampant lawlessness and poverty that is so prevalent in the black community is the breakdown of the family.

It has been widely reported for years now that the out-of-wedlock birth rate among American blacks is over 70 percent. Almost always, mothers are left to raise their children alone. In U.S. cities, where the violence and poverty among U.S. blacks is most pronounced, the out-of-wedlock birth rate is even worse. For example, in Chicago about 80 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Today, only 17 percent of American black teenagers reach age 17 in a family with their biological parents married to each other. In no state in the U.S does black family intactness exceed 30 percent.

Social science is finally revealing what sound morality and good common sense always told us: Children of single mothers do worse in almost every metric measured: school achievement, poverty, crime, emotional well-being, drug use, delinquency, violent behavior, and so on. These negative outcomes are even worse for black children born to single mothers. Millions of black youths—because of the frequent absence of fathers, especially black males—are growing up poorly disciplined, poorly educated, and poorly churched.

Thus, gangs and crime have become far too common in the black communities of America. Sadly, these broken and vulnerable black families typically live in the most dangerous parts of our nation. From the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, until the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011, there were 4,485 U.S. casualties. The city of Chicago alone had 4,265 murders during the same time period. Perhaps the most shocking statistic of all when it comes to black Americans and violence is that black men in the U.S. are half as likely to die if they are in prison than if they are not.

However, easily the most dangerous place for a black child in America is the womb. This is horrifically sad when one considers that a mother’s womb should be one of the safest places in the universe. Since the Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973, abortion has killed more black Americans than crime, accidents, cancer, heart disease, or AIDS. Since 1973, abortion has taken the life of more black Americans than any other single cause of death. Again, in U.S. cities, these numbers are even more staggering. In New York City, in 2012, more black children were aborted than were born.

As Mother Teresa warned us, “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” Thus, we should not be surprised that, where there is rampant abortion, there is also rampant violence. In spite of all of this, Black Lives Matter and their liberal apologists refuse to stand up for black children in the womb.

As I have often said, after our relationship with our Creator, the most important relationship in the universe is the relationship between a husband and his wife. Any other type of union is a perversion of one of the oldest truths in the history of humanity. Such a conclusion is in direct opposition to the pro-homosexual, pro-abortion, pro-big-government—which could all be summed up as the anti-family—agenda of today’s American left. For decades now, modern American liberals have waged war on the family. They have lied about sex and sexuality, about the importance of mothers and fathers, about marriage, and about life in the womb. The rotten fruit of these lies is widespread death and destruction. It is the politics, policies, and practices of liberalism that have robbed America’s black communities of peace and prosperity and turned our police officers into targets.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2016, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Liberals Fiddle While Black Communities Burn (UPDATED)

I don't yet know the complete story of the MN or LA shootings where black men were killed by police in what some are calling suspicious circumstances. Few do know the complete story. If the police acted criminally, let justice be done. However, we do know that institutionalized police violence is FAR from the biggest problem the black community in America faces. As many U.S. cities have suffered from the "Ferguson effect," the real problems in the black community become more clear. As Heather MacDonald reveals:

Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies. 

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawal from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum. (An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian.)

Like across the rest of the U.S., the vast majority of the victims in the Chicago violence are black Americans. The vast majority of the perpetrators are young black males from broken (read: "fatherless") homes. For decades now numerous liberal policies have undermined the family in America--especially the black family--and just as is the case with terrorism and Islam, liberals across the U.S. ignore the real causes of the evil that plagues us and continue to play their foolish political games.

Maybe liberals will tell us that we need more abortions of black children. After all, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's vision has only been partially realized: Only about half of the black population in the U.S. has been wiped out by abortion.

And now it seems, those political games have again turned deadly. Late Thursday evening, at a Black Lives Matter Next Generation Action Network protest in Dallas, TX, four five police officers were killed and 11 7 more injured. Again, few details are in. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: A self-described "black power group," has claimed responsibility for the Dallas cop murders. "Black Power Political Organization" wrote on its Facebook account that it was behind the attack and that "more assassinations are coming".

We are NEVER going to solve the problem of violence in the black community, we are NEVER going to solve the problem of the "War on Cops" until we stop waging war on the family.

Trevor Thomas

Tyler Perry Betrays his Faith and his Message

A few days ago, Tyler Perry did what is all too common these days among those who have surrendered themselves to the Hollywood hook-up culture: he proudly and glowingly announced the birth of his child with his long-time on-again, off-again girlfriend, Gelila Bekele, a 28-year-old Ethiopian model.

The 45-year-old Perry, in an interview with EXTRA, said, “We're having a baby. She and I are very excited. I'm happy. I'm really excited about it.” During the interview Perry noted how the pending birth of his son (Perry inadvertently revealed the child’s gender) which “God has allowed” to come into his life—as if the boy just fell from the sky—has already changed his life.

“The greatest gift that I'm being given right now,” Perry declared, “is the opportunity to give the little boy in me everything I never had. So that's what I'm so excited about. This beautiful human being that God has allowed to come into my life, for me to get to know, because they come in their own personalities and who they are, and just shepherd and usher him into whatever the child is supposed to be is what, I'm gonna do.”

Tyler Perry disappoints on so many levels with this news. Perhaps we should not be surprised from an enabler of liberalism, but when Perry burst into the national spotlight about a decade ago, his story and his story-telling seemed to be a refreshing departure from what Hollywood usually presents.

In an interview in 2005, Perry said that “family and faith” were very important to him, adding that “I am a Christian, I am a believer, and I know had I not been a person of faith, I couldn't be here in this place, and I wouldn't be walking the path that I'm on now.” Perry also discussed his efforts of working the themes of faith and family into his films.

Much of Tyler Perry’s story is admirable. He overcame a very rough childhood; he has openly acknowledged being the victim of both physical and sexual abuse. One of the reasons Perry has given for the physical abuse he suffered is that the man who raised him, Emmitt Perry, was not his biological father.

On this, Tyler Perry is probably correct. As I’ve noted before, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America is in a home where the man present is not the biological father (ask Adrian Peterson). Again, this is especially true within the black family. Tyler Perry almost certainly knows this. Yet, his actions have created a scenario where his own child may face such a situation.

After all, how likely is it that Perry and Bekele will marry, commit to one another for life, and give their children both a mom and a dad in the home? I certainly hope this is the case, but Mr. Perry has given no indication that this will happen. Given the culture of Hollywood, it is much more likely that we will soon hear that Perry and Bekele are both in other “relationships.”

As almost any real parent rooted in sound morality knows, marriage and parenting require a great deal of sacrifice and selflessness. And parenting certainly is not about giving the “little boy in you” everything you never had. Career paths and plans may have to be altered, and more time will need to be spent at home. Marriage and parenting are hard work!

Whether we’re talking marriage, money, or monogamy, because of the efforts of the great deceiver, doing the right thing is often difficult. Of course, we all fall short. However, once a Christian recognizes the error of his ways, the proper thing to do is repent, not celebrate. For a highly public figure like Tyler Perry, this repentance should take place somewhat publicly, or at least he should publicly display an attitude of repentance.

This is especially the case given the devastation that out-of-wedlock births have brought to our nation, particularly the black family. It’s one thing to stumble, fall, and then surrender to God and allow Him to pick you back up and place you on that narrow path. It’s quite another to fall and then wallow in the filth with those who say that your faith is a lie and you can do whatever you want as long as it makes you happy.

Tyler Perry spoke at the funeral of Whitney Houston. He also laid hands on and prayed for TD Jakes. He has been open and unapologetic about his faith. He has said that he believes that God has called him to tell his story. This makes it all the more important that he speak and live the truth when it comes to the defining moral issues of our time.

During his 2005 interview, Perry was asked about his reaction to Bill Cosby’s outspoken criticism of the black community. Cosby has been one of the rare bold voices speaking truth when it comes to the breakdown of the black family. Perry noted that “Dr. Cosby and I are saying the exact same things.” Of course, as even most children know, what we say matters little if our actions don’t support our words. In other words, it’s not enough to have fictional tales that reflect the biblical truth on marriage (or any other issue); your personal life should bear such witness as well.

Copyright 2014, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

BET is Part of the Problem

Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Bob Johnson recently angrily lamented the black unemployment rate in the U.S. “This country would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent… somebody’s going to have to pay— 34 million African-Americans are not going to leave this country…Somebody’s going to have to pay for them. Somebody’s going to have to take care of them, and if somebody’s going to have to take care of them that money’s got to come from somebody. And whoever’s paying for it is going to be upset about it, and they’re going to start looking for somebody to blame,” said Johnson.

Johnson recently (late February) commissioned a poll of just over one-thousand black Americans. In spite of lingering high black unemployment, blacks have an overwhelmingly (91%) favorable opinion of President Obama. Though the poll does not ask about democrats in general, blacks, as they have now for decades, continue to vote almost exclusively for democrats.

In other words, in spite of constantly trailing other groups in virtually every economic metric, blacks continue to support a political party and its liberal policies that have significantly contributed to perpetuating poverty within the black community and across the U.S. in general.

The poll also revealed that half of black Americans blamed high black unemployment on the failures of the American education system. While it is good to see blacks acknowledging the failures of America’s public school system, it seems that too many—Bob Johnson included—are blind to the most significant problem within black America: the breakdown of the family.

Today an obscene number—72%—of black children are born to unwed mothers. “The single biggest predictor of poverty is family structure,” wrote Gary Palmer of the Alabama Policy Institute. According to Census data, marriage drops the probability of child poverty by 82%.

Yet what does Bob Johnson’s network glorify and promote? (Though no longer owner or CEO of BET, Johnson is heavily responsible for making BET what it is today.) BET’s programming is replete with sexual, profane, and violent content. BET music videos are especially degrading to women. What’s worse, much of this content is aimed at children and teenagers. Bombarded with such imagery, what are many young black men going to replicate as they mature into adulthood? This is especially true if they don’t have a father in the home to teach (and model for) them the truth.

BET could help fill this void, or, even better, help reduce it. Instead, they are part of the problem.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com