Barack Obama was the clear winner in last night’s debate, therefore proving my theory that someone must have drugged him during the first abysmal show last month. Yesterday when the issue of gun control was brought up, Mitt Romney went on a tangent. He said something to this effect: of course he’ll never do anything to imperil the Second Amendment, but agreed that guns should be taken from the hands of criminals. But what struck me was that he used that subject for an awkward segue to talk about the rising out-of-wedlock rate and how children without two parent households are contributing to gun violence. While his comment had a very loose link to gun control, he’s right about one thing. Studies consistently show that kids from fatherless homes are more likely to engage in violent crime.

What he did right there folks, gives a hint as to what will come if he becomes president. You can forget about all the social programs that all the liberal bleeding hearts advocate to “save the children” and to help the impoverished. He and his administration won’t be buying it. I would bet my firstborn (a child I had when I was unmarried) that the Romney Administration will throw their dollars and support towards programs that support marriage. There will be sweeping campaigns to encourage the benefits of marriage, namely the idea that you’ll be a lot less poor if you have another working parent in your household and therefore won’t ever need welfare (that was sarcasm).

Why Does Romney Care?

So why all the attention to single parents all of a sudden? I can guarantee you it’s not because the black community has an 80% out of wedlock rate for first children born to black women. If they cared, something would have been done eons ago. But let’s be frank…white folks care for their own. And now that the OOW rate is affecting the white community, policy makers, sociologists, legislators and the like are bumping into each other and wringing their hands about how to find a solution. If you think this isn’t so, then perhaps you might want to pick up a copy of Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 by Charles Murray, the infamous co-author of The Bell Curve. In Coming Apart:

Murray meticulously chronicles and measures the emergence of two wholly distinct classes: a new upper class, first identified in The Bell Curve as “the cognitive elite,” and a new “lower class,” which he is too polite to give a name. And he vividly localizes his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one college degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any. (Read: Tonyville and Trashtown.)

The key point is that the four great social trends of the past half-century–the decline of marriage, of the work ethic, of respect for the law and of religious observance–have affected Fishtown much more than Belmont. As a consequence, the traditional bonds of civil society have atrophied in Fishtown. And that, Murray concludes, is why people there are so very unhappy–and dysfunctional.

If you’ve noticed an uptick in the rhetoric about single parenthood, the out of wedlock rate and how it relates to poverty, just know it’s not your imagination. Trust and believe there are folks working right now to bring forth policy to address the problem, and I for one don’t think that’s a bad thing. At this point only the truly delusional can argue that the policies over the last 40 years, along with a massive culture shift about how children should be raised has been successful. It hasn’t. And for the people who will come to this thread chomping at the bit to cry how their mother was a single parent and you “came out fine!!!” I want to give you a preemptive and symbolic cookie, pat you on the head, and remind you that we are not talking about the exceptions.

Two years ago me and a host of other No Wedding No Womb! participants predicted that the days of all these social programs and government handouts were numbered. With a deficit deeper than all the oceans on Earth and spending already through the roof, don’t expect the government to hand over freebies like Lyndon Johnson did, because some would argue he started this whole mess in the first place (Murray does). The chickens are coming home to roost and the hens are going to have to figure out a way to manage all those, uh…cocks.