No Dunn At Redsfest?

[919191]

Jeez...we hijacked this thread. Sorry, folks!

[dougflynn23]

40% of the children today are born out of wedlock. The vast majority of men in prision are born out of wedlock. There are great examples of children that have overcame the odds and become productive, well-rounded adults. There are also examples of dead beats that came form 2 parent homes. With that being said the childs best chance is growing up in a 2 parent home, statistics don't lie.

I wonder how those odds change when you factor out of the 40% those children who have one of the parents making $10M or more in annual salary.

BTW.....since it's a boy, can we start referring to him as the "Little Burro" since his father is the "Big Donkey"?

[vaticanplum]

40% of the children today are born out of wedlock. The vast majority of men in prision are born out of wedlock. There are great examples of children that have overcame the odds and become productive, well-rounded adults. There are also examples of dead beats that came form 2 parent homes. With that being said the childs best chance is growing up in a 2 parent home, statistics don't lie.

Ok. That's an interesting use of stats for your argument. The majority of men in prison are black. Are all black men doomed to commit crime? The majority of people in prison are men. Should we ship all males out of the country? If the prison-bound out-of-wedlock children were born to those same parents and those parents had been married, I don't their chances would have increased much. If they didn't have random strangers consigning them to a terrible life because "the odds are against them," maybe their chances would go up.

George, I'm not arguing that stats point to a child born out of wedlock as the most ideal of situations. But the prison stat, for example...it's not as simple as a marriage license. It's like the misleading stat that says that people who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce. This is largely because in this day and age, when co-habitation is pretty socially acceptable, people who refuse to live together before marriage are the ones most likely to hang onto a marriage and refuse divorce even if the marriage turns out badly. There may be more men in prison whose parents weren't married, but that's not due to something as simple as a marriage license. It's due to the fact that some people who make the decision not to marry sometimes make it because they have made bad choices or don't have certain resources available to them. The "problem" to be fixed is not whether the baby is born before or after marriage; the problems are poverty, poor education, dangerous neighborhoods, etc. If you're truly concerned about "illegitimacy" and its effects on our country, I suggest you use your time to look into solving those things, rather than consigning a baby to the doghouse at birth.

If it's "odds" that matter to you, by the way, I'm guessing that the very baby who brought this up, Baby Dunn, is not likely to fall into that category. And things in general have changed a lot. There are plenty of babies whose parents are committed but not married, whose parents are stable, nurturing people who don't want to be in a relationship, whose parents are single but knew they'd make could parents, whose parents can't get married. And these babies do ok. Where are the stats for what percentage of out-of-wedlock babies do ok now as opposed to a few hundred years ago? Do you really believe that America doesn't "need" any of them? Again, if you're that concerned about babies in that situation, maybe they need you. It's hard for me to understand in what ways a country "doesn't need" children.

If this is too political, I apologize. It was brought up and I only felt it prudent to respond. It just boggles my mind that in America, the revolutionary nation which was the first in history to declare that your life is what you make of it, not how you were born into it, some people are still so concerned with the circumstances out of someone's control at birth.

[westofyou]

It just boggles my mind that in America, the revolutionary nation which was the first in history to declare that your life is what you make of it, not how you were born into it, some people are still so concerned with the circumstances out of someone's control at birth.

Alexander Hamilton says hello.

John Adams called Hamilton a "bastard"

And here we stand today.....

Yankee Doodle
Judged a man.....