Hardly a day goes by without news breaking of another shooting, a random subway attack, mass looting and the like in cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles.
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley recently told Fox News the liberals who want to throw money at the problem or excuse it away because of some supposed systemic oppression are looking for solutions in all the wrong places.
"We love to talk about social inequality, but we don't talk about how family structure contributes to social inequality in this country," he observes.
Specifically, he means fatherlessness.
"The correlation between a child coming from a fatherless home and ending up in prison or on drugs or a single parent himself are much more strongly correlated than it is with race, than it is with ethnicity, than it is from poverty and income level," Riley asserts.
Statistically, kids in two-parent homes do better in school, delay sexual activity, stay longer in jobs, and reap a myriad of other benefits. Riley says the evidence for this is indisputable; there are dozens of studies to back it up.
"They're role models," he calls involved fathers. "They teach their sons how to behave, how to carry themselves, how to treat women."
But that positive message does not sit well with today's woke liberals "who say this is moralizing, this is victimizing teen moms and blaming them for their circumstances."
In Riley's December column, "The biggest root cause of crime is fatherlessness," he commends the single mothers "who heroically beat these odds and raised children that have gone on to lead productive lives."
Still, he concludes, "The public-policy goal should be to reduce the number of people who will have to face those odds. And that means calling out behavior that is objectively harmful to people and society in general."
