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The Myth of the "Deadbeat Dad" Although the sexual revolution has recently tried to distance itself from the class struggle, their origins are similar. As with previous episodes in the destruction of freedom, the politicization of the Sexual Revolution was built upon appeals to help “the poor.” The earliest institution of sexual warfare was the welfare state. The welfare state has been regarded as the triumph of class politics within the liberal democracies — the one successful achievement of socialism or “social democracy” that has grown and survived even in countries, like the US, which avoided these terms. Yet in retrospect, the welfare state stands as the first salvo of gender politics, following directly from the enfranchisement of doctrinaire feminists. Simultaneously, the professionalization of social work and its nationalization by government agencies led quickly to government control over the family. From its inception, each stage of US welfare state expansion was justified not simply for the poor but specifically for poor children. The interests of these children could also be gradually divorced from their parents, though in practice they tended to be identified with the mothers who claimed to be the guardians of those interests: increasingly, single mothers. The proliferation of single-mother homes lent superficial plausibility to the new rallying cry, the “feminization of poverty,” that shifted poor relief from a socialist to a feminist crusade. But the feminization of poverty was a deception from the start — a creation of ideology rather than an objective social reality and a textbook example of ideology creating its own grievances. Originally justified to provide for the families of men who had been laid off during economic downturns or eliminated by war, the welfare state quickly became a subsidy on single-mother homes and fatherless children. In good bureaucratic fashion, that is, it immediately set in to vastly expand and effectively to create precisely the problem of poverty it claimed to be alleviating. To justify this sleight-of-hand, the welfare state engineers needed a rationale, and they found it in one of the most potent and destructive falsehoods ever foisted on a well-meaning but gullible public, one that has served, directly or indirectly, to justify the exponential expansion of not only the welfare state but the scope and power of government in many areas. This is the falsehood that government must provide for massive numbers of women and children whose men are abandoning them. With the abrupt reversal of an airbrushed Kremlin photograph, the welfare state’s rationalizing figure was demoted from a hero to a villain. The same working men who, we were previously told, had been valiantly sacrificing themselves in imperialism’s wars or laid off as innocent victims of heartless capitalism were suddenly and ignominiously absconding from the bastards they had sired. Both the lucrative potential and the destructive force of this untruth are incalculable. It instantly legitimized the entire welfare state behemoth. Accept it, and virtually every expansion of both social welfare spending and law-enforcement authority is readily justified and, indeed, unanswerable. It thus prompted a spontaneous collusion of the left and the right: leftists loved it and conservatives feared it. Women and children are being abandoned by irresponsible men: no politician could resist that appeal. Significantly, the most eminent peddler of the falsehood was a radical leftist who skillfully began marketing himself as a family-values conservative. In his hugely influential 1995 book, Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn provided a superb description of the destructive social consequences resulting from the sudden appearance of tens of millions of fatherless children. But to make his case broadly palatable, he predicated it all on one fundamental, massive untruth: “Never before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers,” he declared. “Today, the principal cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice… the rising rate of paternal abandonment.” Blankenhorn provided no documentation for this libel against millions of innocent men who had no platform to speak in their own defense, and he has not done so subsequently when challenged to verify these statements. But the truth was very different. While examples can be found of anything, no evidence indicates that the ongoing crisis of fatherless children is caused primarily or even significantly by fathers abandoning their children. It is now very clear that it has been driven throughout by policies and agencies rooted in feminist ideology. Single mothers are not being, and never have been, thrown into poverty by absconding men; they are choosing it because it offers precisely the “sexual freedom” that is feminism’s seminal urge, regardless of the consequences for their children and society. Single motherhood is feminism’s most potent and most destructive achievement, and before the right audience feminists not only concede but boast about it. Single Mothers By Choice expresses this boast organizationally, and when pressed, most single mothers will insist that that is precisely what they are. “This is the life I chose,” declares one, and we are told by the sisters themselves that this is typical. Best-selling books now extol the practice and the “freedom” it confers, and they are celebrated in the media. “When you’re a single mom,” writes one promoter, “you don’t have to deal with unrealized expectations about your partner, nor do you have to cope with a partner’s preconceptions or expectations.” (Peggy Drexler, Raising Boys Without Men) In other words, it means sexual freedom and, above all, sexual power — with monopoly control over the children and, through the children, the father. While feminists readily pose as the champions of children when it comes to perpetuating welfare dependency, it is clear that, beneath the rhetorical fluff, the exhilarating power is more than adequate compensation for pulling their children into poverty. The very feminist intellectuals who popularized the term “feminization of poverty” defiantly declare as much: “Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms,” proclaim Barbara Ehrenreich and her colleagues (Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex), “still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.” Indeed, the great hoax of paternal abandonment is an optical illusion, for today it is not fathers who are abandoning both their marriages and also their children en masse. A glance at both the law and social infrastructure reveals that, under feminist prompting, it is quite clearly mothers. A panoply of mechanisms and institutions now allows liberated mothers to rid themselves, temporarily or permanently, of inconvenient children: A) “safe havens” legalize cost-free child abandonment by mothers; day care is tailored to the convenience of mothers (and employers), not the needs of children; B) foster care relieves single mothers who cannot provide their children basic care and protection; C) “CHINS” petitions (”Child In Need Of Services”) allow single mothers to unload unruly adolescent boys to the custody of social workers; D) “SIDS” and in some countries infanticide laws have now made even the murder of children by mothers semi-legal. E) And then of course there is abortion. When one adds the massive growth and proliferation of institutions not normally associated with welfare but whose purpose is clearly to relieve parents in general and mothers in particular of what had previously been their childrearing responsibilities — public schools, “early childhood education,” organized after-school activities, convenience food and fast food, psychotropic drugs to control undisciplined boys — we can begin to see how massively the society and economy have been gearing up for decades to facilitate single motherhood, marginalize fathers, collectivize childrearing, and generally render parents and families redundant.