Stones Cry Out

you have got to be kidding. have you no idea about the economic/societal obstacles to material opportunity rampant in our our country? do you honestly think that the "haves" have, because they work harder and live a more morally correct way of life than the "have nots"? I'm shocked at the narrow-minded, bigoted, idiocy at what I've just read on your blog... I don't know what else to say, I'm sure you wouldn't understand it if I did, but you and people like you are the problem, not the opressed poor.

by the way, I would love to hear what correlation you believe there is between poverty and having "children out of wedlock"____ shyeah, that's what causes poverty.

Some observations:
1. Matt, you and your blogging colleagues apparently have a different perspective about vitriolic comments than we do at CGO. You are...patient. :)

2. Joe Stanford may have read widely and deeply in the sociology of family and the sociology of inequality & welfare, but based on his ridiculing skepticism about the robustness of the "out of wedlock" variable, I'd guess he has not read a single academic book or a single academic journal article on these subjects. Depending on the data set and statistics employed, the "out of wedlock" variable is at least ONE of the most potent variables that correlates to poverty and many see it as THE most potent variable.

If I am wrong, and Joe has actually read first rate social science on these subects and still holds his ridiculing skepticism, I'd be interested to know which scholars undergird this thinking.

Glenn and Matt,

I'm glad I checked back, so that I can clarify. I am not ridiculing the idea that out of wedlock births play a role in the issue of poverty. I am ridiculing the idea that out of wedlock births, play a differeent role than those within wedlock___ I believe what you're intending to discuss is an "absent father syndrome" or a "single parent household syndrome", which often arise from circumstances that begin with birth within wedlock. ascribing the cause of poverty to out of wedlock births misses this key fact.

While we are on this subject, absent father and single parent households, in the context of contemporary western society, do exacerbate the already existing root causes of poverty___ which, as I commented previously, are not tied to sexual promiscuity, but rather societal and economic inequities (you can read that as iniquities, if you like).

The assumption that I find the most ridiculous that the two of you seem to be espousing, is the idea that sexual promiscuity is (or for that matter, out of wedlock births are) confined to the economically impoverished. clearly it is not, and equally clearly, it then cannot be argued that it is a cause of that impoverishment. countless sexually promiscuous people are doing just fine financially, I know a number of them myself.

The most that can be said is that in our contemporary industrial/post-industrial society, individuals who have the responsibility to provide financial support for more offspring than they can afford, have a greater degree of difficulty in overcoming the economic obstacles already facing them.

to attribute the cause of poverty to sexual promiscuity or any other issue of moral degradation (with the possible exception of the ethical negligence of some of our legislators and an apparent majority of their constituencies), is naive, and I dare say, negligent.

glenn, you asked for a scholarly reference however you did not feel obliged to offer one of your own. don't worry, I don't need one and certainly don't think the existence of scholarly references give any credibility to a flawed argument. no matter how well supported an argument or a viewpoint is, if it is wrong it is wrong. that said, because you asked, I spent all of a minute and a half googling keywords "out . wedlock . variable . poverty" and found the following, which supports the viewpoint that joblessness and poverty lead to pathological behavior, not vice versa. I'm sure you could find an article that would disagree, but it was not difficult to find this one either. so here it is, I excerpted it from http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/jeffreyliebman/Liebman_Katz_Kling_Beyond_Treatment_Effects.pdf.

Sociological threshold models suggest that individual behaviors may change dramatically when
the percentage of the population engaging in a behavior reaches a threshold level (Granovetter,
1978). Such a model underlies Wilson’s (1987) theory of the black underclass. In Wilson’s
model, the deindustrialization of urban centers led to a concentration of joblessness and poverty;
once the concentration of poverty reached a sufficient level, pathological behaviors arose. In the
literature arising from Wilson’s work, a census tract poverty rate of 40 percent is often seen as
the threshold that produces high levels of drug use, out-of-wedlock-births, high-school dropouts,
and welfare dependency. However, evidence of poverty-rate threshold effects is sparse

Joe,

I replied to your comment that you posted at Common Grounds Online. I hope you take the challenge. If you do, I think you'll be surprised at the discrepancy between what you have been thinking that I believe, and what I actually believe.

http://commongroundsonline.typepad.com/common_grounds_online/2005/10/david_lumpkins_.html#comments

Matt, nice stuff in theory, but reality is that much poverty is punctuated by inequitable federal, state, and local policy, in particular, transportation and housing policy of the past 100 years. Read up on the Home Owners Loan Corporation and all the major transportation acts of this century. Then think about how these two pieces go together in creating and sealing off slums, leaving the poor (of all races) with no recourse as the feds subsidized the evisceration of inner city tax bases, leaving already poor communities devastated. L

ook, I know where you are coming from. Heck, I even used to take your view and I'm not excusing individuals who make poor and immoral choices that keep them in poverty. But just as we are doing with the war in Iraq to help create the conditions for change in the Middle East, it should be our (America's) moral obligation to create the conditions for change in our inner cities to right 100+ years of immoral federal ghetto policy. The transforming power of Jesus Christ is crucial for individual change, certainly. But God can and does use government to bring comfort to people in ways that church organizations cannot.

I completely agree with Mr. Lumpkins. I think the spiritual poverty within America is the main reason for economic poverty. America has all the resourses and economic capital needed to enrich everyone. To those who fret over the zillions of reasons why there is disparity and unfairness within the American system, you either don't understand or give creedance to the overall structure.

There are many evil people who twist the system for there own benefet, just as there are many fine Americans who don't use the system as well as they could.

Rick: Theory? What I said is a theory? Please. But you're saying the same thing I am. Federal action to reverse the disastrous politices of Roosevelt and Johnson aren't a bad thing. I was directing my comments towards those people, Christians included (see Wallis, Jim) who think that it's God's will to continue with the Great Society.

All I have to say is that I agree with MATT 100% and I think that the rest of the 700 club on this blog should plug it....