WE saw George W Bush and his schemers use The Gays as a boogey man to energize the right, to our cost. It's a pretty deliberate scheme, and it still goes one...but what it leads to is a fundamental hypocrisy. From the LA TImes
Social conservatives say they're trying to address the problems of family breakdown, crime and welfare costs, but there's a huge disconnect between the problems they identify and the policy solutions they propose. It's almost like the man who looked for his keys on the thoroughfare, even though he lost them in the alley, because the light was better....
As a 2009 Heritage Foundation report stated, children born to single mothers "score lower on tests, have increased chances for committing a crime, have higher chances of living in poverty, experience more emotional and behavioral problems, are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol and have higher chances of becoming pregnant as teens." And social problems like that do tend to lead to higher government spending.
But those problems have nothing to do with abortion or gay marriage, the issues that social conservatives talk most about.
Abortion may be a moral crime, but it isn't the cause of high government spending or intergenerational poverty. And one thing gay couples are not doing is filling the world with fatherless children. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that allowing more people to make the emotional and financial commitments of marriage could cause family breakdown or welfare spending.
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