FIRlnGLlne WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. DAVID BLANKENHORN "AN APPROACH TO ILLEGITIMACY?"

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1 The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. 0 FIRlnGLlne HOST: GUEST: SUBJECT: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. DAVID BLANKENHORN "AN APPROACH TO ILLEGITIMACY?" FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL. This is a transcript of the Firing Line program (#968/2236) taped in New York City on April 27, 1993, and telecast later on public television stations. copyright 1993 NATIONAL REVIEW

2 The issue before the house is the rising rate of illegitimate children. Their incidence has almost tripled among whites in the last 30 years, rising to 17 percent, and among blacks it has risen to 62 percent. Most people know intuitively that the rise in single-parent households is the greatest single inducement to drugs, to crime, to poverty and to illiteracy. But the question is being faced, interestingly enough, not at a single level--i.e., what can be done about it?--but also at a second level--should we in fact attempt to do anything about it? The latter position is taken by those who believe that emphasis on marriage is a reactionary, retrograde movement designed to subordinate the mother socially and economically. To discuss the question, we have here David Blankenhorn, who is the president of the Institute for American Values in New York City. He and Barbara Whitehead have jointly published several articles, and Ms. Whitehead is the author of the article featured in the current Atlantic Monthly, a runaway bestseller, called Dan Quayle Was Right, i.e., about Murphy Brown. Mr. Blankenhorn is a Virginian. At Harvard he graduated with honors, going on to the University of Warwick in England to get his graduate degree. The organization he heads up is devoted to research, publication and public education on issues of family policy. I'd like to begin by asking Mr. Blankenhorn: Is it assumed or anticipated by unmarried mothers what special difficulties they will face in raising their children, or are these all adventitious? It used to be assumed, of cou~se, that raising a child alone presented all kinds of problems for the child and for the mother. That's shifted quite a bit in the last 20 years and now, I'd say, especially actually among people other than the single parents themselves, in the society as a whole, there is increasingly a point of view that says, well, it's okay. I mean, Do children need fathers? And the answer used to be yes, they need them. And now it's, not necessarily, seems to be the-- What I have especially in mind to ask you about is the notion in general circulation that many teenage girls become mothers because they calculate that there is an economic benefit in doing so--separate households, welfare and so on and so forth. Is that a position that is documentable, or is that simply an intuition? It's mostly an intuition. If it accounts for much of the problem, it only accounts for a small fraction of the problem. That is, the economic advantages or the economic l

3 inducements for single parenthood is mostly welfare, and I think it can be fairly said by the people who have studied this the hardest that it doesn't encourage it, but it does permit it. That is, for someone who is looking at her options in life, if the options aren't very good to begin with--and "Should I have a child?," welfare permits that choice to be made. Now does one of the recommendations that you or your organization make touch on welfare policies toward unmarried mothers? Well, my own view is that the welfare system now is a pretty strong disincentive for marriage and a pretty strong disincentive for responsible fatherhood, so that we should eliminate those disincentives. Now, who are the principal backers of the contrary lobby? Is it just unmarried mothers or is the normal congeries of people who-- More the normal group. I mean, interestingly in our interviews, we found the most severe critics of the current welfare system to be the people who are on it. They will tell you in unequivocal terms that it's a pretty terrible thing and they will tell you that one of the terrible things about it is that it's part of a system that effectively keeps men out of family life. So the welfare people themselves, the people who receive it, are pretty critical of it. But I think there is a sense that it's just become a kind of--i don't know--an encrusted way of doing things that's developed its own sort of rationale over time. And I also think frankly that sometimes--sometimes I wonder, Who is the real beneficiary from the welfare system? That is, sometimes I think it's the people who aren't on it, who by it are allowed to feel that they are doing something compassionate. That is, we are the beneficiaries of a system that, if we looked closely at it and asked the people who are on it, we would see that it's a pretty terrible system. Well, do-- I do want to say one other thing, though. Yes. I think this explains only a small fraction of the problem, that the trend toward family fragmentation is society-wide and it can't be explained simply by the welfare system. 2

4 No, I am going to touch on that rather heavily. But let me ask you this one question before we dispose of it: To what extent are these sort of ultra-feminist pulsations coming in at you that really we have a situation now in which women finally affirm their individualism? They have a child if they want a child, but they don't need a husband. And therefore, it would be, as I said, retrograde to move in such a direction as to put pressure on the mother to be married. Well, there is a school of thqught that says that single parenthood, single motherhood, is a statement of independence, "We can do this without men." And there is a school of thought that says if a mother has to choose between relying upon a husband and relying upon the state, that it's better to rely upon the state because they are less troublesome than relying upon husbands. But that's kind of--that's a small opinion. It's lodged in the elite debate. It has almost no adherents on the ground. It's an intellectual argument that has a lot of influence, I think, in the media and so on, but it doesn't have-- I would say there are not that many-- It's not the kind of thing the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention would stress. Well, that's another question, but it's not the kind of thing that you would find if you just rounded up the first ten grandmothers that you found in Toledo or Baton Rouge. [laughter] Well, let me ask you a question which is both delicate and terribly important. The whole notion of sanctions traditionally relies for their effectiveness mostly on public opinion rather than the law. I think it was--no, it was Jefferson--who said that public opinion is more important than the law because the law is merely a codification of public opinion. Now, years ago the actress who played in Casablanca- what's her name? Was it Lauren Bacall? No, Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman. Ingrid Bergman, yes. She came over and she had just had a child out of wedlock and she was scheduled to go on a popular program, the Sullivan program. And there were protests sort of from coast to coast. Now, I'm not asking you to be censorious on the point but simply to make a social statement on the efficacy, or lack of it, of the judgment of one's peers. In the last few months we've had three spectacular out-of-wedlock births: Warren Beatty, Eddie 3

5 Murphy, and Jack Nicholson. And it seems not to matter to anybody. Up until 25 years ago, you couldn't enter the royal circle in Ascot if you had ever been divorced, let alone- which, by the way, would have excluded an awful lot of royal relatives of the Queen. [laughter] Right. But I guess the question I am asking is: What is it that has happened that causes public sentiment simply to adjourn-- Right. --any adverse judgment on people who have children without making the basic commitment associated with marriage? Right. This is the heart of the matter. And a good analogy, I think, is smoking. Because it's really not true that we are becoming a more permissive society across the board. We in fact are raising our standards of expectations of private behavior in the whole area of what might be called the natural ecology, and smoking is really the best.example. No one's smoking here. Two or three decades ago it probably would have been quite common. So smoking is something that people do privately. We haven't outlawed it, but what we have done is stigmatize it--stigmatize it and tax it--so that people are made-- And that works, doesn't it? People are made to feel bad if they smoke. It's seen as something that's not a good thing to do. Why? Because the society has essentially changed its mind on this issue and said, "Here is a private behavior that has social consequences. Therefore, it's a good thing to uphold certain cultural norms and social values on this issue of smoking." So we're raising our standards-- and-- But you have to have a consensus on toxicity, You do. And of course, at the beginning of the smoking debate there were counter-studies and people arguing that in fact smoking relaxed you-- But that was special interest stuff. But the Playboy philosophy is absolutely articulate on this point, namely that sexual intercourse is exclusively for pleasure. That's right. 4

6 And I see nothing-- Commitments are a bind. And I see nothing-- Yes. I see nothing happening that seems to challenge that. Sure, in terms of Christian orthodoxy that is challenged. But I don't see any counterpart to the anti-smoking ranks mobilizing, do you? The only glimmer I see is that there is an increasing social awareness that child well-..being is declining and that the result of a rather vast social experimentation of the past three decades in family fragmentation, family diversity, has produced a now rather long-term trend of declining child well-being. And I think-- Well, but does it-- --there is a general sense that that's true and that it is linked to the issue of family fragmentation. But that might mobilize pressures for birth control or for abortion without necessarily mobilizing pressures against licentious sex, or is it axiomatic that the two are related?-- i.e., to the extent that there is licentious sex, there is going to be more births, more illegitimate births. I think you are right in the sense that there isn't really yet a very good way that the obvious can be stated on this point. I mean, what's interesting to me about the whole family structure debate now is not so much this sort of empirical evidence that tells us that mothers and fathers married to one another are the best way to bring up children. It's a little bit like, you know, using social science to show that the earth is round. But what's really interesting is this other question you raise, of why is it so hard, especially in our elite discourse-- We don't even have a vocabulary for talking about it. You know, you can't say anything that would make someone feel bad. You can't say something that would be considered as judgmental. The other thing you ~an't do is make what the social scientists would call a confirmed empirical generalization because, you know-- Again, to get back to the smoking analogy, here's an example of a confirmed empirical generalization: Smoking can be hazardous to your health. A sort of clinical veto of that generalization is, "Why, I know Frank next door who smoked two packs a day for 30 years; he's healthy as a horse." In our debate about smoking, we don't let the example of Frank veto the confirmed empirical generalization that smoking can be hazardous to your health. In our debate about illegitimacy, out-of-wedlock childbearing, it governs. Someone can say, "Well, aren't a lot of two-parerit 5

7 families terrible?" Well, yes, that's true. "Aren't there a lot of single moms who do a great job?" Well, that's true too. So therefore, you have nothing to say. "Wasn't Alexander Hamilton illegitimate?," that sort of thing. Yes, right. Right. So you're right. We can't-- The interesting question is why we have lost our vocabulary for discussing this issue, why we can't have a reasoned, moral discourse about this topic without it becoming politicized, turned into therapeutic talk and so on. Well, now, your institute permits or does not permit, encourages or does not encourage, value judgments of a kind that some would call censorious? For instance, would you permit yourself to be the author of the statement, "There should not be freelance intercourse between people who do not intend to be married"? Well, my own view-- Or would that strike you as Calvinistic? Well, my own view, which is maybe a little bit not quite what you're asking me, but I think unwed parenthood is morally wrong. That's what I would say. Well, now, is there-- That's my value judgment on that. There is obviously a biological correlation between intercourse and parenthood. (laughter] Right, right. correlation-- But to the extent that that is a flexible Right. --should empirically minded people put their money in the bank of prophylactic intercourse or interdictive intercourse? I wrote a piece a couple of days ago in which I said, you know, somebody ought to form an organization called Unplanned Parenthood [laughter] and see whether or not that gets better results than Planned Parenthood. The more money Planned Parenthood spends, the more unplanned parenthood one seems to get, right? Have you reached an empirical conclusion about the correlation between, say, early sex education and unplanned births? 6

8 The best studies I've seen suggest that, for example, in the schools, sex education as currently is taught, condom distribution, counseling of one kind or another, does seem to produce a net increase in what we are trying to stop. Now tell me why. Is it because it is kind of an aphrodisiac, the whole experience? I don't know if it's an aphrodisiac. I use that as a metaphor. [laughter] I think that what it is, is this fundamental conflict between on the one hand, the drive to normalize everearly sexual experiences on the part of young people. "It's a normal, healthy thing. It's up to you, based on your personal choice, consulting your own individual value system, and we are here"--we, the teachers, the counselors, the therapists, the health care workers--"are here to help you--" Make it painless. --"realize your personal choices and philosophy in this matter, and to tell you what they all are, and to tell you that they are all, from a kind of moral point of view, more or less equivalent except insofar as you choose one or the other." And on the other hand, that approach seems to be, generally speaking, incompatible with, "Don't have sex. Don't have sex until later or until you are married." Those two things are incompatible. And so insofar as there is a tension, we have shifted more toward I think what I would call the sexualization of childhood, that is, the belief that whereas heretofore we have tended to protect children from having the burden of sexual decision-making, we now ask them to accept that burden themselves, in part because we are no longer as adults willing to accept it for them. And so we tell the child, "You now decide. You are an eight- or ten- or elevenyear-old sexual being. You decide." In one of the big public school systems, there is actually a bill of rights for children, and the first thing that they teach the children when they hand out the bill of rights is that, "You have the right to decide when you will have sex and whom you will have it with." That's kind of a--you know, your tax dollars at work, the bill of rights. Yes. Well, there are two points here that we are juggling. One is empirical and the other is moral, and of course we don't hesitate as required to relate the two. But are you telling me that sex education courses, even though they are theoretically designed to prevent unwilling pregnancies, in fact promote unwilling pregnancies? Is it because people don't 7

9 listen to the lessons that they are being told, or is it simply because of the statistical uncertainty of the result? Well, first of all, there is the question of how many of the pregnancies are actually unwilling--i mean, how many of them are actually, you know-- Do you have figures on that? No. There are also some examples that go counter to the point I am making. For example, there are some schools where you have a very, very high rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing, where at least in the first few years the introduction of counseling and distribution of condoms and so on has resulted-- You mean after the first birth? No, period. --has resulted in fewer pregnancies and childbirths. But I think the weight of evidence suggests that for most schools, introducing this notion, which I would call the sexualization of childhood--that is, the current way of teaching about sex and the current way of thinking about distributing birth control and so on--well, I think that the net result of this is more sex and more pregnancy. I know there are people who would say that they have studies that show differently, but I think the weight of evidence is not good. Therefore, my conclusion from this is that this is not essentially a health problem; this is not essentially a legal problem; it is a cultural, normative problem, and it is about finding a way-- I mean, you know, the real word is a "stigma," and you know, people recoil from that, but it is actually what it is. In the case, I think, of to some degree, both divorce and unwed parenthood, which are the two twin engines driving the family breakup phenomenon, more judgment, more of a sense of, "This is not a good thing." Well, now, in your judgment, to generate, or rather to regenerate, that ethos, is it important to stress only the empirical point, or is there a moral dimension that can still be vitalized? That is, if you could say, "Look, here is solid proof that children born out of wedlock are going to suffer and the whole society is going to suffer derivatively, for that reason don't do X," or are you also oriented toward the possibility of saying, "Don't do X because doing X is not right"? Well, it's a very hard thing, something that I struggle with a lot in my work. Because of the nature of what my institute does, we are trying to make an argument to what might be called the sort of elite discourse. That's where we are trying to be heard, and so we use social science and we 8

10 ... Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. use--i'll say "I"--use social science evidence and try to- You know, you've heard the old joke: Two hundred years ago if you wanted to make a point, quote the Bible; a hundred years ago if you wanted to make a point, quote a great work of literature; and today if you want to make a great point, quote a poll or a social science study. So it's at least open to question whether or not that represents progress in terms of being able to make a strong argument. But that's the playing field that's out there in the elite debate. But I also think that it's necessary at the same time to be clea~ as we can about the sort of normative framework that we're operating from. For example, in a book I'm working on now on fatherhood, we have a chapter on the evolution of fatherhood, using biological and anthropological evidence. And the next part of it will be a look at fatherhood in the book of Genesis, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, and two or three fairy tales--that is, through folk wisdom and-- Huckleberry Finn is not a very good recommendation. Well, it is an example of what I guess would be called a dysfunctional family. [laughter] Yes. And it's interesting that the-- The point is to revibrate that literature to show its continuing relevance. The point is that your conclusion after you evaluate the anthropological and biological evidence about what is a father, and your conclusion, if you evaluate these great texts, are synonymous. Thank you, Mr. Blankenhorn, from the American Values Institute; and we have with us today, 85 percent of the membership of the Republican Club of Harvard and Radcliffe. [laughter] Welcome. 9