It’s my favorite single-question pop quiz: What is the out-of-wedlock birth rate in The Bronx?
The answers I get from New Yorkers who should know better usually top out at 50 percent. Only occasionally does anyone come close to the correct answer: 70 percent.
You read it right — seven out of 10 babies born in The Bronx in 2010 were born to unmarried parents. The state recorded 22,386 live births in the borough that year, with 15,539 born to single mothers. More than 2,100 of those mothers were teens, some as young as 15.
Yet it is how most people react to hearing the correct answer that I find especially troubling. They are shocked it’s so high, but then shrug and mutter something like, “Well, I’m not surprised.”
That world-weary cynicism illustrates the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s meaning of “defining deviancy down.” His point was that a declining society accepts as normal bad things that are not normal. Numbness leads to inertia.
So it is with out-of-wedlock birth. As the proportion climbed and climbed, from single digits to 41 percent nationally, and 45 percent in the city, our political leaders responded with . . . silence. Even Mayor Bloomberg once said to me that “you know it’s something we can’t touch,” presumably because of the racial implications. Nationally, 73 percent of black children are born to single mothers.
That chat was about six months ago — but I am happy to report that Bloomy’s response could be outdated. City Hall is now getting ready to smash the taboo on confronting out-of-wedlock birth. Heart be still.
The effort is in the planning stage but likely will involve a public-service-style campaign, suggests Robert Doar, Bloomberg’s determined Human Resources commissioner. It will focus on “the outcome of the child,” meaning it will warn potential parents about the hard lives of children if the parents aren’t married.
Doar cites unstable homes, poverty, lower educational achievement and higher odds of criminal behavior as the fate of many children raised without a father. He also has a suggestion for journalists fond of tear-jerker stories about poor, single mothers. Ask them, he urges, “Where’s the father?”
Doar made the comments in a thoughtful speech last week when he won the Manhattan Institute’s Urban Innovator Award for fostering upward mobility instead of dependency among welfare recipients. He outlined Bloomberg’s philosophy that combines conservative principles of “work first” with the liberal instinct for government help, including Medicaid, food stamps and tax credits.
The city favors strong anti-fraud measures, saying bureaucrats “cannot be naive about the capacity of citizens” to rip off taxpayers. Doar also believes many advocates have “lost the message” of self-sufficiency.
But he reserved his sharpest language for out-of-wedlock births, saying that universities, religious institutions, the media and black and Hispanic leaders “refuse to take this issue on.”
He included President Obama. After saying the president’s personal family sets a great example, he added, “But he says so little and almost never turns his hypercritical eye on this important issue. He is very good at describing America’s shortcomings and hypocrisies and failures. But not this one.”
The remarks were so bold that I was compelled to ask Doar why the city had not publicly encouraged marriage before children. After all, Bloomberg ran TV ads against sugary drinks, smoking and trans fats but says not a word about the public-health crisis of more than 50,000 city children born each year to single parents.
Doar’s uplifting answer — that something is in the works — included his plan to confront many young people who believe “that somehow or other the government” will take care of them. The message will strive to be positive by getting potential parents “to consider the likelihood that their children will do well in school or succeed economically” if mom and dad are married.
Gotham being the capital of the “anything goes” culture, there will be vile denunciations from advocates and demagogic pols. Expect lawsuits and general hysteria over the quaint idea that an intact family is good for children.
Doar is ready with the right attitude about the likely mouthpiece for the resistance. Earlier, he noted a key to being a good welfare commissioner: “Don’t worry about anything The New York Times says.”
Amen, and full speed ahead.
Gov’s off the mark on frisk benefit
In his State of the State address, Gov. Cuomo was exuberant in his passion for more gun control, but his logic had missing links. Consider that New York City’s stop-and-frisk program prevents violence by taking illegal handguns off the streets.
Yet Cuomo’s single mention of the program carried a negative slant. In a section between increasing the minimum wage and ending false convictions, he rapped the NYPD.
“There is a challenge posed by the stop-and-frisk police policies,” he said. “Roughly 50,000 arrests in New York City for marijuana possession. Of those 50,000 arrests, 82 percent are black and Hispanic. These arrests stigmatize, they criminalize, they create a permanent record. It’s not fair. It’s not right. It must end. And it must end now.”
Cuomo’s policy aim, to de-criminalize small amounts of marijuana found in the searches, is reasonable. But top cop Ray Kelly already clarified rules to that effect.
More important, Cuomo ignored the fact that the NYPD is America’s best example of how to do gun control right. The city’s homicide rate fell 80 percent in 20 years, and there were nearly 100 fewer homicides in 2012 compared to 2011. That should be a national model.
While horrible mass murders in Connecticut and elsewhere involving semiautomatic assault rifles prompted Cuomo’s gun proposals, official homicide stats paint a different problem.
Of the 796 people murdered in New York state in 2011, only five were killed with rifles of any kind. Handguns were used in 397 murders and knives in 161.
Of course, more should be done to keep us safe, but perspective is important. The 2011 body count in New York amounted to nearly 30 times the toll at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Illegal handguns were the main weapon, yet those murders don’t have shock value because they happened one or two at a time.
To stop that slaughter, Cuomo can stand with the NYPD and copy its success around the state.
Tough Time for Chris
The sleazy Time magazine cover that made Jersey Gov. Chris Christie look like Tony Soprano on a bad day is fair warning to conservatives thinking of moving left. Always, Time marries the Democrat after screwing the Republican.
O hits a new Lew low
Nominating Jack Lew to be the next treasury secretary, President Obama offered mighty strange praise: “I know very few people with greater integrity,” he said.
So, where are they? Did those with greater integrity turn down the job, or didn’t Obama want a more honest man around?
Mike’s guy Geithner
Don’t be surprised if Tim Geithner ends up on Mayor Bloomberg’s payroll. Bloomy gushes over the soon-to-be-former treasury secretary, saying he’d hire him in a minute. Now’s his chance.