Get Hitched, Young Woman

Ruth Rosen
September 26, 2005

Ruth Rosen, professor emeritus at U.C. Davis and senior fellow at the Longview Institute is the author, most recently, of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.

Why have “out-of wedlock” pregnancies suddenly entered the national debate over President’s Bush’s astonishingly incompetent failure to rescue the poor in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina?

The answer is obvious: It’s a great way to change the subject, and to remind us that in contemporary America, only unmarried mothers fail to demonstrate “personal responsibility.”

Never mind that neither the Pentagon nor Congress can account for the $200 billion that have been spent waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or that George W. Bush has saddled the nation with a monstrous national debt. Never mind that he sent tens of thousands of young people to Iraq on cooked-up intelligence and that no government official has taken responsibility for the torture of prisoners. Or that Afghanistan is once again the world’s leading exporter of narcotics. Never mind that Bush chose Michael D. Brown, an inexperienced and incompetent crony, to run FEMA, with disastrous consequences.