Today’s lesson: Dan Quayle was right

Thank you for your Nov. 30 editorial, “Facing the child support dilemma,” which recounts the difficulty of collecting child support in this depressed economy. People, usually mothers, who find themselves in this situation, are encouraged to go to the Illinois Child Support Services to take advantage of the resources available through the state “to make a concentrated effort to marshal its not-insubstantial forces to collect all it can.”

The last paragraph acknowledges this is not an ideal solution, that there is a key quality on which all strategies can build: commitment. There is a better word (which is no longer politically correct to say): marriage. We show commitment by marriage and making a home, no matter how humble for any future children.

When former Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the TV show ”Murphy Brown” in which Candice Bergen played a well-off single woman who decided to have a baby without marriage, Quayle was met with a barrage of scorn. Years later, sociologists had to come back and say, “Dan Quayle was right.” Former Senator Daniel Moynihan of Massachusetts wrote his monumental work on the results of the single-parent family. Children from these situations often had children themselves outside marriage, dropped out of school in their teens, and were incarcerated in greater percentages. Even Moynihan met with scorn and seldom cited his own work again. Recent statistics show 33 percent of live births in the U.S. are to single mothers; among some minority groups it is 72 percent. Our first reaction to these statistics might be anger. But until we turn anger into pity — for thousands of fatherless children, for grieving grandmothers caught in the middle, for young men rotting in prison, for young women who have locked themselves into an almost certain life of poverty — the problem will continue unsolved.

Priscilla Weese

Wheaton