CPAC panel: ‘Feminist ideologues’ make income inequality worse by fighting nuclear family revival

Income inequality would shrink if a larger majority of families were made of married mothers and fathers raising their children, panelists told a session at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday.

But revival of such a norm is likely to be opposed by feminist ideologues and gay-marriage supporters

It’s going to be hard to argue that “fathers are essential” if gay-marriage laws say “they are optional,” said Jennifer A. Marshall, vice president for the Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity at the Heritage Foundation.

“The Future of Marriage” session at CPAC 2015 reviewed benefits of marriage — and alarming trends, such as young Americans having babies out of wedlock in their 20s, but waiting to marry until their 30s or later.

Social science is “extraordinarily clear” that children do best when raised by their married mothers and fathers, said child psychologist Wade Horn, a former Health and Human Services official for families and children.

And yet, he said, when he and others started the National Fatherhood Initiative in the mid-1990s, it was because there was already fear that the idea that “children need their fathers” was getting lost.

Today, boys in many communities do not grow up thinking they are going to marry the mother of their children — single parenthood, not marriage, is the norm, said Heather MacDonald, a scholar at Manhattan Institute.

This loss of marriage and rise of fatherlessness has been catastrophic for children and communities, since unwed childbearing, single parenting and multiple sex partners are associated with poverty, instability and income inequality, she said.

“If you could take out fatherlessness and single-parent homes from the equation, the income gap would shrink enormously,” she said. That’s because people in the affluent levels of American society are still getting married. It’s the people in the lower socioeconomic levels that are not.

This is why gay marriage would be a “final nail in the coffin” of fighting fatherless homes, Ms. MacDonald said.

It’s already hard to spread the message that fathers matter, due to feminism, she said.

“To say ’mothers and fathers are important’ is going to be seen as a blow against valuing the diversity of all families,” including those headed by two men or two women, she said. It’s not unthinkable, she added, that “Father’s Day” could one day be considered “hate speech” because it discounts lesbian couples.

Meanwhile, boys are not taught about the personal, social and economic benefits of marriage — such as the “income-earnings boost” that married fathers are likely to receive over men — or all the tangible and intangible assets married fathers bring to their children, the panelists said.

Solutions included encouraging churches and organizations to do more public education about the ways a married mother-father norm will serve children, men, women and society.