Family Disintegration In Freefall Since 1965 Report

Posted 05:50 PM ET

Society: Nearly half a century after the 1965 Moynihan Report on black family disintegration, a prominent liberal think tank finds things "have only grown worse." Its clueless recommendation: more government.

The Urban Institute, working with the Albany-based Fathers Incorporated, last week released "The Moynihan Report Revisited." It re-examines the black family since LBJ Labor Department sociologist and eventual Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan analyzed the "tangle of pathologies" afflicting black America.

The institute's report laments that "the statistics that so alarmed Moynihan in the 1960s have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well."

White illegitimacy has reached the rate of black illegitimacy of the 1960s, while black out-of-wedlock births "tripled between the early 1960s and 2009, remaining far higher than the percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers."

Moynihan "saw the breakdown of the nuclear family as the fundamental source of weakness in the black community" and believed "high nonmarital birth rates among blacks and the large share of black children raised in female-headed households created a matriarchal society that undermined the role of black men," the report recalls.

As a result, "black men would abdicate their responsibilities as husbands, fathers, and providers, and the pattern would repeat from one generation to the next." Government exacerbated the problem with plenty of financial assistance to unwed mothers.

Moynihan believed "reversing the decay of the traditional two-married-parent family was the key to improving blacks' prospects," but the Urban Institute insists on ignoring that 800-pound gorilla in the room. It instead recommends an array of politically correct distractions.

They include ending the "mass incarceration of black men for nonviolent drug-related offenses"; the wacky idea of "education for home-seekers," presumably to convince affluents to move into high-crime neighborhoods; "community reinvestment," i.e. pouring still more government loot into minority communities; increasing the earned income tax credit — which is welfare masquerading as a tax break — for nonmarried adults in the hope it will "encourage more work among single men," and making them "better positioned to support their future families financially."

The real solution is a nongovernmental restoration of traditional family values, with the incomparable stability they provide. Sadly, for black America and society as a whole, it isn't happening anytime soon.