Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Vandy has a winning record against Texas.

Good idea.

NYC Kicks Off Plan to Rezone Midtown, Turn Offices to Houses (msn.com)

yup, not the first time

I do not find that stadium very attractive.

See ya on Monday?

Whether God is real or not, I think the No Sex till Marriage is/was a huge warning, that we as a modern society choose to ignore. ...
But we moderns know so much more than those silly backwater peasants, we have birth control and condoms.
And yet the percentage of people have abortions or having kids as a single parent has never been higher.
With all of our intelligence, we have lost our wisdom.

My dad always used to say that we had replaced a lot of things that worked with a lot of things that sounded good.  

Right, it's only a race issue insofar as minorities are overrepresented in the lower economic classes, as medina points out.

BUT, that doesn't mean you can't address it through a racial approach.  There are pro-minority groups that already have the means and an audience.  Someone like the NAACP could assert itself in promoting the merits of the two-parent family, for example.

Ultimately I think we're already so far down this road then I'm not sure there's any way to reverse it.  Maybe we can slow it down. 

So I found this site with some numbers.  It is a little dated but here is what they show:
Percent of births to unmarried mothers:
White:

• 15% in 1990
• 28% in 2016

Hispanic:

• 34% in 1990
• 52% in 2016

Black:

• 63% in 1990
• 69% in 2016

Then they break it by education:
<HS:

• 46% in 1990
• 62% in 2016

HS or GED:

• 29% in 1990
• 59% in 2016

Assoc Degree or some college:

• 17% in 1990
• 43% in 2016

Bachelor's Degree or higher:

• 5% in 1990
• 10% in 2016

Then they have a table that combines both race (at least black/white/hispanic) and education.  


The striking thing to me in all of this is that among white women with a college degree the percentage of unmarried mothers is in the single digits.  Basically white people with degrees are forming families the same way they were back when Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy were on TV.  

Hispanics have higher percentages of unmarried mothers at all education levels and blacks even higher still but the trend exists for all three and note that the percentage of black women with degrees who are single mothers is LOWER than the percentage for ANY group of white or hispanic women other than those with Bachelors degrees.  This, I think, supports my assertion that it is MUCH more of a class issue than a racial issue because higher class blacks are more similar to higher class whites than they are to lower class blacks.  Similarly, lower class whites are more similar to lower class hispanics and blacks than they are to upper class whites.  

One cruel irony in all of this is that the women who would be most able to successfully raise a child without a partner are the women who are the least likely to actually attempt it.  Conversely the women least able to successfully raise a child without a partner are the MOST likely to be in that situation.  

I appreciate the post, but I think you're giving ancient societies WAAAYYYYYY too much credit here.  Like absurdly too much.
First of all, prior to 100-150 years ago, women didn't decide anything.  About anything.  Ever. 
Men decided if they were going to be a couple or not.  And men, in this specific example, had no accountability, either.  The woman was saddled with the pregnancy.  If they both survived, the woman was saddled with the child.  And as a single mother, the woman was literally shunned and cast out of the family/village. 
Now, you could be suggesting that the culture came up with the witch in the forest religious story of judgement to dissuade both sides from producing this result, but there's a problem there.......men want to fuck and everyone knows we want to and will.
Insert the gender divide in islam to this day.

Of course men want to . . . have intimate relationships.  I'm no prude and I'm not saying that I'm against pre-marital sex.  However, think of it this way:
When my dad was a teenager and a young and single marine (1953-1961) the question of intimate relationships was only ONE question:
Do you want to have sex and start a family?  

Today, of course, that is two questions.  The cultural norm is for people to have sex before they are married.  I assume that nearly everyone posting here did.  However, for some reason (see above figures in response to @utee94 ) the upper classes (defined by education) figured out how to do exactly that.  I doubt that reliable figures could be obtained but I think we all know that unmarried people had a LOT more sex in the 1980's-2020's than they did pre-pill and before generally legal abortion in the 1950's and early 1960's.  Among whites with college degrees this did NOT increase the number of unmarried mothers in any meaningful way.  The percentage I listed in the above post was just 7% for white women with degrees as of 2016.  

The problem is that among the lower classes marriage has more-or-less disappeared.  59%, 61%, and 82% respectively of white, hispanic, and black women without a HS diploma are unmarried when having kids.  

This cultural divide is catastrophic.  The kids born to HS dropout moms with no father in the picture face a massive uphill climb without anywhere near the support network that all of us here who are parents are able to provide for our kids.  

Your aside into women's rights is certainly an important issue but as it relates to societal function I'm not sure that it is all that important.  Society functions best with families raising kids rather than single moms.  Whether you get there by compelling the men to stay with a woman they knock up or providing the women with the choice but impressing on them that they need to have a long-term partner before they have kids, you get to the same end-point.  

I know enough history to know that the bulk of western European children have been raised in families for at least a millennia.  Ie, it worked.  Which brings me to:
Second, human history didn't exactly live in a single-family home.  Family groups grew into villages, and everyone was family or like family, so a single mother's child was raised by a group.  It was less of a problem back then.  This is mostly a last-50-years-American problem.  A luxury of a problem, if you will.
Everywhere else, they just go with it.  Whether it's sad, unfortunate, or banal, no matter.  They just move on about their lives.  That's all they can do.  But they're not basically required to have a full-time job to pay for an extra mouth to feed AND child care, when a tiny apartment costs 50% plus of her income.  At least back in the 80s, she could afford it.  No longer.

This was probably true for most of human history but I specifically referenced successful civilizations.  The way that humans lived before creating civilization isn't really germane to the topic at hand.  

And if religion is strictly just some lesson to be learned, the lesson can be taught without the avalanche of baggage that comes with a god.
It's 2023.
This 2000 year old ball-and-chain needs to be released.  ALL of its positives can be recreated without ANY of its minuses.

Well, how?  It most certainly hasn't been.  We HAD a system that helped to minimize single-parent situations and it worked for literally thousands of years.  When we dropped it the upper classes still continued by-and-large to have kids as married couples but the HS dropouts:
White:

• 38% of mothers unwed in 1990
• 59% of mothers unwed in 2016.  

Hispanic:

• 41% of mothers unwed in 1990
• 61% of mothers unwed in 2016.  

Black:

• 82% of mothers unwed in 1990
• 82% of mothers unwed in 2016.  

Husbands/fathers in the ghettos (not just black, this includes poor hispanics and whites) of America today are basically unicorns.  Everyone has heard of them and knows conceptually what they are but confirmed sightings are rare events.