Where have all the dirty names gone?

This blog originally appeared in Institute for American Values Center for Marriage and Families' blog at familyscholars.org.

In her watershed 1993 article in the Atlantic, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote of how “every time the issue of family structure has been raised, the response has been first controversy, then retreat, andfinally silence.” That decisively had been the case 28 years earlier in the aftermath of the 1965 release of what quickly became known as the “Moynihan Report” on family breakdown in the African American community. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, never once attributed blame to African Americans themselves, but rather, indicted the nation’s history of slavery and racism. His analysis, in fact, was exquisitely progressive, laying the conceptual foundation, for example, for affirmative action.

Nevertheless, Moynihan was routinely pilloried for supposedly being a racist keen on blaming victims, and as a result, large numbers of otherwise brave men and women were intimidated into silence on the subject of out-of-wedlock births for a couple of decades. And even when, in the 1980s, it began to get a bit less scary to talk and write about family breakdown, the best and fairest of people doing so still risked being called dirty names, most notably sexist and racist.

Jumping ahead to the present moment, I’m increasingly of the mind that talking and writing about family fragmentation in the United States is no longer as dangerous as it once was. Granted, my evidence is largely anecdotal and personal, pertaining as it does to a new book of mine released about four months ago: From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation. Also granted, the book is not exactly leading any bestsellers list, which is to say the number of people even aware of its existence, shall we say, is modest.

Then again, I’ve talked about the book on national radio three times, wrote articles based on it for three national publications, and I’ve been making presentations all around the Twin Cities, among other promotional activities. The book also has been reviewed several times. Nevertheless, it’s no modest matter at all that I have yet to be called a single dirty name. Or at least I haven’t heard or read of any. Actually, people on all sides of various aisles have been saying very nice things about it.

Obviously, this is pleasant news personally, for which I’m terrifically thankful. But it’s also encouraging news for the nation, as we need to muster as much candor and good thinking as we can when it comes to the extraordinary number of children not growing up under the same roof with their mother and father.

But to the real extent we’ve made progress in the decency of discourse on this painfully sensitive subject, why exactly have we? My best answer is that as more Americans have grown more frightened by family fragmentation and its many and lasting effects, fewer voices are inclined to question the decency and motives of those who have been sounding alarms.

Might others think this is the case?