Single Mums GUILTY of Raising Kids like Clinton

In 1992 they told the joke that if the world ended the New York Times would say World to End, the Wall Street Journal would say World to End; Markets Close Early and the Washington Post would say World to End; Women and Children Hurt Worst.

Today they would add Ann Coulter would say World to End; Liberals' Fault; Women Pretend to be Worst Victims.

Coulter is not part of the 800-Top-Friends!, You-Like-Me;-You-Really-Like-Me!, How's My Yoga Position? culture. She is not an approval seeker.

Insulting 9/11 widows, Bill Clinton, JFK--"a venereal-disease-ridden sexual profligate and drug addict,"-- or single mothers on the ABC daytime talk show, the View, is what she does. Nor will she probably kiss babies on her new book tour.

For years media scholars have been baffled by Coulter's pursuit of the Bobby Fischer/ Marge Schott/Leona Helmsley World Congeniality Award.

Why would a woman who could practice law, model clothes, teach first grade--the kids would not call her Mommy by mistake--or deny health insurance claims for a living, want to be a right-wing piñata?

Battered by the left-wing, mainstream and even conservatives? Banished to gun 'n conspiracy web sites and late night UFO radio talk shows?

But just as baffling is media's "discovery" she's mean--as if it's a stylistic consideration instead of her Point. What was their first clue? That she says so?

"Where's your compassion," asked the View panelist Sherri Shepherd when Coulter criticized single mothers on the show in January. "Why aren't you out there helping young women," she pursued, appealing to Coulter's putative inner social worker.

"Why don't you come down on the fathers?" asked Elisabeth Hasselbeck with you're-blaming-the-victims-you-meanie indignation.

Some women just want to be mothers, protested a diffident Barbara Walters--and they can afford to do so.

Of course most people know by now that Coulter devotes an entire chapter in her new book, "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America" to single motherhood.

It is called "Victim of a Crime? Thank a Single Mother" and contends that the selfishness of single mothers in pursuing motherhood without a mate virtually assures harm to the child and society.

Seventy percent of state prison inmates, 63 percent of suicides, 71 percent of drug abusers and 90 percent of the homeless and runaways were raised by single mothers, writes Coulter. Moreover, only six and a half percent of single mothers are widows and thirty-seven percent divorced. (We have a term for "Children of divorce," writes Coulter, "I call them, future strippers.")

That means forty-one percent of single mothers get pregnant out of wedlock--which unlike "catching the flu," says Coulter, requires acts of volition.

Unfortunately, Coulter is probably right.

Freakonomics whiz kid Steven Levitt came to similar conclusions when he found that US crime dropped by 50 percent exactly 18 years after abortion, 81 percent of which affects single women, was legalized in the 1970s. In fact, the earliest legalizing states showed the earliest declines in crime.

Statistics show fatherless children tend to fail academically, professionally and at marriage. Many carry debilitating guilt from the single mother's lopsided, sometimes martyred devotion and their spouse-like role in the family so that marrying, dating and even getting a life feels like "cheating" on Mom, say therapists.

Coulter makes the point that her stats are not racist. Black and white crime are equal when you remove the single mother variable, she said on the View.

She reserves particular bile in her new book for affluent women who pursue idealized sperm profiles for pregnancies. (I prefer my "eugenics" in the "original German," she writes.)

But the View participants still found her views Mean.

Do you have children? Are you married?" demanded Whoopie Goldberg, a single mother who called Coulter's facts "not great research." "You'd feel different if you had children," she said, skirting Coulter's point that it's not about the mothers.

"What about your girlfriend Sarah Palin?" asked Joy Behar.

"Judging, judging, judging," said Sherri Shepherd.

"You can dish it out but not take it," added Goldberg though some would call appearing on the View "taking it."

Mean said the at home audience.

ENDS

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