Via John Cole
At the Corner:
RE: WELCOME TO 2003 [John Derbyshire]
K-Lo: So DC’s first baby of the year was born to a lesbian couple. New York’s seems to have been to a black single mother. Don’t you sometimes feel like giving in to despair?
Now, one can make an argument about the dissolution of the African-American family and how it has hurt poor African-American children especially. In fact, Daniel Moynihan said just such a thing. One can certainly say that raising a child is a difficult process and two parents are better than one. Having been raised in a single family home, I can attest my mother’s life would have been much easier with a partner. The problem is Derbyshire doesn’t make such an argument, he plays off a stereotype and dehumanizes the wonderous event of the birth of a child.
Worse, he seems to think the race of the mother was important without any context to his language. If one is making a Moynihan type argument race becomes a factor. In the way Derbyshire introduces it, well, it isn’t an argument, it is a stereotype. That child deserves the love and hope for the future, not the notion that she is already a burden on the great mind of John Derbyshire.
His comments about the lesbian couple are handled well by John Cole.