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Wednesday, February 21, 2018

America's Most Violent Come from Broken Homes

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America's Most Violent Come from Broken Homes

In the wake of the Parkland school shooting, while most of the media’s passionately clamoring against guns, one woman makes a far shrewder point:

By Suzanne Venker | Fox NewsMy most recent article about the Parkland school shooting and its connection to fatherlessness prompted a tsunami of emails. In one of those emails, a man named Fritz asked what I considered to be the root of fatherlessness. I decided to write a follow-up article to answer that question.

The subject of “The Desperate Cry of America’s Boys” is a difficult one. To point out that boys need their fathers is to shine a spotlight on divorce and single mothers; and that is, admittedly, uncomfortable. But there’s no way to address fatherlessness comfortably.

The fact is, divorce and family breakdown—which, to answer my emailer’s question, is the root of fatherlessness—is catastrophic for children. There’s more than one reason why, but an obvious one is that in the majority of cases, divorce separates children from their fathers.

This is destructive to both boys and girls, but each sex suffers differently. Girls who grow up deprived of their father are more likely to become depressed, more likely to self-harm, and more likely to be promiscuous. But they still have their mothers, with whom they clearly identify. Boys do not have a comparable identification and thus suffer more from father absence. They also tend to act out in a manner that’s harmful to others, which girls typically do not

…When boys don’t have this model, they suffer. And when they suffer, society suffers. A majority of school shooters come from fatherless homes; and a study of older male shooters (think Steven Paddock of the Las Vegas massacre) produces similar results. Indeed, the consequences of fatherlessness are simply staggering.

The root of fatherlessness is deep and wide, but it ultimately rests in two things: our culture’s dismissal of men as valuable human beings who have something unique to offer—on the one hand, we tell them to ‘man up,’ and on the other we tell them manhood is the problem—and its dismissal of marriage as an institution that’s crucial to the health and well-being of children. This long-standing belief has been supplanted by the notion that marriage is about the emotional fulfillment of adults.

It is not. Marriage is about the needs of children, pure and simple. That’s how it began, and that’s how it remains. Children’s needs are the same today as they were one hundred years ago. It is we, not they, who have changed. Read her excellent article HERE

REMNANT COMMENT: Now we’re getting somewhere! Please, click on the link above, read the entire article, and share it with your friends and family. 

The Remnant will not be getting into the guns debate here. We've said our piece. We support Second Amendment rights. But this is so much bigger than that. If we don't address the fundamental problems that have developed in our society since we ran Christian Morality out of town and told God to go to Hell, it won't matter if we put the nation's schools in lock down, arm all the teachers with AR-15s and put state-of-the-art metal detectors in every doorway. The evil will continue to come in, the madness will only increase, and the pungent stench of death will continue to permeate the streets and classrooms of our precious New World Order.

You cannot possibly gun down all the monsters we're mass producing in progressive laboratories from sea to shining sea. Only God can save us now.

 

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Last modified on Thursday, February 22, 2018
Michael J. Matt | Editor

Michael J. Matt has been an editor of The Remnant since 1990. Since 1994, he has been the newspaper's editor. A graduate of Christendom College, Michael Matt has written hundreds of articles on the state of the Church and the modern world. He is the host of The Remnant Underground and Remnant TV's The Remnant Forum. He's been U.S. Coordinator for Notre Dame de Chrétienté in Paris--the organization responsible for the Pentecost Pilgrimage to Chartres, France--since 2000.  Mr. Matt has led the U.S. contingent on the Pilgrimage to Chartres for the last 24 years. He is a lecturer for the Roman Forum's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. He is the author of Christian Fables, Legends of Christmas and Gods of Wasteland (Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll) and regularly delivers addresses and conferences to Catholic groups about the Mass, home-schooling, and the culture question. Together with his wife, Carol Lynn and their seven children, Mr. Matt currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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