Rights and Responsibilities

Fully achieved, Iris Young’s proposals would be a disaster for women and children, probably for men too, and certainly for liberal and left politics.

She is wrong on three points, at least: single mothers are not despised; liberals don’t view single mothers as the sole source of our social ills; liberalism has not abandoned its heritage by rallying to the two-parent family.

If only Time magazine had made Marla Maples—an unwed mother—the woman of the year, we would fully realize that a mother’s unwedded state is no bar to celebrity or social lionizing—and a kiss on the cheek from (former) Mayor David Dinkins. The press and television treat single motherhood as a variant of the American family...