CHOICES HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Read and understand this, picked up by John at Right Wing News.

If a young girl chooses to have six illegitimate children before the age of thirty, I don't have to raise them, nor do I have to enter the delivery room. But money is taken from my paycheck to subsidize her welfare check, her state-sponsored health care, her two failed attempts to get a GED, the police who patrol her crime-ridden street where gangs of fatherless boys gather to terrorize the local residents, the juvenile hall her oldest boy ends up in 14 years later.

I didn't make those choices, but I get stuck with the tab. And I live in a world in which some people work hard and pay their own way, while other people do as they please and have their expenses paid by others. For a party that claims fairness as its mantra, this hardly seems appropriate.

The prevailing view of the Left is that people ought to be allowed to make choices without facing the natural consequences of those choices. That, in and of itself, might not be objectionable to the Right, if they did not also maintain that it was the duty of all right-thinking people to protect the chooser from facing those consequences.

The Michael Kinsleys of this world portray the Right as harshly judgemental and anti-choice. I don't hate that unwed mother. I don't condemn her. But I'm not sure it helped to subsidize her refusal to face reality. I wouldn't support that behavior in my own daughter because I understand it's not good for her or her children.

...The truth is, values are not a cost-free proposition. The 'values-neutral' approach of the left has real social and economic costs: higher divorce rates, STDs, illegitimacy, single parent families, juvenile delinquency, declining academic achievement. Look at the destruction of the black nuclear family over the past 40 years for a salutory lesson in social engineering run amok."