Leftist Organizations Decry Inequality, But Abandon The Family – The Key Social Force That Can Fix It

As the institutional Left has increasingly demanded “racial equity” – parity between races in everything from income to incarceration rates – it has simultaneously rejected the very thing that evidence suggests could move the needle most: encouraging households headed by two parents.

Children raised by one parent, which is the case for a disproportionate number of minorities, are far more likely to break the law and grow up poor, data shows. And while liberals in the past, including President Clinton, have lamented the breakdown of two-parent households, it is often embraced by modern leftist institutions such as Black Lives Matter which in 2020 called for “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

“Now it’s like they’re celebrating [single motherhood],” said Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies upward mobility and family formation. “[Liberals are] saying we should have systems that cater to this, rather than the government saying it’s something to be avoided if possible. The government can never make up for what two married parents can provide for a child.”

It’s not just Black Lives Matter that seems to reject the traditional family structure. Well-funded, elite institutions that have traditionally shaped policy from the Left advance the same position through their donations. The Daily Wire analyzed the historical giving of seven of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations: the Ford Foundation; Open Society Foundations; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; MacArthur Foundation; W.K. Kellogg Foundation; Carnegie Corporation; and Hewlett Foundation. All help set the agenda on social issues in America by steering billions of dollars to woke social groups and causes that see the government, not the family, as key to raising children.

Philanthropic foundations like Ford and Kellogg were founded on a belief in social science, and that by studying how to impact human behavior, wealthy benefactors could make the world a better place. The foundations’ admiration for the field is so great that four of the seven foundations jointly fund the Social Science Research Council, according to tax return data.

In recent years, they have made racial inequality a primary focus. When it comes to “equity,” “inequity,” and “equality,” there are nearly 6,000 grants totaling nearly $4 billion.

These dual priorities would seem to make encouraging intact families a natural fit: Few variables in social science so dramatically predict outcomes as the presence of two parents. Such positive outcomes would reduce racial inequality.

Yet the foundations have almost completely avoided the issue of family structure. Combined, the records showed $110 billion of giving across 131,000 donations. Almost none of it went to promoting marriage or fatherhood.

Only 59 donations, totaling $8.7 million, dealt with fatherhood. And even among these, the largest grant recipient actually appeared to work against intact families, complaining about how delinquent dads were being inconvenienced by being forced to pay child support. The Ford Foundation tasked the Center for Family Policy and Practice “to analyze the impact of state and federal child-support policies and child-support debt on the ability of low-income, noncustodial fathers to achieve economic stability and build assets.” This and a similar grant totaled about half a million dollars. Then Kellogg paid it another half-million to “inform policymakers” of the research.

In the 1990s, foundations made at least a few grants that promoted fatherhood, such as one to the Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family Revitalization to “expand and replicate a fatherhood responsibility program in cities,” and another to the Parent Resource Center to “strengthen parenting skills of high-risk teen fathers through participation in a 20-week group program.”

But by the 2000s, they appeared not just neutral but hostile to that line of thinking. In 2006, Ford paid $25,000 to a progressive think tank called Political Research Associates to write a pair of reports attacking the push for two-parent households. The first was titled “Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion.”

The second belied a sensitivity to the fact that working against intact families contradicted a large body of work in a field that foundations ordinarily exalted.

“Social science research is no more rigorous than the standards of the practitioners,” it said. “When those practitioners are using social science trappings to support their ideological positions, it is time for their flawed procedures to be exposed.”

“These two reports demonstrate the Right’s use of federal funds to exert social control and their use of agenda driven treatises, masquerading as science, to justify, and elicit support for, this ideological maneuvering,” it continued. “The rightist fatherhood movement relies on biased scholarship to support its assertion that a family is not complete without the presence of a father.”

It said that people who argue that marriage leads to prosperity are violating a “fundamental rule of social science” by “confusing correlation with causality”: One should not assume people are poor because of a lack of marriage when it could be that “they are unmarried because they are poor.”

Christopher

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