Looks Cool

Ann Coulter took the New York Times to task for subjecting its readers, once again, to a sermon on single mother child rearing, a fad the paper approves of as heartily as it disapproves of smoking. It doesn’t take a sociologist, psychologist or minister to recognize that, in general, children do much better in a family unit headed up by a mother and a father. What the vast majority of normal people take for granted the New York Times finds silly as it celebrates the brave, progressive single mother who raises her child all on her own without the pesky interference of that child’s father. Less is more according to the Times and those who have qualms over the disintegration of the traditional family had better get with it since the single-mother trend is accelerating and soon will become the norm.

All right, says Ann Coulter, if that is the norm then why aren’t the millions of smokers also considered a fait accompli? After all the research clearly shows that smoking causes a lot less damage to society and that the harm, if any, that results from smoking afflicts only the person who chooses to smoke, not innocent children. She continues in this vein contrasting the "harm" that befalls smokers with the actual, measurable harm that poverty, the lot of most single mothers, causes children. She weighs the "costs" of smoking with the verifiable costs of single motherhood in the form of welfare payments, criminal behavior of fatherless youths, substance abuse and sexual victimization.

"If a pregnant woman smokes or drinks, we blame her. But if a woman decides to have a fatherless child, we praise her as brave — even though the outcome for the child is much worse."

Smoking, she says, indubitably, also looks cool. Coulter, a smoker, examines the double standard, the hypocritical posturing, and the batty value system of the prevailing culture along with the rabidly anti-tobacco mainstream press that serves the governing elite. She does it in an amusing fashion for which she deserves an award: for maintaining good humor while exposing a pernicious agenda that long ago morphed from officious Puritanism to destructive lunacy.