This business of how many children are born out of wedlock is a lot of statistics and numbers and has next to nothing to do with the quality of parenting and how well children are raised in our country.

I have a large family. At least six family members have joined their partners in setting up housekeeping without bothering to get married. They stayed together in loving relationships for decades and raised children. Some kids are still in school, and a lot have already finished college and launched their careers.

Whether parents are married or not has little to do with providing a good, stable, and ethically grounded environment for children to grow in.

My own mother was widowed at the age of 29, at which time she had four children under the age of 10 years. She married my father when she was eighteen and they had four kids together. After he died, we lived at my grandmother’s house, my mother had a job, and we were surrounded by lots of family. Damned lucky, because Mom would have had a hell of a time trying to take care of us as a single Mom without other adults to help. She remarried about four years later, and she and her new husband raised the family and had two more kids, though he did NOT adopt the four of us. But he has been by Dad since I was eleven.

All this BS about having children out of wedlock is just that — a lot of crap.

What harms families trying to raise children in a decent, loving, and principled and ethical environment is POVERTY. People struggling in full-time jobs, doing the important work our country needs done, and being unable to support a household on one income. Struggling to arrange for child care, health care, an affordable roof over people’s heads — that is what hurts famillies.

We don’t know how many of those “out of wedlock” kids are living in stable homes — likely more of them than people reading this thinK — but we can guess which ones are struggling, if they are living in single-parent homes with one income — whether that parent was ever married or not.

POVERTY and a skewed economy are what people with kids need to contend with — Using statistics that list “out of wedlock” births is just a lot of cultural crap.

And I am white, too — I KNOW the level of “white privilege’ that has come my way, including the foundation of property ownership down through the generations … something POC have been denied until only the past one or two generations. When I was growing up, real estate was still red-lining, and mortgages for POC were hard to come by — discrimination was RAMPANT.

Don’t kid yourselves, people. It’s easy to draw a false picture about how our society works, if you want to refuse to deal with unpleasant facts and the reality of our history.

What we are dealing with right now is a choice between voting for people who we can work with to maintain our Constitutional Democracy, or voting for someone who won’t.

Vote Blue, if you want a democratic country that we can continue to try to make better … whether we get married or not.