Right-wingers (and The New York Times' Maureen Dowd) are browbeating President Biden for not embracing his son Hunter's illegitimate child -- the result of drug-crazed, unprotected sex with a stripper.
Conservatives are so enjoying bashing the president that they're taking a strikingly unconservative position. We don't believe in polyamorous three-person "families" or "Heather Has Two Mommies" or "Junior, meet your half-brother from Daddy's unprotected sex outside of marriage!"
We're the ones who believe that marriage means something. (Thus, our opposition to gay marriage.) Ideally, a man wouldn't have any "parental rights" to a kid he fathered unless he's married to the mother, and she wouldn't get access to the sperm-donor's bank account unless she's married to him.
But the law has come a long way from such straightforward rules, so, yeah, Hunter is going to have to pay up -- and I hope he has to pay through the nose, pay so much that it hurts. But the idea that a crack-fueled roll in the hay entitles the mother to be treated like an honored member of the family is absurd.
What are conservatives and Dowd imagining exactly? That the stripper -- accompanying the 4-year-old child -- should be invited to Biden family dinners, weddings and vacations? How will this be explained to the other grandchildren? Uncle Hunter smoked crack cocaine then ejaculated inside a woman who takes her clothes off for a living. Be polite and ask her how she enjoys her work!
Just because Hunter is a total degenerate doesn't mean society should allow unfit mothers to use their capture of his sperm as a winning lottery ticket, entitling her entree into someone else's family.
The stripper is getting 18 years of child support payments and the Biden genes -- which I'm sure never even occurred to her when she was having unprotected sex with the son of a former vice president. She could just as easily have forgotten her diaphragm with the guy selling tube socks on the street.
The Kardashians are a bad enough influence. How will a stripper's "love child" showing up on the White House Christmas card affect other girls looking to upgrade with an "unwanted pregnancy"? Punish Hunter with massive child support payments, not by turning the mother and her child into heroes.
Under English common law, going back to 1235, any child born outside of wedlock had no rights at all, was unable to inherit, and was "looked upon as the son of nobody," as Sir William Blackstone put it. (If that were still the law, I bet the stripper would have remembered her diaphragm.)
It doesn't matter that "it's not the kid's fault." Of course it isn't. This is like the anchor baby argument. We're supposed to ignore our borders because IT'S NOT THE CHILD'S FAULT! And now we're supposed to ignore the purpose of marriage because IT'S NOT THE CHILD'S FAULT! We don't take a sledgehammer to the basic building blocks of civilization to avoid somebody, somewhere, having hurt feelings.
Sorry, but we can't legislate that all children be born to good parents. We can, however, legislate that marriage, and marriage alone, carries legal consequences unavailable to the unmarried. That's a pretty good incentive for would-be parents to spare future generations the heartbreak of being born out of wedlock. Rushing to salve the hurt feelings of today's illegitimate children merely ensures that we'll have a lot more illegitimate children tomorrow.
It was (of course) the Warren court that cast aside the collective wisdom of 48 states and hundreds of years of common law to nuke the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate kids. Using infantile logic, Justice William O. Douglas (author of Griswold v. Connecticut) announced in Levy v. Louisiana (1968) that illegitimate children ARE NOT NON-PERSONS! Therefore, state laws that required marriage for the creation of certain rights and duties violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Justice John Marshall Harlan II dissented, saying it was "preposterous to suggest that the State has made illegitimates into 'nonpersons,'" pointing out that, a "man may recover for the death of his wife, whether he loved her or not, but may not recover for the death of his paramour." That does not make the paramour a "non-person."
That very year, black people in Detroit released a hit song discouraging illegitimacy ("Love Child"), even as a cranky, four-times-married white man in Washington, D.C. (Douglas) opened the floodgates.
Since the court found it "unconstitutional" to distinguish between the children of married parents and unmarried parents, the illegitimacy rate in the U.S. soared from 24% for blacks and 3.1% for whites to 69.4% for blacks, 28.2% for whites and 39.6% overall. With that came an explosion in child poverty, criminality, educational deficits, teen pregnancies, behavioral problems and on and on and on.
Conservatives used to care about those things. But the fun of bashing Hunter seems to have overwhelmed their respect for marriage, as well as their understanding of incentives.