If you believe the mainstream media (MSM), they do. The inference I get from MSM is that traditional values are repressive and stifling. People prefer to live life as if there were no consequences to behavior.
For instance, if someone is poor and unmarried and gets pregnant for the fifth or sixth time, unless they were raped, it is definitely their fault and should be their sole responsibility. But not in paternalistic, welfare-state America. When consequences inevitably smack people in the face, we’re all hit by flying debris.
It doesn’t take a particularly insightful person to see that the lack of traditional values is the problem when it comes to most of society’s ills. Star Parker tackles this and other issues in her latest column, writing about the alarming statistics of AIDS among black Americans. Lack of traditional values, in a sense, causes AIDS. Those are my words, not Parker’s. Controversial? Probably. But I believe it.
AIDS is now the No. 1 cause of death among African-Americans between the ages of 25 and 44.Joseph Lowery, the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, once said, “When America gets a cold, black America gets pneumonia.”
The “cold” that America has in this case is the ongoing politicization of our society and the breakdown of the traditional values that have been the glue that has held together the American family and our society. The symptoms of this “cold” are obvious: skyrocketing divorce rates and illegitimacy rates, declining test scores that result from a politicized and bureaucratized public-school system and politicization of our legal system that reflects the detachment of law from its moral foundations.
Whether we are talking about breakdown in family, education or law, the symptoms of this cold are more intense and protracted in the black community than in other communities. But it’s important to retain perspective that black social problems are symptomatic of a national problem. Irresponsible sexual behavior has no racial boundaries. The rate of out-of-wedlock births among whites today exceeds the rate among blacks 40 years ago.
As we plainly see with our own eyes every day, the erosion of decency causes so many other problems. The weakening of the black family is a direct consequence of a critical mass who reject traditional values. Of course AIDS, a direct consequence of society’s overall slackness, affects all. Parker says:
The AIDS epidemic is symptomatic of a society spinning out of control. There is only one answer, and that is to re-establish our mooring rooted in personal responsibility and the traditional sense of right and wrong behavior. What can be the future for a society in which love and personal responsibility are displaced by sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility? What type of society will we be living in when we get to the point where few American adults will have grown up in a traditional family?
When I was growing up, I was one of the few people among my set whose parents were married to each other and lived in the same house as their children. That was the 70s and 80s. Statistically speaking, it’s much worse now. As Parker says, fighting against the tide of erosion and focusing on restoring traditional values are the only answers.
Read Simple Girl’s Guide For Avoiding AIDS
Update (12/27): Liberals love to lie about me. But that’s OK. I’m grown. I can take it. The liberal blog host who’s linked to my site has not been banned. Where he got the idea, I don’t know, and why he’s speading the lie, I’m equally clueless. My advice to him: Find a different hobby.
By the way, I also MODERATE COMMENTS OVERNIGHT (and sometimes during the day), so if you liberals respond to this post after 9:00 p.m., your comments will be held until morning just like everyone else’s. Sometimes I feel like I’m running a Kindergarten. 
