Comments on: Book Review: Why Ann Coulter’s Guilty is Innocent

By: Nathan Alexander

Nathan Alexander — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:41:08 +0000

Coulter proposes creating an incentive to actually get married: make the father’s access to children depend on his marrying the mother–and make a mother’s right to her child’s father’s money dependent upon her marrying the father. Get rid of the court’s attempt to “recreate the family” on a sort of weird biological level (which enables a biological father to disrupt the lives of the child/foster family who has raised his child; and the mother to endlessly puruse the money of the biological father in court).

YOu can “privilege” the family–or for purposes of keeping kids off the state welfare roles, you end up endorsing the liberal court’s “biological family” model, which has angered fathers and mothers by reducing fathership to “money”. The “biological model” was probably introduced in part to give “wealthy, libertine” fathers the chance to avoid marriage. In any case, it has wholly undercut the marriage model and made child custody/support into a cottage industry.

Coulter is a polemicist, but she generally has a very good argument underlying the hyperbole. If you watch her on the media, the liberal interrogators spend all their time trying to play “gotcha” with her hyperbole–and avoid her arguments. –she also seems to spend most of her time correcting misquotations–whcih also prevents her from talking about her arguments.

By: mpanetta

mpanetta — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:06:20 +0000

The view that marriage is a positive isn’t controversial. The problem with people like Coulter and the rest of you who seem to enjoy her work is that you focus far more on what is wrong than how to fix it.

Alright, we can all agree that children who are born into families with both parents married are likely to have a better time of life. How do we encourage that behavior? I don’t want to hear any inane arguments about how things got this way in the first place because its too late for that now. What can we do today? How can we fix it? Are we going to punish child birth out of wedlock? What’s your plan and how do you think it will sit with America?

By: Nathan Alexander

Nathan Alexander — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:49:48 +0000

What is really necessary about Coulter these days is that her sharp wit and willingness to assign guilt to individuals and social groups other than GW Bush offsets the mind-numbing drone of the “yes we can” media. I wish, however, you’d summed up her arguments a bit more and spent less time defending her against her media detractors. Her position on the family, in her chapter on single mothers, is terrific. Coulter argues that traditionally, to have a right to raise children you were assumed to be married. Having attacked the institution of marriage as being outdated, the liberal federal courts then tried to recreate it be using the “genetic” or “biological” family as its substitute. This led to “biological fathers” having the rght to disrupt the often happy and healthy lives of their children, who were being raised in foster families. LIkewise, the “biological” family gave mothers the right to pursue their children’s father for his money–setting up the evil mess which is today’s custody courts. Up until the late 1960s, Coulter argues, a father need not pay child support if he wasn’t married to the mother–but he also lost all rights to his children. Coulter suggest that by upholding the institution of marriage, it gave a tremendous incentive for fathers to 1) marry their children’s mothers and 2) mothers to marry their children’s fathers (or at least refrain from impregnating themselves until they were married).

Coulter also does the usual excellent job documenting media double standards when treating conservatives and liberals. While Coulter is as feisty as ever–seemingly sparing no one, it’s important to pay close attention to her underlying arguments, which in the case of the importance of marriage as a stabilizing force in society, is an excellent one.

By: Ivan Ivanovich

Ivan Ivanovich — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:02:16 +0000

“So, why is this view controversial?”

One word: Octuplets!