#Yes, kids do need dads and other commentary

Sociology experts: Yes, Kids Do Need Dads

Progressives like Harvard sociologist Christina Cross have recently been casting doubt on the “kids-benefit-from-fathers argument,” lament Ian Rowe and Brad Wilcox at USA Today. Cross’ research is part of “a larger effort to call into question the idea that married, two-parent families matter not just for Black children but, indeed, all children.” Yet this “revisionist effort” relies on “cherry picking a few findings” and “obscures the full truth from the sciences about the importance of two-parent families for kids.” As President Barack Obama noted in 2008, fatherless kids “are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime.” They’re “more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves.” The “foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”

Academic: The Elites’ Anti-Israel Bias

College campuses, medical and mental-health professionals, “people whose careers are rooted in inquiry and fact are falling over each other to condemn Israel for last month’s defensive war against Hamas,” warns psych prof Phyllis Chesler at The Investigative Project. “I don’t know how to stop the lies about Israeli ‘massacres’ ” when they’ve been “amplified by professors at so many universities,” the media and professional publications. Journals like The Lancet, Scientific American, faculty and teachers unions and various professional organizations are rife with anti-Israel bias. The incoming president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, despite her lack of expertise, is “strongly” pro-Palestinian. “The propaganda has swiftly unleashed mini-pogroms and major pogroms against Jews around the world.” Yet Jews in the diaspora “have no” Israel Defense Forces “to defend them.”

Iconoclast: The Menace of Identity Politics

Humanity’s natural “acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one’s own group” for millennia meant that “the natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders,” with attempts at other arrangements “unstable and short-lived,” explains Charles Murray at Spectator World — until America’s founders designed “a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct.” That makes identity politics a direct threat to our democracy: “It not only permits but insists that the power of the state be used to reward favored groups at the expense of everyone else. That view of power is the defining characteristic of the natural form of government that humankind endured until the miracle at Philadelphia in 1787.”

From the right: Critical Race Theory Is Losing

With opposition to critical race theory growing, liberals are “frantically trying to redefine the terms of the debate,” notes the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Faria. They’re “asking that you pay no attention to the curriculum behind the curtain” and denying that CRT is being taught in schools. Even Nikole Hannah-Jones, architect of the controversial 1619 Project, “is trying to distance her shoddy ‘journalism’ from critical race theory because the push against it is real and effective.” It’s a good sign that liberals feel the need to “constantly move the goal posts” because it means “they are losing the fight to indoctrinate America’s youth with their toxic and divisive racial obsession. We are on the right path, and the push to reject these ideas must continue apace.”

Libertarian: Joe’s Broken Promise on Taxes

A new analysis by the center-left Tax Policy Center finds 60 percent of Americans, including many making less than $400,000, will face higher tax burdens under President Biden’s first budget — even though he vowed not to raise taxes on such people, reports Eric Boehm at Reason. “In fact, three-quarters of households earning between $75,000 and $100,000” would face an average tax hike of $440, thanks largely to companies passing along Biden’s corporate tax hike to “shareholders and workers in the form of lower investment earnings and compensation.” Yes, some hikes may be needed to balance the budget, but Biden should’ve been honest: “A more expensive government means higher taxes on almost everyone.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board