Being a Man

Today's Washington Post features an article by William Raspberry entitled, "Why Black Families are Failing." It generally describes the degradation of the family unit that is often caused by men who don't know how to be men.

Here is an excerpt:

The absence of fathers means, as well, that girls lack both a pattern against which to measure the boys who pursue them and an example of sacrificial love between a man and a woman. As the ministers were at pains to say last week, it isn't the incompetence of mothers that is at issue but the absence of half of the adult support needed for families to be most effective.

Interestingly, they blamed the black church for abetting the decline of the black family -- by moderating virtually out of existence its once stern sanctions against extramarital sex and childbirth and by accepting the present trends as more or less inevitable.