From the Department of I Think We May be Doomed: Heather Mac Donald writes about a new euphemism:
I heard a chilling new phrase on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Saturday morning: “independent mothers,” from a caller who clearly was one herself. If this euphemism catches on, we might as well turn out the lights on civilized society.
Was “single mother” really so stigmatizing? Of course not. It was scrupulously nonjudgmental, having been purged of the unpleasant echo of “marriage” that still hovers around the now-archaic term “unwed mother.” And while the phrase “single mother” may have been value-neutral, the culture around it operated overtime to celebrate the “strong women” who were raising their children solo and to obliterate from public consciousness the males who regrettably still played a role in reproduction. The iron-clad rule in the MSM has been: When writing about single mothers, one must never, ever ask: Where are the fathers of their children? Male parents of poor children have simply been disappeared from mainstream discourse, too irrelevant to even think about. …
Just a question: what percentage of "independent" mothers are receiving help from the taxpayers?