The modern welfare state and the 60s Cultural Revolution are gifts that keep on giving -- if the gifts that are given are fatherlessness, particularly for low income or poverty-level black kids. Hispanic and white kids aren't immune to the longstanding trend of fatherlessness, though. And the breakdown of the traditional family continues to rip apart the nation's social fabric.

The Washington Times reported on Christmas day:

Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status, census data show. Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother. Twelve percent of black families below the poverty line have two parents present, compared with 41 percent of impoverished Hispanic families and 32 percent of poor white families.

The troubling phenomenon of single-mother black households began back in the 1960s, when liberals greatly expanded welfare programs that diminished or replaced fathers' roles in poor families. Feminism, which rose along with the 60s' counterculture, further denigrated the role of men and fathers, traditional marriage and families. The results: greater poverty and shattered young lives, especially in the nation's inner cities and in large swaths of the Deep South's old "Black Belt."

In 1981, George Gilder, in his now-classic Wealth and Poverty, wrote powerfully about the breakdown of poor black families due to government interference and handouts and the radical cultural changes that occurred consequently and independently of government policies.

Though the disturbing trend of fatherless households is growing among whites and Hispanics, there's effectively a two-tier system in modern American society, with a disproportionate number of white and Hispanic children having both a mother and father while black children are raised by young, often under- or unemployed mothers. Too many of these black mothers are raising children sired by different men.

The Washington Times quotes Vincent DiCaro, vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative:

"The people who might not be preaching family values, like coastal upper-class communities, those are the people who are waiting to get married."

There you go. Many Blue State higher income progressives, who profess belief and support for alternative lifestyles or nontraditional families, are, in fact, forming traditional families where fathers play more than nominal roles in their kids' lives. Yet it is these same progressives and their leaders who for at least two generations have been the primary culprits -- through values and policies -- in the destruction of poor black families.

But the contagion started by liberals has only its epicenter in black communities across the nation. The cancer of fatherless children, illegitimacy, and shattered, dysfunctional families is spreading and bumping up the income ladder.

The damage done -- and being done -- to the nation's social fabric is immense and frightening. Nations can survive wars, natural disasters, and whole hosts of cataclysms, but the destruction of families, neighborhoods, and communities is not easily or quickly reparable.

Will America survive the damage being done to the nation's culture and society by the country's leftists? This Christmas season, we can only hope and pray so.