Very rarely is a “love child,” the accidental biological result of two unmarried people “in love,” mentioned in a newspaper headline. That was my first reaction to reading about Isiah Thomas’s alleged indiscretion from 20 years ago, which was uncovered during the ugly glare of publicity surrounding a former employee’s recent sexual harassment suit against the president of the New York Knicks. My second reaction was weariness at yet another instance of lives being destroyed by indiscriminate sexual behavior.

Pope Benedict XVI recently released an encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, meaning God Is love, which warned that sex without unconditional love risked turning men and women into merchandise. Amen to that, your Holiness, but far more important is that it has also turned children into collateral damage.

Isn’t it time that we stop pretending there are good substitutes for the traditional nuclear family? Surely there have been enough studies of child abuse to confirm that the majority of abusers involve nonbiological guardians.

I’m not suggesting that we revert to “Leave It to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best,” because that sitcom world was never real. It did, however, represent a standard that made sense and was something to strive for. A good many of us who grew up in the inner city prior to the revolutionary 1960s are products of broken homes. My parents separated when I was 6 years old. The difference between then and now is that our mothers generally did not bring home a succession of substitute father figures and bedmates, because women then had morals and a respect for wedding vows. The idea of bearing a child out of wedlock still bore some shame. We’ve come a long way, baby, but it’s been downhill for many.

The death earlier this month of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown has created a firestorm of protest against the Administration for Children’s Services, which allegedly neglected the child’s abuse by her stepfather. The response, of course, has been calls to flood the city agency with more money to hire more caseworkers to monitor at-risk children.

Most commentators on this tragic case can’t relate to any of the participants. They tend to categorize the alleged perpetrators as “lowlifes” or just plain evil. This is much easier than delving too deeply into the factors that create dysfunctional and dangerous families for children to grow up in.

Having lived most of my life in or near neighborhoods like Nixzmary Brown’s, I can trace the decline of morality in them to the day it became fashionable to claim God was dead. Oh, I can hear my critics moaning, “There she goes again, bringing up religion.” But I know the people who live there, and though many of them are about as low as humans can sink, no one starts out that way in life. Alcohol and drugs may release the inner demons, but those demons thrive where there’s a spiritual vacuum.

And that emptiness began when welfare began offering young women long-term support for their children – but only as long as there were no fathers around. What did we expect the results would be? Now we have generation after generation of children who were raised by single mothers dependent on government subsidies for their livelihood.

Ending welfare under President Clinton just drove many unwed mothers to find other ways to secure support for the “love children” resulting from their frivolous relationships. Consider my son’s co-worker, a Hispanic man who’s been paying child support for the past six years, only to discover the child is not his. Since he always denied parentage, he’s had no relationship with the boy, yet he was deemed responsible merely on the mother’s say-so. His case is not unusual. Exploitative TV shows frequently feature segments offering paternity tests to doubting lovers, in order to prove or disprove the mother’s claim for child support. Fueled by drugs and alcohol, the resentment felt by men involved in these loveless relationships can boil over into acts of violence against the innocent children in the household.

Perhaps we should enact legislation requiring mandatory paternity tests upon the birth of any child. At the very least, they might limit deceptive attempts to entrap an ex-lover.

How does society deal with the wreckage it has spawned through misguided social programs? We’ve witnessed the damage that a sexually liberated culture inflicts on children. When the Bush administration proposed advocating the benefits of marriage, liberals snorted at such a naive notion. But the nuclear family of husband, wife, and children is best for a stable society. In his encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI describes unconditional love between a man and a woman as “the epitome of love.” Children born from such a union are unlikely ever to need the services of ACS.