Every Friday morning, I’ll provide the news that is almost too ridiculous to even blog about. I will carefully tread the line thought-provoking and mind-numbing, insightful and incoherent, awesome and awful.

This week’s proof that human evolution is taking one step forward, two steps backward: teenagers near Boston made a pregnancy pact. An estimated eight girls, all under the age of 17, made a pact to each have a child and raise them together. At present, I am unsure how to even begin to unravel this situation, but here it goes:

First, should we be investigating the fathers for statutory rape charges? According to Massachusetts state law, anyone under 16 cannot legally consent to sex. (Thankfully, I’m not based in Massachusetts, because I don’t know how I’d feel about friends and co-workers seeing “Massachusetts age of consent” in my google search history). The punishment is up to 3 years in prison. If the government is going to be legislating sexual behavior, and I doubt the constitutionality of doing so, then we should be investigating this situation. The NYT article suggests that at least some of the girls had sex with men in their 20s.

This should keep her on the air for a few more weeks

Second, what the hell are these kids thinking? Communal baby-raising? Did they take Hillary’s “village to raise a child” message about 345 steps too far? What is the over-under on them putting the babies up for adoption/asking mommy (aka the baby’s grandmother) to just take over childrearing responsibilities/accidentally kill they after they starts teething/drop them after trying to chat on the cell phone and breastfeed? Two weeks? Three?

Third, the community leaders’ responses have ranged from moronic to pathetic:

“We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head says the school’s principal.

The mayor weighed in with:

“This is a city in transition going through a hard economic time,” Ms. Kirk said. “There are cuts in economic programs, cuts in services, cuts in after-school programs, and they’re all impacting the social climate. We really let these kids down.”

“It’s the social environment these girls are coming from,” she added. “They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life, and these girls are very, very young. And I think if you talk to any teenage mother who is caring for an infant, the road is not easy.”

So the community is blaming itself for 16 year old pregnancy pacts? And this incident will be used to justify more social spending on incoherent government education programs? Regrettably, I see no irony in the fact that the same citizens who will have eight new bundles of joy in their town elected this laughing-stock of a mayor. If you ever wanted a reason to endorse limited-government, here it is: an idiot politician uses a teenage pregnancy pact to justify more social spending. Someone call the Democratic Party, I found its keynote speaker at this summer’s DNC, Mayor Carolyn Kirk.

Whatever happened to traditional responsibility? Where are the parents? Why was no one paying attention to this? Surely this reflects poorly on the girls and their families, but even worse on us as a society. Somewhere we have gotten so entangled in our own social bureaucracy that these sort of events are even possible. This isn’t society’s fault, but we as individuals can act to promote at least a mildly intelligent worldview.