Love Child, never meant to be?

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s budget director, got a little unwelcome tabloid attention this weekend. Just as his ex-girlfriend Claire Milonas gave birth to their daughter, Orszag announced his engagement to a TV-news reporter named Bianna Golodryga. The New York Post put this on its front page, with a lot of talk about his “secret love child.”

Now, I am not going to wade into this seamy story, for the simple reason that the inside of a couple’s machinations is never exactly what it seems. For all we know, the new baby’s parents may not have wanted to be married. Maybe they (or at least Claire M.) wanted a baby; maybe their daughter was a surprise. Maybe the breakup and the new girlfriend occurred in sequence; maybe they overlapped. Maybe Orszag and she agreed to raise that kid jointly in exemplary fashion, separately; maybe he’s a thoughtless jerk who’s onto the next phase of his busy life. We just have no idea. (Full disclosure: Claire and I have met a couple of times, through the informal but tight network that is Greek-American New York, but I know nothing about her life.)

But I will say this: Can we all agree, starting with the New York Post, that “love child” is a term that ought to be retired? Unless you are Diana Ross, you have no business using it. It implies a severe moral judgment, in a country where 40 percent of babies are born outside a marriage. Even if you believe marriages tend to be better places for kids to be brought up–and you can have that argument forever, and neither side will ever win, because you can’t say that an awful marriage is better than a loving single household–eventually you have to accept the fact. Between divorce and never-marrying and gay adoption, we are no longer a culture in which the norm has a married mommy and a daddy living under the same roof, and it’s time to end the tacit finger-wagging. Old habits die hard, particularly among headline-writers at the Post (where the word “coed” also still has some currency, as if most colleges are just now admitting women). But c’mon, folks, it’s time.