Last week the Pope issued a wake-up call to persons of all religious
persuasions. "Never before in history," the pontiff warned, has the
family "been so threatened as in today's culture." As the traditional
defender and protector of the family, it's no surprise that fathers and
fatherhood have taken the brunt of the Leftist-feminist onslaught.
Fatherhood has come under attack on six fronts:
- Smearing dads with the "patriarchal" epithet
- Claiming that fathers and mothers are socially interchangeable
- Removing fathers' legal say in abortion decisions
- Encouraging moms to summarily evict their husbands under the pretext
of domestic "abuse"
- Allowing inequities in child custody awards
- Enacting child support laws that send men to jail for not paying
money that they don't have in the first place
No wonder American families are falling apart. And no surprise that so
many eligible bachelors avow no interest in marriage.
Back in 1995 president Bill Clinton directed all federal agencies to
review their programs with an eye to strengthening fatherhood. With the
high-profile backing of vice president Al Gore, the federal Fatherhood
Initiative sprang to life. Conferences were held, research agendas were
developed, and fathers were on a roll.
But the Lavender Ladies began to fret over the "infiltration" of
fathers' rights groups and plotted to throw a monkey-wrench into the
operation. Finally someone had a stroke of genius: we'll insert the
adjectival "responsible" before the word "fatherhood." Who could ever
oppose that?
So in his June 17, 2000
Father's
Day radio address, Bill Clinton gave
his blessing to the catechism of Responsible Fatherhood, making it clear
that responsible dads always make their child support payments on time.
Problem is, that high-sounding phrase is a demeaning affront to fathers.
It's like saying mothers need to be taught how to be nurturing, and of
course we need a government program to take care of that. What mom in
her right mind would ever go to a class called, "Caring Motherhood"?
With the Fatherhood Initiative now under the ideological thumb of the
child support zealots, the whole effort quickly lost its momentum.
A few months later George W. Bush was elected on a platform that
included shoring up the traditional family. Bush tapped Wade Horn to
head up the Administration for Children and Families, a gargantuan $49
billion welfare bureaucracy that covers everything from Head Start,
child abuse, homeless youth, and child support enforcement.
A psychologist by training, Dr. Horn had served as president of the
National Fatherhood Initiative for eight years. Horn seemed destined to
be the go-to guy to re-focus and re-energize the Fatherhood Initiative.
In the religious tradition, confession must precede atonement.
Unfortunately, the Administration for Children and Families has never
admitted the heinous sin of Great Society welfare programs that made
fathers redundant, thus decimating the traditional family in low-income
communities.
Wade Horn did not wish to do battle with his own Office for Child
Support Enforcement. In fact, he became its vocal proponent. In 2003
Horn wrote in Crisis
magazine, "In such cases, are we to simply turn our
backs on negligent non-custodial parents who refuse to support their
children financially?"
That stinks like a pile of fresh barnyard manure.
Everyone knows that the problem of non-payment of child support is
concentrated among low-income fathers. It's not Lexus-driving dads who
have "negligently" abandoned their kids. The problem is a scandalous
government program that saddles poor men with a debt they can never hope
to pay off.
The disinformation continues when we are told that responsible
fatherhood also means reducing the
"violence
committed by men." Shame on the ACF
for ignoring the well-known fact that women are just as likely - or even
more prone - to engage in domestic violence.
Eventually even well-meaning bureaucrats began to lose interest. Check
out the Fatherhood Initiative's
"What's New"
page, and you'll see its
"new" information was last updated one year ago on June 20, 2005.
Guess not much is happening with fatherhood these days.
The Fatherhood Initiative has become an orphan program that the
Sisterhood would happily kill off, but the higher-ups know that would be
politically embarrassing. So the Initiative now floats in bureaucratic
cyberspace with no defined mandate, leadership, operating structure, or
budget.
So as we celebrate Father's Day this year, we might reflect on Bill
Clinton's disingenuous radio address six years ago, and how the red-fems
schemed to leave millions of American boys and girls without their
daddies.
One only hopes that God will be merciful.
Carey Roberts has
been published frequently in the Washington Times, Townhall.com,
LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and
elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media Alliance.