This weekend, I turned on C-SPAN and, for the first time, heard and watched Barack Obama making a speech. Most of the speech had something to do with Obama positioning himself as the heir-apparent of the civil rights movement, with the old “Moses” generation of that movement handing to him and the current “Joshua” generation the legacy of the movement. It was a bit self-serving, but to be expected of one who is seeking the highest public office.
One thing about Obama’s speech, however, caught my attention. It was the part that pertained to fatherhood and families. The media has glossed over this portion of the speech, choosing to divert their focus to the sentence that preceded it all: “We’ve got too many children in poverty in this country, and everybody should be ashamed.” This was an example of the media’s obsession with the promotion of the nanny state, coupling the plight of impoverished children with an implied call for ever more government benefits. Instead, Obama could have linked the absence of fathers with child poverty, and then called for the reform of our family laws to give fathers positive incentives to remain in the family. But Obama played into the rhetoric of feminists who excoriate fathers for being absent, but provide no legal support for such fathers to be present.
[coolplayer width="480" height="380" autoplay="0" loop="0" charset="utf-8" download="1" mediatype=""]
Here is a You-Tube video clip of Obama’s speech.
[/coolplayer]
And here is a transcript of the above clip:
“We’ve got too many children in poverty in this country, and everybody should be ashamed. But don’t tell me it doesn’t have a little to do with the fact that we’ve got too many daddies not acting like daddies, think that fatherhood ends at conception.
I know something about that because my father wasn’t around when I was young. And I struggled. Those of you who read my book know. I went through some difficult times. I know what it means when you don’t have a strong male figure in the house, which is why the hardest thing about me being in politics, sometimes, is not being home as much as I’d like. And I’m just blessed that I’ve got such a wonderful wife at home, to hold things together.
But don’t tell me that we can’t do better by our children. That we can’t take more responsibility for making sure we’re instilling in them the values and the ideals that the Moses generation taught us — about sacrifice, and dignity, and honesty, and hard work, and discipline, and self-sacrifice.”
I just wish that any major public figure who purports to bring fathers back into the family would recognize how current law treats them as irrelevant (except as financial providers). Poverty is directly related to the absence of fathers. It stands to reason that equal parenting time therefore be the focus, among unmarried or separated parents.
Obama’s shaming of fathers to accept even more responsibility and “self-sacrifice” — without the intendant legal rights that all fathers should enjoy — makes his argument profoundly half-baked.
