Syndicated Columnist Kathleen Parker Covers Controversy over Anti-Father OPUS Father’s Day Week Cartoon
Background: On Monday I asked you to write newspapers in protest of Berkeley Breathed’s new nationally-syndicated OPUS cartoon “Davie Dinkle has two moms” (pictured), which, I noted “gives fathers a nice kick in the teeth Father’s Day week.”
In the comic, which appeared in many of America’s largest newspapers, two elementary school boys discuss a classmate who is being raised by two lesbian moms. One boy says, “Makes you wonder how he’ll do without a male role model in the house.” Right afterwards, the drunken, idiot father angrily throws the TV out the window, yelling “Now THAT was a pitch you @$%* moron!”
Not surprisingly, the gay press fired back at me and also at conservative religious writer Jennifer Roback Morse, who had later criticized the same cartoon in a Townhall.com column. To learn more, see my blog posts Nationally-Syndicated Cartoonist: It’s Better to Have Two Moms than a Mom and a Dad and Gay/Lesbian Press Mischaracterizes My Criticism of OPUS Cartoon.
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who is often sympathetic to men’s and fathers’ issues, covers the controversy over “Davie Dinkle has two moms” in her new column “Happy Father’s Day, jerk.” Parker writes:
“Men and fathers have been on the receiving end of a male-bashing trend for the past 20 years or so, and they’ve had enough. Breathed’s comic strip might have faded into the ethers if it didn’t cut so close to the bone, if it weren’t one more insult added to a history that long ago ceased to amuse.
“On television, men are depicted as boors or buffoons, while in the broader culture, they’re deadbeats or wife beaters. In a 1999 study of how fathers were presented in 102 prime-time shows, the National Fatherhood Initiative found only four in which a father was portrayed as present and involved in his children’s lives.
“At the same time little boys and girls are seeing bad, dumb daddies on TV, more than a third don’t live with their own father, owing either to divorce or single motherhood. Despite inevitable exceptions to the rule, it is merely ignorant to say that a father’s absence has no effect on children. Study after study shows an association between fatherlessness and a wide range of social pathologies, including drug abuse, promiscuity and delinquency.
“Two mommies may work out fine for some children. And some men, just like some women, are contemptible slobs or worse. But neither observation diminishes the larger truth that children need fathers, most of whom are not, in fact, the cartoonish characters we love to loathe.
“Breathed’s comic strip, intended or not, revealed where we have arrived as a society in our attitudes toward male role models, otherwise known as fathers: Two lesbian mommies are cool, while dad is a violent, profane, impulsive, substance-abusing slob.”
Read Parker’s full column here. Parker can be reached at kparker@kparker.com.
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Stumble It!
June 15th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/kathleen/parker061103.asp
A mom wants to wring her 10-year-old son’s neck when he tracks mud through her freshly mopped kitchen. When a grown woman finds out her husband has become intimate with the help, she wants to invite Lorena Bobbitt to din-din and forget to put the cleaver in the dishwasher.
Kathleen Parker, June 11, 2003
June 16th, 2007 at 7:01 am
MENSNEWSDAILY needs a cartoonist.. There must be someone reading these columns with some satire talent that wants to start to make a name for himself/herself..