Why is it that every single holiday is turned into a way to bash fathers and men? With Valentine’s Day, a day to celebrate the love of men and women comes the Vagina Monologuesâ€â€Âa twist on the V-day promoting awareness how men are abusive to women. On previous Mother’s Days in Berkshire County of Massachusetts, men had signed pledges not to beat the living daylights out of their significant others and the pledge list was put in the local newspaper.
So what do you do for fathers on Father’s Day? We find yet another way to bash men and fathers rather than celebrate them. We praise single mothersâ€â€Âdivorcees and those that had children out of wedlockâ€â€Âas somehow having the virtues of the Virgin Mary, and decry single fathers as the spawn of Satan. It is a dichotomy of good and evil with one gender representing all that is good, and one representing all that is bad. Morally simplistic views of the universe seldom are true.
In full disclosure, I am a Barack Obama supporter, and worked and donated on his campaign. I plan to continue. So the words that emanate are not from his bitter enemy. Barack Obama had the tastelessness to make Father’s Day anything but a celebration of fatherhood, but rather a barrage on the irresponsibility of black fathers. The press ate it up. The headlines for U.S World News Report were “Obama Calls On Black Men To Be Better Fathers.†The Age from Australia headlined, “Black fathers missing from too many lives: Obama.†The Washington Post article was “Obama Discusses Duties of Fatherhood.†The ABC headline was “Obama Tells Black Dads: Have the Courage to Be a Father.†ABC called it a political attempt to be the “centrist voice of moral authority.†Bill Cosby move over.
It is impossible to imagine a story on Mother’s Day, “Black mothers need to be more responsible.†It might be more appropriate. The number one reason men are not involved in the lives of their children is a court system that literally makes fathering impossible, and the mothers that use that court system to keep fathers out of the lives of children. It is doubtful that Obama even has ever heard of the term “father’s rights†let alone use it, though he spoke without end about saintly virtues of single mothers and the men they have to put up with.
When John McCain was confronted with a question in Iowa about the issue he answered the question from a black person saying that he “would not touch that tar baby.†CNN was obsessed with his use of the racist term, not the substantive response to his question which was strongly pro-court and anti-father. Big media does not care about father’s rights, though it should. It was apparent that having thought little about the issue would not prevent McCain from desisting from attempting to answer the question. The tar baby comment was gaffe; his insensitivity to the plight of fathers was not.
In Massachusetts, when a public policy question was put on the ballot in 2004, it was found that 87% of the public supported shared parenting, a rebuttable presumption that there should be joint physical and legal custody. The presumption may be rebutted by evidence that one of the parents is unfit or that it is unworkable through no fault of the parents.
It is doubtful that Obama’s speech will sway a single father to be active in a child’s life. Despite his “just words†speech which was inspired by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, they really are just words. Such get-your-act together rhetoric often does not reach the targeted audience, and when it does, it almost never has an impact. To the extent that fathers are not involved in their children’s life by choice, the psychological reasons are complex. Their ex may have called 911 on them once too often, they cannot approach their children without being screamed at by mom, the mother constantly frustrates visitation plans, or a court ordered them to pay some fantastic amount of child support that they could not pay. Many got the boot when mom wanted to get on the welfare rolls. While it is certainly not the moral thing to do, many want to “move on.â€ÂÂ
But most fathers that do not spend with their children literally cannot legally spend time with them by court order. As a man that has been in the father’s rights movement just shy of a decade now, Obama’s words were not only highly offensive, but they overlooked the obvious truth. Before government tries to make an unwilling father be a father to his children, the government ought to let willing fathers be fathers to their children. The former is an immensely difficult task and concerns far fewer numbers. The latter is simply a matter of passing legislation and concerns the great majority of absent fathers.
Obama once said, “We need to see what we can to make sure that fathers are valued, that our policies are encouraging them to be part of their children’s lives, that they are lifted up as important in stitching back together the kind of strong communities that we need for children to thrive.” That was the candidate that I supported.
Rinaldo Del Gallo, III
The author is spokes person of the Berkshire Fatherhood Coalition and a practicing family law attorney.
