An Inconvenient Truth about Absent Fathers

Collen Caroll Campbell writes at the Ethics and Public Policy Center: “What accounts for this disconnect between our concern about fatherlessness and our resigned acceptance of it? The answer may lie in our desperation to believe the happy fiction of the sexual revolution that child welfare and adult desires need never conflict. In a nation where so many families deviate from the married-mother-and-father model and a powerful gay-rights movement seeks to redefine marriage as an institution with no intrinsic connection to the bearing or raising of children, it’s easier to ignore or stay mum on the link between the fatherhood crisis and the marriage crisis that spawned it.. . . For all we have learned in recent decades about how a child benefits from having his biological father in the home for the long haul, many of us still prefer to tell ourselves that any caring adult can fill a father’s shoes, and a live-in, married-to-mom dad is simply a bonus. Such happy talk may comfort adults, but it does little to ease the pain of the millions of children living with a hole in their hearts that only a father can fill.”