For the men

Photo by Marco Carcia – AP

There’s a lot more attention focused on fathers right now than I can remember in decades. That can only be a good thing.

President Obama has especially centered the nation’s attention on fatherhood.

President Obama, who barely knew his own father, devoted his afternoon Friday to promoting the importance of being a good dad, saying he wanted to start a “national conversation” on the subject.

Two days before Father’s Day, Obama attended events related to fatherhood — gathering famous and not-so-famous dads for a series of service projects around Washington and a White House town hall meeting, then addressing young men on the South Lawn.

He spoke in deeply personal terms of “the hole in a child’s heart” left by an absent father and of the powerful influence his Kenyan father exerted during the only visit the senior Obama made after he and the president’s mother had divorced. Obama noted that during that visit — when he was 10 — his father gave him his first basketball and took him to his first jazz concert, stirring lifelong interests.

“Fathers are our first teachers and coaches, they’re our mentors and role models, they set an example of success and push us to succeed,” Obama said at the White House. “When fathers are absent, when they abandon their responsibility to their children, we know the damage that does to our families.”

Although presidents typically mark Father’s Day and celebrate the virtues of family, the attention Obama devoted was unusual.

Whatever else may be calculated for political gain in this man’s career, it is not this. His commitment as husband and father is genuine and clear.

Which is all the more reason why he has such great potential to inspire family values. But his definition of that term is in tension with the traditional understanding in our culture.

During the presidential campaign, he made the impromptu remark that if one of his daughters made a mistake, he wouldn’t want her “punished with a baby”. He didn’t say ‘punished with a pregnancy’, though that’s the general sentiment of the ‘pro-choice’ movement, to which he adheres. He didn’t say ‘punished with a fetus’, the euphemism to de-humanize the pre-born child in the womb. He did say baby, and that sentiment about his daughters was genuine, and lays bare the tension in his vision of family and human values.

Then on Father’s Day 2008, candidate Obama gave a rousing talk to a church congregation on fatherhood. 

‘We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception,’ he said.

He thus recognized that a child has been conceived at that moment, and the man has become a father. And yet…..he politically stands for the right to end that child’s life at any time prior to – and in the midst of – birth.

According to a Church prelate who spoke personally with him about the contradiction between what he says and what he does, Obama realizes the tension exists. He seems willing to live with it instead of trying to reconcile it one way or the other.

But on this subject he has as much conviction as on anything.

In his essay in Parade, Obama speaks of the struggles that he faces in common with much of the country in balancing work and family life, noting that at times he has been “an imperfect father.”

“I know I have made mistakes,” he writes. “I have lost count of all the times, over the years, when the demands of work have taken me from the duties of fatherhood.”

“On this Father’s Day, I am recommitting myself to that work, to those duties,” he writes, “to build a foundation for our children’s dreams, to give them the love and support they need to fulfill them, and to stick with them the whole way through.”

Good for President Obama. Time to recommit to fatherhood, from the moment of conception, “the whole way through”.