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FATHERLESS AMERICA #2
DAD FOR HALF AN HOUR
Here's a story taken from the Washington Post and excerpted
in Fatherless America, the new book by David Blankenhorn. It may actually
be hard to follow, but see if you can track through this tangled web.
Here it is:
"In 1990, Daniel Schmidt, the father of
two children whom he seldom saw and did not support, got his girlfriend,
Clara Clausen, pregnant. Then the couple broke up. Clausen did not tell
Schmidt about the child. When she decided to put the baby up for adoption,
she named another man, her current boyfriend, as the father. She and the
boyfriend signed the adoption papers. The little girl went to a new home
in Michigan, where her adoptive parents named her Jessica.
"Meanwhile, the mother told the truth to Daniel Schmidt, who then
initiated legal action to get custody of a daughter he had never seen.
During the protracted legal proceedings, the court papers referred to
the child as B.G.C., for Baby Girl Clausen. Schmidt won. The child, now
a toddler, came back to Iowa. Schmidt and the mother, by then reconciled
and married, named her Jane Schmidt, her third name in less than three
years."
That's the story. If you're driving and couldn't take
notes, I imagine I could repeat it again, but it's really too sad and
frustrating for that. Because there are literally millions of kids out
there across America who honestly don't know who their fathers are. Put
plain and simple, they don't even know their own last names.
One-third of all births in the nation now occur outside of marriage, says
Blankenhorn. In most of these cases, when the mother fills in the birth
certificate, when she comes to the space where the dad's name should go,
she simply leaves it blank. In at least two of every three cases of unwed
parenthood, the father is never legally identified. He then observes:
"Not surprisingly, paternity suits are on
the rise."
All this week we're examining together this devastating social AND spiritual
crisis: Fatherless America. Everywhere you turn, children are growing
up in homes where Dad is either gone, or NEVER was there in the first
place. What's more disturbing, we now live in a land where people accept
this as being the status quo. "Who needs dads?" we ask. They're
not important. Kids can do just as good without them.
One of the most wrenching chapter titles in Blankenhorn's book is this:
"The Sperm Father." These are men who help to MAKE a baby .
. . and that's IT. That's ALL they do. They're there for the first half-hour
of the process, but they don't stay around for any of the rest. In his
book, after a lengthy and very stirring description of what fatherhood
CAN be, the author mentions the phenomenon of a sperm bank, describing
it as:
"Fatherhood as anonymous insemination."
He then adds: "NO DEFINITION OF FATHERHOOD COULD BE TINIER."
And yet, whether or not a person walks into a comfortable
office building, a sperm bank, with a receptionist and telephones and
drinking fountain and validated parking . . . when men do no more to be
fathers than to do the impregnating, we really have arrived at that tragically
TINY definition of fatherhood.
Perhaps you recall in the film City Slickers a few years ago a part where
Billy Crystal and his two cowboy friends had a very serious discussion
on the topic of sex without responsibility. Contrast that with what David
Blankenhorn says is the popular view today. Listen to this:
"The traditional male fantasy of sex WITHOUT
responsibility — the anti-father world view of the adolescent male, as
emblemized in the philosophy of Playboy magazine, James Bond movies, and
Travis McGee novels — is an increasingly accepted cultural model in our
society, less an ACCUSATION than an ASSUMPTION about male behavior."
Sociologist Elijah Anderson writes about the "street culture"
of our inner cities where:
"Men's glorification of casual and even predatory sex, completely
divorced from responsible fatherhood, now constitutes the core of the
`sex code' of young minority males."
Now, friend, how do we respond to the idea of the "(quote)
sperm father"? What do we say about men who impregnate someone and
then climb into their cars and drive away?
Of course, from a Christian viewpoint, we would open up God's Word and
say this is wrong. Adultery is a sin. Cheap, casual, unmarried sex is
a sin. Ignoring your parental responsibility is a sin. Failure to provide
is a sin. I could fill up the rest of this program and the rest of this
whole week's programs simply going from Bible verse to Bible verse and
telling you that these things are sins. The majority of you listening
today already agree with me.
On the other hand, we have to realize that not every citizen of America
takes the Bible as their normative guide in life. Not everybody accepts
the 66 books from Genesis to Revelation as having moral authority over
them. We're a land of many Christians, many others who hold to the often-quoted
Judeo-Christian ethic . . . and also many others who don't hold to either
of those things. In other words, we're not all singing from the same hymnal.
And yet, I want to tell you something. More and more Americans, regardless
of their religious convictions or their denominational affiliations, are
starting to look at "Fatherless America." They're starting to
see the deep scars that come from casual sex, from Sperm Fathers, from
one-night-stand fatherhood. People are seeing what happens to the kids.
And more of them, whether or not they read the Ten Commandments, are finally
nodding their heads in agreement. "What's going on is WRONG. Pure-and-simple
WRONG."
About a year ago, President Clinton addressed an enormous group of Baptists
who were concerned about these very issues. And I'm grateful that every
president, including this one, realizes that they are president of ALL
the people, not just the Southern Baptists. But I appreciated so much
the fact that President Clinton looked those people in the face, and looked
the teenagers in the face, and said to them: "Folks, for young unmarried
men to father children . . . is WRONG. Period. It's wrong." When
you look at the results, it's wrong.
But now for just a few moments, I want us to spin the coin around and
look at the other side. It's not just the boys-in-the-street who are carelessly
making babies. In what's becoming a tidal-wave trend, single women are
making up THEIR minds to have babies all by themselves. They don't want
a dad around; they don't NEED him, they say. A half-hour of help is all
they really want.
In a book entitled Single Parents By Choice, Cynthia tells her story:
"When I was thirty-two I decided that I
wanted to be pregnant, but that I didn't want to wait for Mr. OK or the
biological clock. So I told an old friend of mine that I wanted to get
pregnant. He agreed but did not want any responsibility, which was fine
with me as I didn't want the relationship, but I wanted a child. I named
him for my father."
In a New York Times article entitled "Bothered and Bewildered,"
July 22, 1993, a Katha Pollitt asks this question:
"Why not have a child on one's own? Children
are a joy; many men are not."
Actress Michelle Pfeiffer, who also decided to raise a child by herself,
added this:
"Men are like pinch hitters. So what's the deal? I thought about
all my options, and certainly one of those options was to just have a
baby with somebody, which I guess is the obvious option. But when it came
right down to it, I just couldn't do it. I thought, I don't want some
guy in my life forever who's going to be driving me nuts."
Statistically, we're told that between 175,000 and
400,000 children per year are now born to "(quote) single mothers
by choice," representing as many as nine percent of all births per
year.
Friend, as we close today, let me turn the spotlight on the biblical model.
A model where good men STAY. They fulfill their God-given responsibility.
They MAKE a baby and then they stay to RAISE that baby.
In the introduction to his book, David Blankenhorn has what I would almost
call a plea. Listen:
"If this book could be distilled into one
sentence, it would be this: A good society CELEBRATES the ideal of the
man who puts his family first."
I like that, don't you? We need to CELEBRATE men who
will be full-fledged, real fathers, and the women who stand with them,
side by side, for the entire process.
In a later chapter, the author of this compelling book describes men who,
in the most positive sense, "(quote) manhandle" their offspring.
Let me say again: he means "manhandle" in a good way, an almost
biblical way. Listen:
"In many respects, the single most consequential
development in the story of human fatherhood, powerfully portrayed in
classic texts such as the Bible's Book of Genesis, is the movement of
males toward understanding their paternity not simply as biological insemination,
nor even primarily as providing resources and warding off danger, but
also — and perhaps most important — as `MANHANDLING' their offspring:
making sure not only that the child survives, but also that the child
grows up to be a certain kind of person.
"Here we see the essential difference between biological paternity
and FATHERHOOD. The former helps to produce a child. The latter helps
to produce an adult."
Friend, wherever you are listening right now, God . . . is on your side.
And wants to be even more on your side. Whatever your circumstances, whatever
sociological variables you're wrestling with today, Tuesday, He wants
to challenge you to greatness and then provide the strength to make it
happen.
There's more coming up tomorrow, so do stay tuned.
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