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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Fathers are not fungible

In response to a timely article by Brad Wilcox, I've addressed the topic at my own blog.

Comments (18)

Michael,

Your post matches Jeff's earlier post on the deterioration of respect for work. The two are related, stemming from the same causes.

The Chicken

By the way, depending on how one defines "conspiracy," I don't know that there's really much point in getting in gibes, however mild, at people who claim there is a "conspiracy" to denigrate men. Let's put it this way: There are tons of people in opinion-making roles who have as a _real goal_ the denigration of men and of all normalcy and traditionalism in gender roles and interactions. Anti-male popular culture items don't write themselves. Anti-male college courses don't teach themselves. Anti-male sensitivity training doesn't make itself. The left is definitely out to denigrate men. It is a certainty that there are people sitting around talking about how to do this, how to "fight the patriarchy," how to fight "sexism," how to "promote diversity," "eliminate microinequities," and all the rest of it, whether one calls that a "conspiracy" or not. How many people does it take to make a conspiracy?

How many people does it take to make a conspiracy?
I think a defining property of a conspiracy is that it occurs in secret. But there isn't anything secret about virulent leftist hatred of men and everything masculine.

How many people does it take to make a conspiracy?

Wow, I can think of several meta-jokes.

In any case, the answer is 2 1/2. It would have been three, but there was a slightly unsuccessful counterrevolution.:)

Try to figure that one out.

The Chicken

Try to figure that one out.

I'm thinking the answer involves Charlie Sheen somehow. Thing is, it would only take one woman, because they are that good. That is your meta-joke for today, don't get greedy.

I doubt this could be considered a true conspiracy, so much as a reaction to the combination of liberalism, birth control, and technocratic decadence.

As such, I could only name this as a conspiracy on a preternatural level. "He was a murderer from the beginning."

Zippy has a good point. In case anybody was wondering, I was responding to this from the full post:

Some of my conservative and/or Catholic friends believe that the denigration of fathers is part-and-parcel of some grand conspiracy to destroy the family. It might be the UN, or the Marxists, or certain key 20th-century cultural icons such as Freud, Margaret Mead, and Picasso, whose creative ideas seemed to be closely bound up with their desire for sexual license. But I seriously doubt it's an organized conspiracy of human beings, save perhaps on the local level in California and New York. There's just a tremendous cultural force behind easy divorce, contraception, abortion, gay "marriage," artificial procreation, and other practices which corrode the traditional family.

"Cultural forces" are made up of human beings. Human beings--feminists, activists, college administrators, politicians, TV show makers, etc. (these not being mutually exclusive categories)-hate the traditional family and are indeed _actively striving_ to destroy it, often by direct and deliberate indoctrination of other real people, preferably young people and/or people who depend on them for jobs or goodwill. There are not merely impersonal "cultural forces" at work here, there are blatantly, openly, planning and working human beings. And they talk to each other about how best to advance their agenda. As Zippy says, if it isn't in secret it probably isn't a conspiracy. But it is a plan, or rather many loosely connected plans, but real plans nonetheless made by real people who are out to destroy traditional conceptions of the family. Hey, I saw a bunch of them (homosexual and transgender activists) working very hard right in my own town last summer.

My parents, both of them wonderful persons, divorced a long time ago which was a blessing for me and my sisters!
And why the heck does gay marriage and artificial procreation corrode traditional families?? Would there be only one happy family more without gay marriage? Quite the contrary: if gays/lesbians are pressed into heterosexual relationships much harm can be done to their possible spouses and children. And whatever the (understandable) ethical concerns with respect to artificial procreation may be, without artificial procreation many happy families wouldn't exist in the first place.
To suggest that people have become homosexual, let alone transgender, by the way of "indoctrination" through cultural forces, or the mass media (Will and Grace, Ellen, Christopher Street Day etc.- huh!) is just a laughable legend. And what is so bad about the fact that today (e.g., due to contraception) an adult heterosexual has more than one live option? If he or she decides to build a family, such a decision is probably more valuable and sincere than it used to be in the fifties or sixties.


And whatever the (understandable) ethical concerns with respect to artificial procreation may be, without artificial procreation many happy families wouldn't exist in the first place.

A. What is happy about a family conceived (literally) in sin?

B. Who says they should exist? One must not use an evil means to a good end. Adoption would work much better and is a blessing for the children and an act of charity.

To suggest that people have become homosexual, let alone transgender, by the way of "indoctrination" through cultural forces, or the mass media (Will and Grace, Ellen, Christopher Street Day etc.- huh!) is just a laughable legend.

A laughable legend that no one stated in this combox. With whom are you arguing the point?

And what is so bad about the fact that today (e.g., due to contraception) an adult heterosexual has more than one live option? If he or she decides to build a family, such a decision is probably more valuable and sincere than it used to be in the fifties or sixties.

These "life" options are mere license for immorality. In order to have a sincere decision, it must be an integral decision. The word sincere comes from an old term in Italian sculpture - literally, sine cere, without wax. It used to be that during the Roman period, if a sculptor made a mistake in carving a white marble statue, say, he made a small nick, the practice was to melt white wax into the defect. The best works, those without alloyment, were said to be sine cere, without wax.

One cannot have a "life" option that impedes life by cooperation in sin. It becomes a life with wax. Marriage, entered into sacramentally, has grace accessible to it that other types of relationships do not. Most of the people getting married in the 1950's understood the concept of, "til death do us part," and so, presumably, entered into sacramental unions (the majority of the country being Christian).

A union, even if not perfect, that has grace and the favor of God going with it is more valuable than a relationship without them, no matter how "good" the relationship may seem to the world. Marriage is not just a natural union, at least not at its best. It signifies something to come. A sinful relationship refuses to participate in this and leaves the two people bound to this earth.

The Chicken

Grobi,

The sociological evidence is overwhelming that families in the traditional sense of the term have a harder time forming and staying together today. Marriages occur later and later, and married couples form an ever-smaller percentage of households. Out-of-wedlock births are way up as a percentage of total births. Abortion is much more common today than before Roe, and no-fault divorce became the norm within a decade after Roe. That means unilateral divorce, which in turn means that divorce is easier and more frequent than prior to the 70s. The evidence is also overwhelming that children tend to do better when raised in intact families; for details, see the work of the authors at this site.

If your parents' divorce was good for you--a claim I take with a grain of salt when anybody makes it--that is the exception not the rule. I've been through two of my own divorces, and I've come to realize that they, and their long-term effects, were worse than anything in my marriages. I can assure you that such is the more common experience. As for gay "marriage," such a thing is a metaphysical impossibility, whatever civil law may end up saying. I think that's why most gay couples, especially men, aren't eager to contract it themselves. They want it enshrined in law only to secure society's moral approval of the kind of sex they have.

Of course plenty of people, who mostly call themselves "liberals," think that such trends are a price worth paying for increased personal autonomy. That was first made possible by cheap and widespread contraception, which ignited "the sexual revolution." In my post, I suggested that such autonomy is illusory. If you believe otherwise, state your premises so that we may debate them.

If your parents' divorce was good for you--a claim I take with a grain of salt when anybody makes it

Reading the Wilcox article (and Grobi's comment), I was struck by the thought that the negative outcomes of "donor children" in the cited study are not so self-evidently negative to some people. On the face of it, we assume that higher rates of depression, substance abuse, etc., are bad things, but in our culture they're almost badges of honor. "Hey, everyone has his issues, right?" For example, in certain communities, serving a prison sentence is no longer stigmatized. Maybe we are witnessing similar fruit in the culture wars: we can't even make arguments that a traditional family is better, because the grounds for "better" are disputed. The ultimate goods are not what we say they are -- everyone has "baggage" nowadays, so what's the big deal?

And why the heck does gay marriage and artificial procreation corrode traditional families??

The answer to Grobi - if one were to assume his questions coming from a sincere intention to apprehend the truth - is the root rationale for Michael's posting "Fathers are not Fungible" to begin with. Fatherhood is not a mere biological accident of DNA transmission. The full, total meaning of human fatherhood is found in a man choosing, out of complete permanent love for his wife as such (including love for her as a fertile woman), chooses to enter into the pro-creative act in cooperation with God, and in making a permanent life-long commitment at that moment to love and selflessly raise to full adulthood any child God may decide to bless this union with.

Every act of contracepted sex, homosexual sex, and artificial "procreation" defies this natural order. And since this natural order is the root of traditional families, voila!

Thank you, Lydia. Talk of impersonal forces is simply not necessary here. An impersonal force did not write the scripts for the Cosby Show. Why is there this reflexive need to disavow belief in feminism as an organized conspiracy, even though there can hardly ever have been anything more organized premeditated than the left's march through the institutions and its orchestrated, all-out assault on the male-headed household. Maybe, as Zippy says, the word conspiracy connotes secrecy. But the word force certainly connotes purposelessness.

Has anyone bothered to wonder why a person might get behind the idea of destroying the traditional family in the first place? Before all else, the idea of destroying tradition has to appeal to those persons.

That's why talk of "conspiracy" is useless. It implies that there's a cabal we need to root out and the problem is solved. Arrest the perps, and voila!

Within a generation or two, are we going to have universities and media elites more sympathetic to traditional families because we've exposed a conspiracy? Or does the phrase "winning hearts and minds" mean nothing?

Your post is good, but the title of it seems misleading in its use of the term fungible. Fungible is a quality of many different items, if each of these items is as good as the other in achieving an intended use. If I intend to use a handful of flour to make bread, one handful of flour from a sack is as good as any other handful from the same sack. Because the flour is fungible, I can use any of the flour in the sack - the important thing is only that I get flour, not from which portion of the sack that I get it.

What you emphasized was that fathers are considered optional in our society, which is also a good and timely point. But fungibility and optionality are not the same qualities, and are hardly even similar. If you had elaborated according to the meaning of the term fungible it would have also been appropriate and timely. How often do we hear of the importance, not of having a father, but of having a father figure in a child's life? In other words, the fact that the father is the biological father is not nearly so important as that he is a man who can function as a father, or do father-things just like a father. Sure, a biological father can be a father to one's children, but so can any other man if he is willing to do the things that fathers do.

The willingness to accept this idea that fathers are fungible is another example of a liberal society's attempt to make the abnormal seem like the normal, and the extraordinary seem like the ordinary.

I think the idea is that men and women are not fungible--cannot be swapped out for one another.

"The full, total meaning of human fatherhood is found in a man choosing, out of complete permanent love for his wife as such (including love for her as a fertile woman), chooses to enter into the pro-creative act in cooperation with God, and in making a permanent life-long commitment at that moment to love and selflessly raise to full adulthood any child God may decide to bless this union with"

Tony, with no disrespect, I don't believe in any God. Am I, in your view, unentitled to raise a family with a woman I love?

Secondly, the reason you (all) seem to be searching for (or believe you may have found) some sort of "conspiracy to destroy the traditional family" is that the majority of you seem to be unable see the world from someone else's point of view.

For many people the views expressed here will be frighteningly reactionary. The "conspiracy" comprises millions of men and women who have chosen not to live by your rules.

And a word to "The Chicken": "A union, even if not perfect" is with wax, to use your analogy. Perhaps it is a better, more Christian kind of wax? I hope you keep your preachy judgement of others, with their terrible sinful lives that are destined to end in Hell, confined to Internet blogs like this one, to be read and confirmed by the minority who agree.

Dear Dom,

There is nothing preachy in my statement or Tony's. If God exists, my statement and his is true. The crux of your disagreement is with the existence of God. Everything else flows from there.

The Chicken

P. S. Atheists can have valid natural marriages which are a good. The argument concerns the highest good in this sort of a relationship (marriage), which leads back to the question of God's existence, as I mention, above.

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