Dads Matter

A recent secular study in England determined (oh my!) that kids whose dads actually interacted with them during childhood had higher IQ’s and more social mobility than those whose dads were not involved.  An article documenting the findings can be found here. 

Of course, the lead researcher, Dr. Daniel Nettle proposes “The data suggest that having a second adult involved during childhood produces benefits in terms of skills and abilities that endure throughout adult life.”  Note the subtle anti-Dad bias here.  It’s not really the biologically male person who matters, just “a second adult” who is “involved.”  Interestingly, that’s apparently not what this researcher’s own data indicated.  Yet, in the politically correct environs of academia and the media we are not permitted to claim dads matter in some specific and special way because that would, definitionally, be sexist, misogynist, and homophobic (because it would be biased against lesbians raising children).  I’m sure I’m leaving off some other utterly horrible things it would be to actually conclude that the male of our species interacting with his children in a routine and regular way is somehow beneficial to the children.

As the cartoonist Walt Kelly said many years ago, we have seen the enemy and it is us.  In our zeal to promote raw individualism, where every person’s individual desires matter above all else, we have, as a society promoted rampant fatherlessness.  Our insane divorce laws make marriage almost pointless, something not lost on the many millennials who simply live together rather than bother entering a marriage they pretty much assume will end in divorce.  Fathers and children are often pulled apart, with Dads slowly fading from the picture, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because it’s just how it works out. Our inner city problems are often made out as education problems, economic problems, or racial problems when the more simple and more likely explanation is a fatherlessness problem.  Young men don’t know how to grow up and become real men because they don’t have a father at home to teach them.  Can a single mom raise a decent young man.  Yes.  Is it likely?  No.  The proof, as the old saying goes, is in the pudding.  We don’t need some British researcher to tell us Dads matter, when the past 50 years or so of American experimentation through a system that unfairly and improperly incentivizes young women to have children out of wedlock is evidence enough. 

Every economic indicator I’ve ever seen shows that stable, married couples are, on average, better off financially in the short and long run than those who are not married.  If for no other reason, our government should encourage men and women to get married and stay married because of its economic benefits.  But, of course, there’s more.  Both boys and girls need Dads who actually take some interest in their lives.  Dad doesn’t have to be a superstar – we’ve all heard that it’s T-I-M-E that counts for as much as anything.  Whatever legacy any Dad should want to leave, it should be that his kids will always say my Dad had time for me.

Dads matter.  The Bible puts a premium on dads doing two things: treating their wives as Christ treats his church and treating their children with dignity (see Ephesians 5:22 through 6:4 for example).  The Proverbs are full of sayings about how dads should deal with their children.  Moreover, the Bible provides vivid examples of how NOT to go about raising children (King David’s massive failures as a father detailed in 2 Samuel make the point – and there are others).

Instead of President Obama tearfully whining about gun deaths on television, how about tearfully and remorsefully apologizing to dads for our country treating fatherhood as if it were some sort of moral evil?  Any number of feminists have, over the years, suggested men are truly unnecessary except as a means of perpetuating the species.  Too many popular media presentations show dads as bunglers and morons who are mostly incapable of handling the day to day affairs of life without full intervention from their wives and kids.  That doesn’t mean children can’t sometimes help out their dads (I confess my own need for occasional help from my teenager with technology!) but neither of my sons were ever the moral, spiritual, or economic arbiter in our household.

So then, what should we do?  First, as a people we must simply acknowledge that dads matter. My dad never did anything “earth shattering” but he sure did make himself available any time I needed him and he taught me things about being a man, through his words and deeds.  Secondly, we need to reinvigorate masculinity as a virtue.  YES, a virtue.  I can’t for the life of me understand why any woman would want the kind of wimps most men are portrayed as in much of our media.  I don’t mean that men are hair-grabbing Neanderthals but there ought to be a bit of an old John Wayne movie hero in every guy.  He ought to want to protect his wife and children; he ought to want to go down guns-a-blazing rather than drip, drip, dripping away; he ought to want people to know that he’s prepared to stand on principle for things that matter, even when it costs him something meaningful; he ought to want to provide for his family, even when his wife has the capacity and ability to do so.  Third, we ought to encourage Dads to spend time with their kids – that can be as mundane as playing a video game with them, grabbing a burger or milkshake with them, riding bikes together, fishing, walking around the park, or just reading to them.  The key is to spend some time with the children.

The craziness here is that the Bible already tells us Dads matter.  Yet, we seem to think we need a “study” to tell us what the Bible has been telling us for thousands of years?  It’s odd that when some expert does a study there are gasps and oohs and aahs as if the expert has really hit on something new and exciting.  Another part of the Bible tells us there is “nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes) and when it comes to human nature, there isn’t.  No study will outdo the God of the universe!

Dads matter.  It’s that simple.  Let’s act like it.

The College Mind Ends with a Whimper

Students on the campus at the University of Washington were unwilling to tell a 5 foot 9 inch white male that he was not a 6 foot 5 inch Chinese woman.  Wow.

The interviewer was asking random college students questions related to transgender use of bathrooms.  Of course, every student was okay with anyone using the restroom they felt comfortable using.  Of course, they're trying to be compassionate and we want to encourage compassion.  They don’t want anyone stigmatized (we’ll ignore for the moment the stigma to a nine year old girl having a large male using the restroom next to her).  No reasonable human being is arguing with these college students that compassion for others is a bad thing - but I digress.

A serious problem arises when the interviewer asks the students if it’s okay if he goes around telling people he’s 6 foot 5 when he clearly is not.  One student indicated she might actually tell him he was wrong, but she hedged enormously.  The rest either said it was okay or said they would want to know why he felt he was 6 foot 5.  Somehow, they clearly thought it was wrong to tell someone the objective truth about their height, presumably because it would lack compassion.

It’s one thing to want to be compassionate, it’s another altogether to ignore reality.  Moreover, how is it compassionate to let a 5 foot 9 white guy go around pretending to be a 6 foot 5 Chinese woman?  There is no other way to say it: he’s pretending.  When children pretend we let them.  If one of my sons told me he was a superhero when he was four years old, I didn’t argue.  Why?  Because I knew he’d grow out of it.  He would start to examine reality and measure things and would come to understand that he was not able to fly on a whim or zap people with bolts of lightning from his eyeballs, or whatever other silly nonsense he pretended to do when he was four.  We let kids indulge in such fantasy for that very reason: it’s fantasy and they must come to some point in their life when they can start to recognize the difference.  We universally used to call that growing up.

Now, apparently, we have so ingrained the current generation with the idea that you can be anything you want that they have taken it to heart.  You really do get to be anything you want, even when it’s obviously and unalterably not true.  So a 5 foot 9 white guy can say he is a 6 foot 5 Chinese woman and no one is supposed to bat an eyelash.

But, oh, the irony (there’s always tremendously delicious irony afoot in such situations).  If the same 5 foot 9 white guy goes around saying he’s Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin or Jack the Ripper, that’s not allowed.  Why not?  We all know the obvious response: they were bad people.  I agree 100% these were bad men.  In fact, I would have serious concerns about anyone who claims to be one of these men.  But let’s be consistent here: if I get to determine “who I am” and, more importantly, “what I am” then how can that possibly have any limits?  Moreover, if you are truly compassionate and caring and tolerant, then don’t I get to “identify” however I want, when I want, under what circumstances I want, with whomever I want, for whatever reason I want?  The answer, on college campuses at least, is, ironically, an emphatic NO.  I can’t be a Donald Trump supporter because that “scares” students who feel they should be in a “safe place.”  I can’t be a Christian because that means I’m homophobic, Islamophobic, bigoted, hateful and intolerant.  In the crazy college mind, these "identities" are wrong without any objective standard to truly explain their wrongness.

I am terrified for the current generation of college students.  If they are truly buying into this insanity (I don’t know if it is true or not – certainly there is plenty of anecdotal evidence, but such evidence is not always convincing), then it indicates a complete failure of rationality and logic.  First, such thinking is utterly irrational.  If there are no categories by which reality is organized, then reality itself must not exist.  If reality doesn’t exist, then allowing someone to “identify” however they want doesn’t matter.  If it doesn’t matter, then no one should really care whether it’s allowed or not allowed.  Yet, somehow, it MUST be allowed with certain exceptions, which makes this sort of thinking all the more infuriatingly irrational. 

Worse, such thinking lacks any sort of consistency (or logic, if you prefer).  As noted above, there are categories of being which are frowned upon, even though everyone is supposed to be allowed to “identify” as best suits them.  Either everyone gets to “identify” or not.  If there are limits on identifying then the very rationale for allowing people to “identify” is, itself lost.  Such inconsistency is absurd.  When it passes for reason, it passes beyond absurd into terrifying.  The dreary drain into which such thinking spins suggests a generation unwilling to think critically or logically about anything.   People who can be willingly led to accept such inconsistency will accept anything.  People who accept anything will accept their own demise with a smile.

 If this is the world these college students want to live in, do they not see where it leads?  It must lead to utter chaos and, therefore, either destruction or absolute, dictatorial control.  Either way, it goes without saying, you won’t get to “identify” however you want in either situation.  You’ll either identify as dead or you’ll identify how you’re told.  Such is not, I suspect, the utopia which these students envision when they decide to ignore reality and uncritically accept the identify movement.

Allow me to paraphrase the ending lament of the T.S. Eliot poem The Hollow Men:  this is the way the college mind ends, this is the way the college mind ends, this is the way the college  mind ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Who reacts to a less than 1% chance of something? Only a liberal law professor.

            There’s an old saw in the legal community that if you have the facts, argue the facts, if you have the law, argue the law and if you have neither, just argue loudly.   Writing in the Louisville Courier-Journal, University of Kentucky law Professor Joshua A. Douglas, apparently decides on the argue loudly approach.  He starts with the premise that an evenly divided Court might end up deciding the 2016 election and concludes, therefore, the Senate should vote on President Obama’s apparent Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

            Let’s start with his premise: the Court might end up deciding the election.  There have been 57 presidential elections prior to the upcoming 2016 election.  How many have been “decided” by the Supreme Court?  Technically, none.  Bush v. Gore in 2000 did not decide the election; rather, Bush v. Gore determined whether Florida’s process for selecting the president did or did not violate the equal protection clause.  Moreover, it is the only instance in our history when the Supreme Court was asked to make this kind of decision.  The odds that there might be a need for the Supreme Court to step in are, thus, already quite remote, even before the election happens.  It’s an odd sort of argument for a lawyer to say “well you know this might just happen under an extremely unpredictable set of circumstances in a really close election, so therefore we should act in a certain way.”

            Secondly, Douglas himself points out the equal protection vote went 7 – 2 against Gore.  Why assume the likelihood of a 4 – 4 determination based on the current constitution of the Court?  Is Douglas suggesting all the current members of the court are pure ideologues who would simply vote along party lines?  Moreover, there is only remote chance this election will end up in litigation and, additionally, no reason to assume the court will necessarily end up in a 4 – 4 draw.  It might, it might not. 

            Third, Douglas fears greatly that a state supreme court will have the final say if the Supreme Court were to split 4 – 4, since such a decision means the lower court decision stands.  So what?  So a state court rules on its own laws, with which it is likely much more familiar than the Supreme Court.  Can state supreme court justices not be relied on to make reasoned, thoughtful decisions?  Douglas suggests that “elected judges” (which we have in Kentucky and which I am against – but that’s for another day) are partisan.  Perhaps, but even partisan players can make reasoned, appropriate, and legally correct decisions.  As a litigator, I learned the tendencies of the judges in front of whom I regularly appeared.  I can think of many instances where judges who leaned one way politically made decisions that were simply based on the law and nothing else.  In other words, they didn’t let sympathy for a partisan cause sway them, even when their inherent biases might have tugged at them to do otherwise when the law was clear.

            So Douglas bases his arguments on an incredibly weak premise, makes several assumptions that may, or may not, be borne out in reality, then suggests therefore the Senate should act on Merrick’s nomination.  Of course, he admits, as he must, that his argument contains “a lot of big ifs.”  Then he makes his most fallacious argument: do we really want to take the chance?  Talk about just argue “real loud.”  There is currently less than a 1.8 % chance (1 in 57) there will be a Supreme Court case regarding the 2016 presidential election and there is no way to know what the chances are the justices end up 4 – 4.  Assuming even odds of a 4 – 4 decision, that means the overall odds of some “partisan” state supreme court effectively making the decision are around 0.9%.  Oooooh, scary.  (By the way, when a liberal says “partisan” he or she generally means conservative). 

            According to Professor Douglas, the Senate should act on President Obama’s nominee because there is a less than 1% chance something could happen.  The problem is, of course, Professor Douglas doesn’t even know what the “something” might be at this point.  So there is a really small chance of an unknown event occurring resulting in a currently unknown state supreme court making a so-called “partisan” decision that the Supreme Court then takes up with completely unknown odds of how the Supreme Court might rule.  And this is a basis for arguing the Senate should take up Judge Merrick’s nomination?

            I wonder if one of his students made such an absurd argument how Professor Douglas would grade the student?  We all know the answer.