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Over the years, through what I’ve seen with my own eyes and heard from others, I’ve come to believe that deliberately depriving a child of a father is a form of child abuse.
That’s not a popular position to hold. What’s doubly sad is that criticizing people who deprive children this way is worse than actually depriving the children. Why? Please explain.
Losing a father through death is awful, but it’s not the same as losing him through divorce or being born into a fatherless home. In whichever case, a child will feel abandoned, but losing a father through divorce and being deprived of one from birth are deliberate acts of abandonment, worse than death in a sense. When a family loses a father through death, they keep his memory alive. His authority lingers. The children grow up knowing he loved them and their mother, made sacrifices for their well being, and did not walk out on them to pursue his own interests.
Three out of four black babies are born in the United States to women who aren’t married to the fathers. Fatherlessness leads to a multitude of problems, the worst of which is the repeated cycle of fatherlessness. You’ve read the studies. Even if you haven’t, you’ve seen firsthand the effects of fatherlessness on children, especially boys.
Despite what selfish and shameless adults think, children want fathers. They need fathers. They need masculine men in their lives who love them and would do anything to protect them, men who live with them, raise them, and sacrifice for them. Millions of children grow up without being loved or cared for by the men who sired them. It makes me angry, bitterly so.
I reviewed a book called Raising Boys without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men, about lesbians and “single by choice” mothers raising boys. The author is a psychologist and married mother, and I don’t know what possessed her to write a book praising fatherless boys. The book got my blood boiling so much, I wanted to fling it across the room. Read the review.
Anyway, the point is this: No matter how much the author tried to tip-toe around it, the boys she wrote about wanted and needed masculine men in their lives. Fathers. Because the mothers weren’t with the men who impregnated them, they had to seek out inferior “father figures” for their sons.
And that leads me to what prompted this post. James White reminds us that things will get a lot worse before they get better. Society’s permissiveness and selfishness will only increase, and sacrificing for and doing what’s best for children will become relics of a bygone era. In response to an article about homosexual “marriage,” James writes:
“As I stared at the picture [of two 'married' women with a child between them] I could not help but see only one thing: the selfish, self-centered abuse of a beautiful little child by two people committed to the fulfillment of their own desires. I once again immediately thought of the comments of Rosie O’Donnell. She was asked about her ‘son,’ and she said he has asked about where his daddy is. O’Donnell’s response is the very essence of self-centeredness: ‘I tell him Mommy only likes other Mommies.’
“It is a measure of the decay of Western culture that self-deception is the activity of the day. We constantly cry, ‘for the children, for the children!’ while abusing them to no end in the service of ourselves. It is purposefully abusive of a child to consciously deny to them a mother and a father…A father is a man who heads the household and loves his wife as himself; a mother is a female who bears the children and nurtures them, honoring and loving her husband. These role models are never perfect even in the best situations, but the fact that there is failure in true marriage is no excuse for the creation of faux-marriages.”
As James alludes later in his post, perversity will become the norm, and anyone speaking out against it is viewed as the problem. No one wants to be reminded of his sin, so he tries to shut out and shut down criticism. On an individual level, that’s no threat. But when people organize as groups and push their debasement into government policy, that’s a BIG problem.
That’s why I speak out against homosexual “marriage” (and having babies out of wedlock) and will continue to do so, no matter what it costs me. It’s not just because it is a mockery of God’s intentions, it deprives children born into such unions the basic necessity of masculine and feminine love of a father and mother.
Freedom of speech will erode in this country, make no mistake about that. Merely expressing a Christian worldview is illegal in Canada. There is a deliberate effort on our own soil to silence those who call a thing by its name. What do you think so-called hate speech laws are about? So speak now, or forever hold your peace. The children need you.
Do you share my view that deliberately depriving a child of a father is a form of child abuse?
Update: Whenever you think something should go without saying, it’s wise to just go ahead and say it. I do not believe women should stay married to men who smack them around or sexually abuse the kids. This post expresses the general ideas that fatherlessness (through divorce or illegitimacy) harms children and that divorces are based on the selfishness of one or both spouses.
Related posts:
Resources:
- Fathers for Life
- National Fatherhood Initiative
- Effects of Fatherlessness here and here
- Shameful stats from A Portrait of the Black Family 2007 (PDF – emphases added):
• 70% of all black children are born out of wedlock.
• 65% of never-married black women have children, double that for white women.
• 22% of never-married black women with incomes over $75,000 have children, 10 times that of white women.
• 62% of black families with children are headed by a single parent.
• 85% of black children do not live in a home with their fathers.
• Only 15-20% of black children born today will grow up with 2 parents until age 16.
• Over 80% of long-term child poverty occurs in broken or never-married homes.
• 70% of [black] boys in the criminal justice system come from single-parent homes.
