Father Politics
You know that moment during the VP debate when Joe Biden choked up? The one when he talked about his first wife and daughter who were killed in the car accident? I loved that moment. He could have milked the tragedy to hammer home his point, but he let us understand it with subtlety and poise instead.
He told us what we all know, but what gets drowned out in our moms-rule culture: fathers are every bit as capable of feeling what mothers feel. Women don't have the chokehold on caring about children. Motherhood is no more important... (let me repeat, Biden-style - No. More. Important.) than fatherhood.
This editorial in The Huffington Post says it a bit more eloquently: "By bringing that reality to a national political stage, Biden demonstrated that -- for all of us, not just feminists -- the personal is political, that women alone do not have the sole responsibility for caring about the future of our children and that the concern of fathers is a largely untapped pool of political energy."
The article ends with an even more striking truth: "Political equality for women will not come from the minimization or idealization of motherhood -- but rather from recognizing fatherhood as a significant factor in our culture and politics."
It is time to recognize fathers as activists and changemakers for our children, and as the other half of women's movements designed to take on issues like equal pay, high quality education, affordable childcare, and parental leave rights. I wonder what might happen if we took the focus off the trials and sanctity of motherhood and let the fathers step up to join in.
Let's pool our power and make things happen!
posted by Marc @ 6:28 PM
2 Comments:
You had me cheering along...until that last paragraph.
Fathers have their own movement. Unfortunately, the mothers movement was hijacked by radical feminists. They fight the fathers movement instead of working with them.
Biden's biggest mistake was losing sight of the value of the Constitution when he authored the Violence Against Women Act. Fathers (and some mothers) now have no due process to fight false allegations of abuse in family court.
Women have become the oppressors.
http://www.jugsforjustice.org/wordpress/?p=172
http://www.teristoddard.org/wordpress/?page_id=7
Teri,
I'm still optimistic that men and women will realize that they need to work together toward many common goals. Separate women's and men's movements will always be focused on attacking each other, I fear.
I admit I need to learn more about post-divorce parental concerns, but as far as intact marriages, I see little reason why we need to separate the genders to get what we all want from our government and from workplaces for all parents.
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