Recently in Family Issues Category

[Note: This is a version of post I wrote last year. I've restructured the argument to address the useful criticisms provided by my commenters. I should note that this post is addressed to Christians because non-believers may not share my understanding of the role and nature of sex. While there may be some overlap of agreement, the presuppositional attitude of most non-Christians would be so foreign to my view (that God created sexual relations with a specific form and for a particular range of purposes) it would be impossible to offer suggestions for a general audience, though I believe this post is as relevant and true for non-believers as it is for Christians.]

Each week my neighbors and I engage in a curious ethical ritual. On Wednesday morning before we leave for work we set outside our doors an artifact which expresses our obligation to the welfare of future generations. We call these objects “recycling bins.”

Recycling is one example of an action that we take in the present to benefit a group in the future. The earth has enough space and resources that all current generations could be extremely wasteful without having a detrimental effect on the global population. Future generations, however, would likely suffer if we are wantonly careless in our use of resources. For this reason the recycling of waste products is viewed as an important, albeit minor, act of virtue.

Although most people probably do not need to be persuaded that we have moral obligations to future generations, it would be useful to examine what form the argument would take. Philosopher Jim Nolt outlines the argument as follows:

1. We have obligations to all currently living people.
2. Future people are in no morally relevant respect different from currently living people.
3. We have obligations to all future people.

Nolt believes the argument is sound and adds:

The moral irrelevance of time of birth is perhaps best understood by the realization that we are future people-to our predecessors. The distinction between past and future is, after all, not ultimate and absolute, but relative to temporal perspective. In that respect, it is like the designation, "foreigner," which is relative to geographical perspective. Who counts as a foreigner depends on the country we inhabit. Likewise, who counts as a future person depends on the time we inhabit. All people are foreigners to people of countries other than their own. Likewise, all people belong to the future generations of their predecessors. [emphasis in original]

If this argument is true then we have generic obligations (i.e., don’t despoil the planet) to future generic groups (e.g., people living in 2056 A.D.). However, I contend that we also have specific obligations to specific individuals in the future. For example, I believe that Christian men and women who are unmarried (and are not called to a life of chastity) have certain present obligations to their future spouse.

Can marriage be considered a form of intellectual property? In an intriguing article at Slate.com, Yale Law professor Kenji Yoshino uses that premise as the foundation for a strawman argument for same-sex marriage:

The law of trademark, particularly the doctrine of tarnishment, is particularly illuminating here. A trademark is a mark a person or business uses to brand its products or services. A "tarnishment" claim arises when a competitor uses that mark in a way that diminishes its cachet.

For example, Coca-Cola sued and won in the case of the "Enjoy Cocaine" slogan, which was written in the same font and color to mimic "Enjoy Coke." The court believed that some consumers might believe that the Coca-Cola company had had produced the t-shirt. But as Yoshino notes, "you can win a tarnishment claim without such confusion about the source of a product."

He then proceeds to make a claim that, while a blatant strawman, provides a plausible answer to the question, "I don't know why somebody else's marriage has anything to do with me."

To people like [former Congressman] Henry Hyde, the idea that same-sex marriage demeans or assaults the institution of marriage is a tarnishment claim. It doesn't matter that he can still marry a woman. If a woman can also get married to a woman, he feels the value of his trademark has gone down. Even those who regard cross-sex and same-sex marriage as separate institutions will conjure up both when they hear the term "marriage." So now we have an answer to [Elizabeth] Edwards' query about what another person's marriage has to do with hers.

Having set ups the strawman, Yoshino proceeds to knock it down in his conclusion:

In 1995 I became a "weekend dad." I was on recruiting duty for the Marine Corps, on an unforgiving assignment that required working fourteen hour days, six days a week. Sundays I'd make the trek from Olympia, WA up to Everett where my soon-to-be-ex-wife had moved. I'd strap my two-year-old daughter into the car seat and we'd set out on our weekend routine: to the park, if it was sunny and warm; to the playland at McDonald's, if it was rainy and cold. (Everett is always rainy and always cold.)

I was returning home one Sunday evening when I stopped off at a bookstore in Seattle. I stumbled upon David Blankenhorn's new book Fatherless America and started reading the chapter on "The Visiting Father." After a few pages I put the book down and left the store before anyone saw a Marine start to cry.

Over a decade later, I've once again stumbled upon Blankenhorn's book and found the passage that pierced my heart:

The evidence shows that the great majority of visiting fathers are not--indeed, cannot be--good-enough fathers to their children. The deck is stacked against them. Too much has changed, too fast; too much will continue to change. In theory, it may be possible to restructure everything else about a family while maintain fatherhood as a constant. In practice, it is hardly ever possible. Visiting fathers have lost the bases of fatherhood. As Bronislaw Malinowski put it in his classic cross-cultural analysis of parenthood, "the child is linked to both its parents by the unity of the household and by the intimacy of daily contacts." But for the Visiting Father, both aspects of this linkage are irrevocably shattered.

Tonight Mr. Blankenhorn will be in D.C. and I have the pleasure of joining him for dinner. I want to tell him how much I appreciate his book, and how he is absolutely wrong. I want to tell him that the base isn't always lost and that the linkage is not always shattered. I want to tell him that it is possible to be a "good-enough father" because I am one, I am good-enough.

But it isn't true. As much as I would like to believe otherwise, his book was devastatingly prescient about my own experience as a "visiting father." Over the past twelve years I've learned being a part-time dad is not enough. Our children always need more.

That is why I want to address a specific, narrow audience with the rest of this post. I want to address those fathers who are on the verge of leaving their families.

I want to start with a basic premise: When your first child is born, your life stops being about what you want and starts being about what they need. If you disagree, then you can stop reading now. The rest of what I say will only make sense to those who understand that this is the foundation of fatherhood.