I was driving home from work the other day, listening to Mark Levin, and an ad came on that had a father helping his little girl learn how to tie her shoes. After she did it, Tom Selleck came on, and said “Sometimes, the smallest things make the biggest impact in our children’s lives. Take time to be a Dad. This message brought to you by fatherhood.gov.”
I couldn’t believe it. FATHERHOOD.GOV??? It had to be a joke.
Sadly, it wasn’t.
I came home and typed www.fatherhood.gov into my computer’s web browser.
One of the graphics I saw was the one above. Another had a picture of the President with his daughters, and the message below invited me to take the fatherhood pledge. I paused, choking down the irony of a man who’s only political stands of any import before becoming the President were centered around maintaining abortion, and resisting palliative care for children who survived their mother’s attempts to murder them pressing me to “Take the Fatherhood Pledge”.
Then I scrolled to the bottom of the website, and saw these words:
This is an official U.S. Government Web site managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
The agency that DEMANDS employers provide abortion, abortifacients, and birth control, even when doing so goes against their religious beliefs, and which persists in the fantasy that giving taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood helps poor and low-income women get mammograms actually sponsors a website purporting to teach American men to be better dads.
With OUR tax money.
The same government which has managed to destroy the black family, (and has inflicted damage on all families) is now telling men how to be dads. How is this acceptable? How is it that the Federal government, even without everything it has done to destroy families, has the right to deign to tell men how to be fathers? It isn’t the government’s job to tell me how to be a Dad…and the fact that it sees fit to do so with my money simply adds insult to injury. The family is not the government’s sphere of influence, especially in light of the fact that there is so little that the government can do efficiently. This is the embodiment of the concept of government breaking your legs, then putting you in a cast and telling you how lucky you are to have it. Add to the concept what government has done to make war on the family, and yes, erode parental authority, and there is simply no moral basis which government can stand on to defend this. And in the meantime, I’m sure this extended middle finger to any parent with a brain is nowhere near the list of things to be cut in the miniscule curtailment in the growth of government known in the White House as SEQUESTERGEDDON!!!111!!! Not when they can mess with airtravel instead….you know…for the CHIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDDRRRREEEEENNNNNNNN!!!!!
I’m sure when my kids are still living in my house when they are 40, dreaming of the day when they can afford to move out to an 800 sq. ft. efficiency apartment all their own, I’m sure that they’ll thank Obama for the usurpation of authority never granted to the government and the deficit spending that make the offensive government lily-guilding like FATHERHOOD.GOV possible. They’ll have a future full of much diminished prospects, but at least they’ll have the memory of Dad helping them learn to tie their shoes because government told him to do it.
Taxes, Stupidity, and Death 
When the government is needed to teach men how to be fathers, you know we are doomed.
And the irony of Obama-who chooses to often vacation WITHOUT his kids … ??
yea. He’s a great example. A great figurehead for the movement.
Ha. check out the “programs” they have. Michigan lists the “father factor project” as one of it’s programs, but when you click it – there is nothing listed on the local site.
You can google it, and you get a .org website for the National Fatherhood Initiative.
That’s their “program”? A website listing articles and stats?
You can search the .org website for programs in your state – it lists organizations with supposedly run programs, but again when you click through- there are no programs listed there. ZERO.
It’s all a big effen shell game.
So what is this “program” going to be called when Mr. Obama is no longer the president? Honestly, the man’s narcissism knows no bounds.
Great post, BlackisWhite!
1. Who says Obama will no longer be Dictat… err .. President?
2. Fatherhood.gov…is just a couple of typos away from FatherLAND.gov so there is aways some way for “them” to continue the site.
Yeah, the last one was a bit on the sarcastic side, but I have fewer and fewer doubts about the first one being true.
And we act surprised about the government poking its nose into all aspects of our lives, like this is something new (or exclusive to one particular party…seems to me the “War on Drugs was a big one for those on the right side of the asile..for one example) That either side really expects those of us out there with anything approaching legitimate thinking and reasoning skills to expect (or accept) their programs as being either something positive, or of any positive productive value, vice being yet another way to exert control over the population at large, are only fooling themselves.
I admit to struggling with “the war on drugs”.
My Criminal Law/Criminal Procedure prof used to say “You cannot consent to assault.”
I think that there are some very real distinctions that you can draw between alcohol and cigarettes and a lot of drugs. Both can be addictive, and both can impair, but I think there is an argument to be made that there is a difference between the addictiveness of a cigarette and the addictiveness of meth, or crack, and the time between onset of lethality, and in the case of impairment, getting drunk still isn’t the same as shooting smack.
The point to be made is that none of it is good for society, but when you cross the line between one and the other, at some point, it becomes predatory, and I’m not sure that it’s government’s place to simply step back and profit from it, rather than prevent the deliberate assault on people under the pretense that it is something they “chose”. Especially when it empowers people who are predatory by nature, and when taking the “Hands Off and Palms Up” approach makes the entity that exists to impose order in part by punishing wrongdoing an accessory to it.
I want to see the government teach kids how to make fart noises with their hands and armpits.
Right after teaching them how to turn their parents in for doubleplusungood politspeech.
BiW, I should have been a bit clearer, or perhaps used a better choice, when I said “War on Drugs”. Perhaps the good intentioned but very ill advised “DHS”/Patriot Act would have been a better example of what I was getting at. The point being, government…especially at the national level, has gotten so caught up in itself…that it has to be mother, father, alpha and omega So the sheeple, the whiners, grifters, and freeloaders, all bow and bleet at the government alter.
And that was kind of the angle I was going for with the War on Drugs. People are concerned about their children being exposed to the evils of drugs Ia legitimate concern, even minus some of the hysteria that was out there in the 60’s and 70’s, along with media misinformation). They also saw what happened to their neighborhoods when those who produced and or provided drugs were allowed in…property values dropped, crime rates rose, etc. And what was started as a legitimate attempt to combat this concern, eventually allowed for the potential erosion of some of our individual “rights:.
Sigh, I am getting long winded here. All I really wanted to say in the first place, is can you (or anyone else) name me one instance where a government program or agency that regardless of its original intent/mission did not over time become a bloated over-reaching,unconstitutional, piece of dreck? The Fatherhood.gov kirfluffle is but the frost on the very tip of the governmental iceberg.
see also http://bedsider.org/
a nightmare of social engineering.