There’s no question that growing up fatherless, or with a mostly absent father, is a huge handicap for children, especially boys. But what can be done about it? Not clear.
Opponents of same-sex marriage have argued that its legalization, universal in this country due to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, would weaken the institution of marriage. Writing as a same-sex marriage supporter in August 2011 (when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed it), I wrote, “I think the institution of the family is less threatened by a few people who want to get married than by the very many more people who get divorced or who have children without getting married at all.” In other words and in many cases, fatherlessness.
In April 2014 I blogged about the issue, wondering why so many cultural conservatives (and others) had done little to limit the no-fault divorce laws which have made it so easy to legally dissolve marriages. Now I see an article by a leader of a group Leading Women for Shared Parenting assailing Republicans for doing little or nothing to strengthen fathers’ chances of getting joint custody of their children in divorce cases.
It’s an intemperate article, and I gather the constituency the writer represents consists of fathers who feel aggrieved at divorce decrees, but it’s an issue worth pondering. Worth pondering, too, is the research, referenced in my 2014 article, indicating that two-thirds of opposite-sex divorces are initiated by women and the anecdotal evidence I have seen that divorces in same-sex marriages are more common among female than male couples. I don’t pretend to understand this, but obviously there’s some connection between this and increasing fatherlessness in American life.
