It has always been about personal responsibility (screed warning)

Fatherhood has always been about honor and responsibility.

"Responsibility" is the marriage of accountability and authority. Responsibility is the means and desire to respond.

Fatherhood is not a one-day-a-year job.

As a father-by-adoption I have a slightly different perspective than many.

In some cases I saw mothers-to-be who chose to not inform the father because they had evidence of the father's toxic personalities. In Michigan, the father has to sign consent for a child to be put up for adoption but not to have the baby aborted.

We learned later that the mothers conveniently remembered a different partner. In one case I met one of the fathers and the reason for the mother's fuzzy memory became clear. The father had several other children in the same time frame. Big promises. No money. He fled the state. And the mother still needed his permission.

He bragged at work about how many kids he had fathered. Had my child's birth-mother not fibbed he could have been bragging about +1. I do not make this up. He was very, very angry that he had been robbed. In his mind it would have been better if my child had been aborted because then he would not have been disrespected. Sick!

Fatherhood is about being there when it is important to your kid, not counting coup at work.

Fatherhood, more than mothering is about letting go.

It may be a bit easier for a father-by-adoption to let a kid learn something the hard way. Yes, we try to talk it through and show them the easy way but if a kid insists on learning by braille-n-bruises, then that is their choice. I think biological parents hang onto their kids longer and are more likely to live their lives vicariously though their kids.

Earl, one of our birth-grandfathers had a chat with me. He had both biological and adopted children. He said, "Adoption is easier for men than for women. Men have been raising children who are not biologically their's since the dawn of time. Some men knew. Many men did not. At a deep level we are wired to accept that."

It is about honor
Representative Norma Torres recently slagged men for having an opinion on "a woman's right to choose" (abortion)

The comment made national news because she characterized the men as sex-starved, not because of her opinion that men have no right to an opinion.

So if I were walking down the street and I saw Representative Torres being pummeled with a baseball bat by her romantic partner...man, woman, space alien - it does not matter... by Representative Torres's logic I have no basis for injecting myself into the spat. I cannot call 9-1-1. I cannot try to calm the partner down. After all, I don't have a vagina or fallopian tubes or ovaries.

But I do have honor. By my lights I have a duty to protect the most vulnerable.

Representative Torres's romantic partner may believe that they have every right to assault and kill Representative Torres because they are intimately entangled. That belief, no matter how strongly felt is not sufficient basis for taking life.

Looking toward the future
Our culture is splintering.

Large swaths of it have abdicated both responsibility and honor. They do not know what they hunger for. They try to sate their hunger with the ice-water of popular culture.

Those of you who cleave to traditional values, our people will win. Those who expect anonymous bureaucrats and mindless apparatchiks to fill the gap, to always demonstrate honor and responsibility will fail. 

Winning might not be visible in our generation but the failure of the other course is guaranteed with the certainty and energetics of large masses of Pu 239.

Be responsible. Be honorable. Remember your kids will care for you in your old age. Keep your powder dry.