We’ve gone from Father Knows Best to Father’s got no chest, from Lucas McCain to dad’s a pain, in two generations. So laments Tea Party figure Lloyd Marcus, pointing out today that during the last 45 years, TV dads have gone from family head to dunderhead — and that, since life also imitates art, this portrayal seriously damages the American family.
Writing at American Thinker, Marcus tells us:
We have gone from TV shows like Father Knows Best to countless shows in which Father is portrayed as an idiot — the butt of jokes, spoken to with disrespect from his wife and children.
…I have turned off movies and TV shows because I could not stomach the disrespectful way children speak to their fathers, lecturing Dad and displaying arrogant disobedience.
Hollywood, Democrats, and fake news media believe that children are wiser than their parents, especially their heterosexual white fathers. Children are told to steal their parents’ guns and turn them over to schoolteachers. Michelle Obama told students to monitor family discussions for racism. Leftist school administrators say children should be allowed to have abortions and even pretend to change their sex through bodily mutilation without parental consent.
California leftist lawmakers believe that due to the backward, outdated thinking of parents, government must make homeschooling illegal. Leftist[s] demand that children be handed over to government schools for LGBT indoctrination, taught to hate America, instilled with guilt for their white privilege, and taught to hate Christianity. Despicably, leftists have robbed children of hope for their future, teaching the absurd lie that the Earth will be unlivable in 12 years because America is destroying the planet.
Leftist have transformed far too many children into socialist/progressive terrorist sleeper cells, taught that they are wiser than their parents on every crucial political issue.
This “separation” of children from parents has a dark precedent, too. Just consider the testimonial of Dith Pran, a Cambodian photojournalist who survived his nation’s Marxist, Khmer Rouge-authored genocide, which claimed one-quarter to one-third of the country’s population between 1975 and 1979.
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The Khmer Rouge “encouraged children to find fault with their own parents and spy on them,” he wrote in 1997. “They openly showed their intention to destroy the family structure that once held love, faith, comfort, happiness, and companionship.”
Tragically, the Khmer Rouge Marxists were not the exception but the norm: Evil movements generally seek to separate children from parents — emotionally if not also physically — so that the miscreants can mold the young in their own image.
As for today, doltish dads, and men in general, are portrayed everywhere, commercials included. This serves to exacerbate a set of cultural norms that diminishes discipline and casts obedience as oppressive and “Respect thy elders” as a quaint, anachronistic sentiment. Yet these things are prerequisites for good child-rearing.
Approximately 15 to 20 years ago I was at a golf driving range and witnessed an accident’s aftermath. A man was kneeling on the ground, with a gash in his head down to the bone, the result of his young son having taken a careless swing. But shortly thereafter the problem’s root cause was revealed: The father said to the boy, “I told you not to swing the club!”
Obedience and “respect for elders” matter because a child can’t learn from you unless he’s first willing to listen to you. Listening is a prerequisite for learning. And a child is far more likely to listen to his elders if he respects them. (Note: The flip side is that adults must be respectable; they must avoid being effete “moderns” and strive to model virtue.)
In reality, the aforementioned father’s wound would heal. But some consequences of childhood disobedience are disastrous and irremediable (such as deadly mistakes). Then, of course, tolerated childhood defiance also makes proper moral inculcation difficult.
And, obviously, children will be less likely to respect their elders generally if they don’t respect dad (and vice versa). Furthermore, they’ll be less likely to respect their fathers if they see such behavior modeled on television and, perhaps, in the home by their mothers.
Realize that undermining fatherhood — or motherhood, which also happens (but that’s a different article) — undermines the family. Cut off the head and the body dies. This is significant because, as Pope John Paul II emphasized, the family is the central building block of civilization. Degrading it is like damaging your body’s cells; illness, and perhaps death, will result.
Of course, though, if you want to grow government, undermining the little micro-nations called families is invaluable. For this leads to social ills and calls to “remedy” them with the larger nation’s head (government). After all, whatever families cannot do for themselves, a larger entity must do.
Then you can end up with a government that may be described, somewhat loosely, in daddy or mommy terms: as paternalistic — or the nanny state.
Image: BarnabyChambers via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
