Dads across America are receiving something this Father’s Day that we have never sought but desperately deserve: vindication.
The social engineers who have shaped the past 60 years of American social policy assumed a check from the government is an adequate replacement for a man in the home. Worse, a new generation of radical elites has spent the past decade trying to destroy the sex binary altogether.
But the evidence is clear: Father absence is associated with higher rates of poverty, teen pregnancy, youth crime, and substance abuse. Conversely, children who grow up with both parents are more likely to attend college and less likely to live in poverty or go to prison.
That doesn’t mean fatherhood today is the same as it was in previous generations. Dads today spend more time with their children than fathers did in the 1960s. For many men, bathing their children and reading to them at night are as much a part of being a good father as teaching their kids to change a tire, fish, or throw a perfect spiral.
Those who have used law and culture to dismiss biology and undermine the role of fathers are wrong. Dads do matter.
Sadly, one important role that fewer and fewer fathers play is that of husband. About 40 percent of all children today are born to unmarried parents. While the 70 percent nonmarital birth rate among black women receives a disproportionate amount of attention, close to 30 percent of white children and over half of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock. Asian Americans are the only ethnic group in the country whose nonmarital birth rate falls below the 1965 “Moynihan threshold” of 25 percent.
At that
