by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
In 2008, Parliament removed a child’s need for a father from fertility law. Clinics had been required to consider “the need of that child for a father”. The amendment that struck it out runs to a single line. It reads, “for ‘a father’ substitute ‘supportive parenting’”. Parliament intentionally said fathers are optional. And the one arrangement that works best to keep a father in his children’s house – real marriage – was left to fend for itself.
Patrick Erlandson has built an organisation around challenging that lie. He runs Father-Con in Los Angeles, and the name is the argument. “We wanted to take on the ‘con’: The lie that fathers don’t matter. They do!” He got there sideways, through eight years working to stop the trafficking of children in Long Beach, California, and he sat down with me to explain it. Watch the first half of our conversation here.
What he found was father absence doing the damage at both ends of the same trade. He lost count, he says, of the trafficked girls who told him the same thing: “I never felt that I was worthy to be loved, because I didn’t have a dad present in my life, or he was abusive”. In the worst cases, the father was the trafficker.
Then there are the boys who grow into the buyers. Boys, he says, are “being groomed to be victimisers, as opposed to the girls that are being groomed to accept being victimised”. And the lesson a boy needs most is one that only a married father teaches at close range. “If you do not have a father who’s demonstrating a love for his wife that boys can see, well, then they’re getting their lessons from porn or from their friends”. Pornography teaches the one thing that makes a buyer. “Nothing feeds entitlement like pornography, because I have no obligation to this person that I’m watching”, he says.