by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Last month, MPs spent nearly an hour and a half debating fathers, and not one of them said the word “marriage”. So I discuss the importance of dads and marriage in part two of my conversation with Rabbi Shlomo Levin MBE. Coalition for Marriage (C4M) supporters come from all faiths and none, and we love to hear from anyone who supports man-woman marriage.
Rabbi Levin points out that the Ten Commandments put the father first when they tell us to honour our parents, while Leviticus puts the mother first when it tells us to fear them. The commentaries explain, he says, that a child naturally honours a mother and fears a father, so each command demands what doesn’t come naturally. The lesson is that “the relationship with a father is different” from that with a mother, and “each has a unique contribution to make to the child’s upbringing”.
There are fewer fathers in families, he says, because the balance between rights and responsibilities has shifted. “Marriage is about responsibility as much as it is about rights, but rights are secondary to responsibility… Becoming a father is more about a responsibility to a family and to a child than it is about my right to be the kind of person that I would choose to be for myself”, he tells me.
Yet when MPs debated fathers on 10 September, one of them told the House that “a child does not need a father in the house to flourish”.