Don’t get me wrong. If someone can step in and be a father to a child who doesn’t have one, he deserves a statue. Of course we honor him.
But lately I’ve been seeing more and more emphasis on “a father figure” and less and less on “father.” Father and “father figure” are NOT the same thing.
I’ve also been hearing it on the radio, in the run-up toward Father’s Day. “Father Figure.”
And you’ve got Entenmann’s Bakeries holding a “Dads of Glory” contest… which “isn’t just for people you call ‘dad’…” Oh, no, my precious! Because… wait for it… the “dad,” according to Entenmann’s, can be male OR female. (“Welcome to my pad, I’m a female dad…”)
I find this rather sinister.
Watch any movie or TV show centered on teenage characters. In almost all of them the father is either just plain not in the story at all, or bad, or irrelevant. I get the impression that our pop culture impresarios want to render fathers obsolete. Replace ’em with father figures. Female father figures.
I don’t like where our culture is headed. Honk if you think we’re doing all right.