Good For Obama

I don't think I have made a secret of how I feel about Barack Obama, and what his becoming President would mean for our country. I also have discussed how I felt about his race speech, which was hailed as so great by so many. I think it's safe to say that I really don't hold him in very high regard, and am not very impressed by most of what I have seen of him. Also, contrary to what most people have said, I don't think he's all that great a speaker. Oh, I admit, when he gives a speech, he does ok, but he's certainly not the greatest speaker I've ever heard.

All that being said however, I have to give him credit for some of the things he said in his Father's Day speech. After a little bit of normal liberal rhetoric, he said this, "But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - it's the courage to raise one." This was an outstanding statement that most of us have thought for a long time, but it was nice to hear it from an ultra liberal politician like Obama. I have to say at this point that, while he did say that this was something that is a big problem for the African American community, I feel the need to point out that it is most certainly not limited to that community, and I hope that others don't ignore the truth of it just because they don't happen to be black.

He went on to say, "You know, sometimes I'll go to an eighth-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just eighth grade. To really compete, they need to graduate high school, and then they need to graduate college, and they probably need a graduate degree too. An eighth-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!" Which I really enjoyed because this is one of my own personal pet peeves. I said the same thing when my daughter had her Kindergarten "Graduation" ceremony, with full cap and gown and everything. Then I started hearing people talking about doing these things for sixth grade, and for eighth grade, and I said to myself, and probably a few other people, "Doesn't this take away from the real Graduation?" I still think that it's crazy to do full cap and gown and all that stuff for anything before high school graduation, that is when you have made an important accomplishment, not when you've made it all the way through kindergarten, or even eighth grade.

If you look at the speech as a whole, there is still a lot of liberal rhetoric throughout it, but I still like that he's calling on fathers to step up and be fathers, and not to just enjoy the passion of the moment and then take off and leave it to the mother to do the child rearing, even if they do send the money, that's not enough, and it doesn't absolve them of responsibility in the lives of their children. I know that there are many fathers out there who really want to do the right thing, but for some reason or anther, that option really isn't open to them. But there are a lot of others who are content to not be a major player in the life if their child, if they are present at all.

I don't want to put this all on the father though. How many cases are there where parents get divorced? How often does this need to happen? How often is it just one parent or the other deciding that they just don't want to be married anymore, or that they just can't work out the issues that they have with their spouse? It is my opinion that most often these issue both can and should be worked out, but in our current culture, that's just not what is done. The prevailing "wisdom" today is, if you don't have a fairy-tale marriage, just end it, no harm, no foul. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Very rare (admittedly not rare enough) is the case where a divorce is actually something that should, and needs to be, done, and yet divorce is rampant in our culture, and this saddens me. I guess that as much as I appreciated Obama's points in his speech, this is one that he missed out on, that the breakdown of the family is driven in large part by unrestricted, no-fault divorce. Mark 10:2-9 says, 2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" 3 He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" 4 They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away." 5 And Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 7 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."(ESV)

I have gotten a little off topic here, but I feel that this subject is very important, and there is every possibility that I will revisit this in some future post. I still say though, good job Obama. I still think he would be a terrible President, but it is nice to at least have heard him make these statements, even if you do have to fish them out liberal speak.