Father Knows Best was one of the most widely-viewed and long-running TV shows of the 1950s. True, the program played to a romanticized image of middle-class Americana. But that beats the modern-day alternative of a raging epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases, safe havens for abandoned infants, and 11-year-old girls wearing thong underwear. 

Father Knows Best was yanked from the air in 1960. Before long the popular discourse was filled with the now-familiar litany of feminist grievance. The women’s libbers were especially troubled with the notion of the traditional family.

Arch-feminist Simone de Beauvoir argued, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children … precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” 

Robin Morgan, former editor of Ms. Magazine, chillingly predicted, “We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.” And Andrea Dworkin compared marriage to legalized prostitution.  

Most laughed at the hyperbole. But the hairy-legged hags were dead serious.  

Exactly how do you go about destroying the family which is, after all, the primordial unit of society? The best tactic, they decided, would be to go after the provider and protector image of Dear Old Dad. 

Homer Simpson became emblematic of the well-intentioned but inept father. “Patriarchal” was inverted into an epithet synonymous with the mistreatment of women. “Paternalistic” was nearly as bad. 

Media accounts began to tar men as wife-beaters, deadbeats, child abusers, clods, and all-around dufuses. Every one of those stereotypes was false or highly exaggerated, but no matter. As author Warren Farrell quipped, “father knows best” turned into “fathers molest.” 

Since men weren’t up to the task, the government would need to step in, the Lefties argued. A series of legal opinions, laws, and government programs came along, all claiming to “empower” women: Roe v. Wade, Violence Against Women Act, welfare programs, maternal custody preference, draconian child support programs, and more. 

If removing flocks of children from their fathers is your yardstick, these programs were successful beyond belief. From 1960 to 1990, says the Census Bureau, the number of American children living with their biological fathers plunged from 82% to 62%. As columnist Dennis Prager recently wrote, “The contemporary absence of men in boys’ lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.” 

These fatherless children are far more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience a range of educational and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior.  

But at least they’re liberated from the baleful influence of their fathers! 

Fortunately, family advocates saw where this was all headed and began to question the fem-think. Several groups are now coming to the rescue of daddy-hood (I’m including the web address if you want more information): 

- This week the National Partnership for Community Leadership is holding a major conference in Washington DC to honor African-American dads: www.npclstrongfamilies.com  

- Next week the National Fatherhood Initiative will release a landmark report, “The One Hundred Billion Dollar Man: The Public Costs of Father Absence:” www.fatherhood.org  

- Fathers and Families has been working with the media to promote positive images of dads: www.fathersandfamilies.org  And several groups are working to increase father involvement after divorce: 

- Marriage Savers has just come out in support of shared parenting, revealing that “of the six states that passed the strongest Joint Custody laws, five experienced the largest drops in the divorce rate.” www.marriagesavers.org  

- The American Coalition for Fathers and Children is urging citizens to sign a petition that reminds us, “Children thrive with the active involvement of both parents”: www.acfc.org  

- And the Children’s Rights Council has succeeded in introducing a Congressional resolution in favor of joint custody: www.crckids.org  

True, frazzled fathers don’t always measure up to the iconic images of Father Knows Best. But on one point, these groups have hit the nail right on the head: a government program is a lousy substitute for a dad.   

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Miami (FL) Herald let lose with another propagandistic broadside against the 2nd Amendment on Thursday featuring some more moaning and false statements about how horrible it is for America that the misnamed “assault weapons ban” has lapsed. There is much wringing of hands, waterworks, histrionics and over dramatics by the aptly named Fred Grimm here. In “What’s a few dead cops to the gun lobby?” Grimm’s final pronouncement is that the 2nd Amendment is a “mythical right” but in between there are many misstatements and out right lies.

Grimm starts out putting on some faux “shock” that a modern “semiautomatic assault rifle” he had the occasion to handle was so light. “The shock was in the weight of the thing. Less than six pounds,” Grimm writes. And, what exactly does this mean? A butcher knife weighs less then a pound and can kill, too. What does weight have to do with anything?

Then the scare tactics:

I thought how easy it would be for some kid, some 110-pound wild-dog street punk, to heft an AR-6520 and wield it to hellish effect.

OK, so the gun is not heavy. This makes the gun somehow less than safe? Guess what, Mr. Grimm. Cars weigh in the tons and teenagers kill themselves by the thousands each year with them. In fact, they kill themselves FAR more with cars than they do guns. Yes, thousands die a year, Mr. Grimm, even though cars are really, really heavy.

Shocking, eh?

Then Grimm goes off lamenting that police forces are spending money on “assault rifles” because of the lapse of the so-called “assault weapons ban.”

No wonder Fort Lauderdale is spending $82,000 for guns designed to kill enemy soldiers. Police know that since the expiration of the federal assault weapon ban, young criminals have ginned up the arms race.

So, Grimm seems to make the claim that “assault weapons” are suddenly everywhere? Naturally, Grimm doesn’t bother to give us any facts and figures to buttress this wild claim. He just states it as fact and moves on. He also makes the absurd claim that small time criminals can easily come up with the “three grand” that he says the street price for one has reached, saying that illegal gun dealers…

…Sell them out of car trunks at twice the price to gangbangers, drug dealers and armed robbers who want to upgrade to cop killers. Sell them to felons. Sell them to kids. Sell them to certifiably crazy people as long as crazy people can ante up a cold three grand.

Nice scare tactics and propaganda. Lacking in truth, but nice propaganda.

Then Grimm makes with what he must think are “facts.”

In 2004, Congress allowed the ban on assault weapons to expire. The federal law suffered major loopholes, but it still had the effect of tamping down the firepower cops faced on the streets. Since the ban was jettisoned, police groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police have lamented that the bad guys have the cops outgunned.

But, there is no evidence whatsoever that this gun ban really did have the “effect of tamping down firepower.” Even those in the Senate that support this gun banning law said that the rate of so-called “assault weapons” used in gun crime was only at 3.5 percent of gun crimes before the ban went into effect. And that is using their own numbers which are probably suspect because they are being used for their own propaganda.

Three percent of anything is statistically insignificant. In 1999 a study was done by Jeffery A. Roth and Christopher S. Koper of the National Institute of Justice and paid for by the Clinton Administration. The study of 15 states found that there might have been a 6.7% decline in murder rates where the Federal gun ban “could have” made a difference. But, in the end, even this Clinton paid for study admitted that assault weapons had been used in such a tiny number of crimes before the ban that it wasn’t really provable that the assault weapons ban had any significant effect at all. Saying, “it is highly improbable that the assault weapons ban produced an effect this large,” the report didn’t do much to help Clinton prove the ban worked in 1999 and things have not changed that much since.

It should also be noted that the claims of “cop killer bullets” linked with the word “assault weapon” is meaningless rhetoric. The same, high power, so-called “cop killing” bullets that some military weapons fire can also be fired by some hunting rifles. So, to link these high powered bullets only with “assault weapons” as if only those sorts of weapons can use them is disingenuous to say the least.

Our Grimm one ends his propaganda with some suitably dramatic nonsense.

Congress demonstrated in 2004 how much value was placed on the mythical right of private citizens to own semiautomatic military assault rifles.

How much? More than a few dead cops.

I see. So the Second Amendment is a “mythical right,” eh? Sorry, but the Founders just don’t agree with you, Mr. Grimm.