It’s Father’s Day. Do you know where your children are? Most American fathers do, but a growing number have little to do with their children. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, nearly a quarter of all white fathers live apart from their children, due to divorce, abandonment, or other reasons. Among African-American fathers, the number is 44%, influenced by the fact that at any one time one in nine African-American males is in prison (the large majority of them on drug charges). The tendency of fathers to live apart from their children is more pronounced among families earning less than $30,000 a year, and it is no surprise therefore that as middle class wages have fallen over the past twenty years, the number of fatherless children has risen.

The burden of raising these children without a permanent male presence in the home has traditionally fallen on the mother, but with so many women forced to work to support themselves and their children, few mothers can do the job alone. Not a small number of these mothers give up, and the children are shuttled off to aunts or grandmothers. This solution used to be found predominantly in the inner city, but it is increasingly found in the suburbs among white families. The federal government no longer refers in its reports on child welfare to children of mothers and fathers, but instead concentrates on “caretakers”, which seems broad enough to constitute just about anybody, since these days just about anybody (except gay people – more on that in a minute) can find themselves taking care of the nation’s misplaced and abandoned youth.

The nation’s welfare services, victims of revenue cutbacks dating to the Clinton administration, are overwhelmed with demands to place children in foster care. Most agencies do what they can to avoid taking on additional responsibilities for such children, since the number of families willing to act as foster homes has not increased enough to meet the demand. As of 2009, there were 424,000 children in the US foster care system, which is a fraction of those in need of a home. If you are in the system and you reach age 16, you are kicked out – “emancipated” is the term – since you are presumed to be an adult capable of living on your own. Over 100,000 of the children in foster care were awaiting adoption, since their parents were declared unfit to raise them. They usually wait in vain to be adopted, in part because they are older or troubled with a history of behavioral problems, and in part because they aren’t white children, and are not a preferred choice to the typical couple looking to adopt (white father and mother unable to have children on their own). Over 60% of the children in foster care are black, Hispanic, or some other non-white race.

There is lots of debate over the importance of providing children with both a father and a mother when they are growing up, but if you talk to workers in the child welfare system, what children need are stability, love, and support. Welfare workers prize these qualities more than any others (including having parents with lots of money), and as a consequence it is not as important to many welfare workers that they find homes with a traditional father and mother.

This irritates the traditionalist, family values people to no end. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, recently penned a letter to his flock titled “The True Meaning of Marriage.” The Cardinal is fighting a fierce battle with the legislature in Albany which is debating approving gay marriage in New York State. The Cardinal wrote:

Our country’s founding principles speak of rights given by God, not invented by government, and certain noble values – life, home, family, marriage, children, faith – that are protected, not re-defined, by a state presuming omnipotence….

We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought; we acknowledge that not every desire, urge, want, or chic cause is automatically a “right.” And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?

Thomas Jefferson – no friend of organized religion – wrote those lines in the Declaration of Independence about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” There was nothing in there about family, or marriage, or children. What Cardinal Dolan is doing is playing the victim, something of a specialty among conservatives. Because Albany is considering making gay marriage legal, it’s an infringement on the Catholic Church’s assumption that it owns marriage. The Church has declared that it alone decides who can and cannot get married, and it assumes the right to decide this for all of civil society as well – Buddhists, Muslims, Atheists, Baptists.

Since when did the Catholic Church, or the Baptists, or any other religious sect, “own” marriage? True enough, churches have for a very long time blessed marriages in a religious ritual, but society has required a legal marriage as well to grant couples civil privileges under the law. Nor was it always the case that the Church was involved in marriage. In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church played no role in marriage; a couple merely announced their intent to live together as man and wife. As you can see in A History of Marriage by Elizabeth Abbott, there were even occasions in the history of the Catholic Church when the local priest would bless same-sex marriages.

Notice another curious presumption made by Cardinal Dolan, that children have a right to a Dad and a Mom. This is a twisted way for the Archbishop to say what he really means: children have no right to any other parental relationship other than a Dad and a Mom. The Cardinal is moaning about being a victim again, because someone in civil society dares to challenge his right to impose an exclusion on people who are already outcasts in his own Church for their “intrinsic evil” of being homosexual.

Nobody is taking away any child’s right to be with their father and mother if both are fit parents. It is the primary goal of welfare agencies to reunite foster children with both of their parents. In fact, in 2009, 51% of children in foster care were eventually reunited with their parents or primary caretakers. For those children in the system who were not so lucky, and who will never be united with their father or mother, the real question is why they shouldn’t be put in the care of not only some other Dad and Mom, but a Mom and Mom, or a Dad and Dad. Every study of children raised by same-sex parents shows that these children wouldn’t trade the stability, love, and support they received from these parents for the rotating family experience that is often the case in foster care.

When you read the unhappy statistics regarding fathers in American society, and the growing estrangement many fathers have with their children, and the high long term cost to both children and society due to that estrangement, you can almost despair about doing anything about the problem. If there were some magical way for society to reverse the downward pressure on wages and salaries for middle class families, maybe something serious could be done about the trend toward absentee fathers.

But there is something that can be done on a smaller scale. We can broaden the definition of who gets to participate in Father’s Day, and Mother’s Day for that matter. We can include Moms and Moms, and Dads and Dads. We can stand up to the Catholic Church, which has lost all mooring with the teachings of Jesus, and which has chosen the path of discrimination and exclusion, and which resorts to sophistry and twisted, deceitful logic to defend its bigotry. If it is within our means and our capabilities, we can look seriously at participating as a foster parent. My wife and I have done so for 15 years now, and let me tell you, it means something very special to hear “Happy Father’s Day” from young adults who know all too well how life could have turned out very differently if someone hadn’t taken an interest in them when they were children.