Ellington

This week, the conservative-values purveyors at the American Family Association announced a new initiative for what the Tupelo-based organization calls our nation's "dad void" that "has reached epidemic proportions."

To illustrate societal costs of rampant fatherlessness, the AFA provided unsourced statistics about how many homeless and runaway kids, youth suicides, pregnant teens, high-school dropouts and juvenile delinquents come from "fatherless homes."

The AFA's handwringing over the absence of fathers is absurd for a few reasons. Most immediately, every single human on planet Earth has a father, so no one is "fatherless"; that's just basic biology. Secondly, and most problematic—and indeed dangerous—is the underlying implication that the mere presence of adult testosterone is some kind of magic wand that can solve all problems. Statistics about the prevalence of domestic abuse and sexual violence, crimes that are disproportionately committed by men, prove otherwise.

What is also true is that these views aren't specific to the family-values set on the ideological right. We've seen the same tropes from African Americans, even many who consider themselves progressive, spread in the recent weeks of conversation about the prevalence of gun violence committed by young men right here in Jackson. "If only their fathers had been involved, they might not have turned to a life of crime," the thinking goes. It's as if we assume that dads are a prophylactic for criminal mischief without realizing that condoms are not 100 percent effective, either.

That particular refrain, which is wanting for empirical support, knows no racial or political boundaries. It's true that the presence of more responsible, loving and working adults, in a household means that the children living in that household will, generally speaking, have a better quality of life.

Mississippi has been an especially bad actor in that our state is so myopically committed to heteropatriarchal solutions that we ignore policies that can empower women and moms: research-based sex education, increasing access to health-care through Medicaid expansion and birth control, including abortion. Not to mention that in Mississippi, one of the top-ranking states for same-sex parents raising children, officials have insisted on protecting the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, so stubbornly, in fact, that change comes from nothing short of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

This week, Sharon Lerner, reporting for the nonprofit education-news service The Hechinger Report, explores our state's structural barriers to promoting breastfeeding, which data show can improve educational outcomes for Mississippi kids.

We hope that our elected officials pay close attention and, when it comes to solving problems involving children, they start thinking more broadly than the same old male-centered solutions.