Finding Fault With Horn's Fatherhood Philosophy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 23, 2001 | by John Elvin

The battles over President George W. Bush's nominees continue with a controversy about traditionalist views of child psychologist Wade Horn, former head of the Fatherhood Initiative. Horn's nomination to be assistant secretary for family support at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had cleared committee hurdles as this column was written but faced a tough fight on the Senate floor due to opposition from the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other liberal groups.

Prominent among arguments against Horn are that his writing has appeared in the Washington Times newspaper and, as NOW puts it, that he "wants to punish children whose parents aren't married or do not live together." More subtle is NOW's criticism that Horn "appears to have no sensitivity to the impact that his proposals and assertions would have on families living in poverty and the harm that his narrow philosophy would impose on individuals who differ with him on cultural, religious or family-formation matters."

A letter to members of the Senate issued by NOW and also signed by the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project and a number of women's groups suggests that the person in charge of family policy at HHS "must be able to understand and promote the needs of all families in our society."

Horn's actual views, as summed up by the conservative Family Research Council (FRC), are that marriage is the best defense against poverty, that men should take responsibility for the children they father and that federal welfare programs should encourage marriage and help families stay together. The distortions in the NOW letter include the charge that Horn wants "unmarried mothers to surrender their children for adoption" when, as FRC points out, in fact what he favors is adoption over abortion. FRC has launched a counteroffensive to convince senators that being an "unabashed promoter of marriage" or insisting that fathers are important and have a vital role to play in rearing children doesn't actually make one an extremist unfit for public service, as NOW asserts.

It's fairly obvious that Horn's position on responsible fatherhood would run contrary to the interests of lesbian couples or women who just choose to be without men for whatever reason. Interestingly enough, there also has been some conservative grumbling about the Horn nomination due to his position in favor of sending little Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba.

It's fairly evident that the weight of Horn's arguments for responsible fatherhood led him to take a position that the boy belonged with his father, whether in Cuba or Timbuktu.

Neither side has had much to say about his comments on the Clinton/Lewinsky fling, wherein he contended that younger children who asked about it weren't pushing so much for intimate and technical details as asking about morality and the right or wrong of lying. "Not whether the dress stain matches Clinton's DNA, but whether what we say matches what we do. On that score, we all have a lot to answer for," Horn wrote.

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