Father’s Day has come and gone, but this year’s media coverage of Father’s Day revealed that the nation faces a radical divide over the nature of parenthood and family life.
Father’s Day should be a day to honor the men who work diligently, love their wives, teach their children virtue, and quietly carry the weight of responsibility for their families. Instead, several media outlets pushed stories that downplay, criticize, and sideline the importance of fatherhood. While millions of normal Americans took the day to celebrate fathers, media coverage has established an annual tradition of using the occasion to publish articles denigrating fathers.
One Father’s Day article in the New York Times was simply a daughter’s hit piece against her father, attacking him viciously and publicly for largely minor grievances. His crimes included not taking her to baseball games, moving a lot for work, and “awkward silences.” The article offered him hardly any sympathy or grace but showered the author in self-praise. At one point, she extolled herself for not giving him a “hard time” when her father’s baseball pitch missed the plate — he was 85 years old at the time. The father is now 92, yet she is still airing out her petty injuries to the world.
Another scornful article in the Toronto Star argued outright that no fathers should be celebrated at all on Father’s Day. Rather, mothers must be celebrated as the real heroes of Father’s Day. Father’s Day, which is “set aside so that children can thank Dad,” is “completely unnecessary,” the author writes. Fathers “need no special day on the calendar to let me know that.” Instead, Father’s Day ought to be when a man is “supposed to make it a priority to thank the woman who birthed his children.” 
While Father’s Day is too much love for fathers, Mother’s Day just simply isn’t enough. The author concludes with a diatribe: “So on Father’s Day, when all the attention falls on perhaps the least important character in the delivery room, it seem...