With Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency dominating headlines right now, do voters care that Musk is engaged in yet another custody dispute with one of the many women he has children with?

Liberal author Zaid Jilani thinks they could. “Democrats should make an issue out of how horrible of a dad, husband, and human Elon is,” Jilani wrote on X. “If Republicans have abandoned family values they are up there for the taking for someone else.”

But does the Democratic Party really have the credibility to make this attack? I don’t think so, which is why I wrote in response to Jilani, “This might be more effective if the Democratic Party believed fathers were necessary or even good.”

Some of the responses on X were informative, some were not, and a lot of people wrote something along the lines of, “Are you seriously suggesting Biden and Obama are worse fathers than Trump?” which is not what I was arguing at all.

Others noted that Obama did promote fatherhood, which is true. Starting with a campaign speech in June 2008, Obama made almost annual speeches on the importance of fatherhood every Father’s Day. 

Obama then followed this up, once elected, with his Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative with five goals, including promoting and creating positive opportunities for fathers to engage in the intellectual, emotional, and financial well-being of their children; supporting and sustaining stable and healthy environments for children and parents, particularly by strengthening the economic stability of low-income fathers and supporting healthy relationships between parents; strengthening and solidifying relationships among fathers, children, and families early in a child’s life; supporting and encouraging disconnected fathers to reconnect with their children and families; and promoting the identification and use of evidence-based practices, as well as fostering high-quality research on fathers and fathering to support policy and program development. 

These all sound nice, but there is one big word missing from this list: marriage.

Indeed, if you go back and read all of Obama’s fatherhood speeches, he rarely mentions marriage at all. This is because, since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family, the Democratic Party has been committed to denying the negative effects of the decline of marriage on children.

Just look at how Democrats treat this 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study on fatherly involvement with children. Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) claims the study found that black fathers are “more involved in their children’s lives compared to other racial groups.” New York Times columnists Charles Blow and Kenrya Rankin Naasel make similar claims, with Blow writing that “black fathers were the most involved with their children daily, on a number of measures, of any other group of fathers — and in many cases, that was among fathers who didn’t live with their children, as well as those who did.”

But that is not what the study found at all. Yes, black fathers who lived with their children were more likely to eat with (78%) or read to (35%) their children than white fathers who lived with their children (74% eat with and 30% read to). Black fathers who did not live with their children also ate with and read to their children more than white fathers who did not live with their children.

However, fathers of all races who lived with their children were far more likely to do every activity with their children than fathers who did not live with their children. For example, just 16% of black fathers who did not live with their children played with them every day, compared to 83% of white fathers who did live with their children.

As the same CDC report shows, white fathers are simply far more likely to live with their children (81%) than black fathers (58%). This is due almost entirely to the fact that white fathers are far more likely to be married to the mother of their children than black fathers are. 

One would hope that the Democratic Party would focus on making it easier for young men and women of all races to get and stay married, but instead, Democrats pursue the exact opposite: making it as easy as possible for women to have children without fathers. Just look at the Life of Julia slideshow to promote Obama’s 2012 campaign and the Life of Linda slideshow to promote Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

In both cases, voters are shown a single woman starting a family by herself with the help of Democratic Party programs. At no point is there ever a father, let alone a husband, pictured. 

Or take a look at where big Democratic donors such as Melinda Gates spend their money. Gates recently gave millions to help found the American Institute for Boys and Men, which may sound nice until you realize that its founder, Richard Reeves, is committed to promoting “fatherhood” as a social institution outside of marriage.

“There is no residency requirement for good fatherhood,” Reeves writes. “The relationship is what matters. Fatherhood matters just as much as ever in a world of women’s economic independence, but necessarily in a reinvented form.”

But this is just plain false. Studies show that the positive behavioral changes associated with fatherhood only occur in residential fathers. More importantly, marriage binds men and women into a long-term project of cooperative care that is absent outside of marriage.

If fathers are not bound to the mothers of their children through marriage, what is stopping them from having multiple children with multiple women like Elon Musk does? Nothing. 

NO, THE AMERICAN FAMILY WAS NOT INVENTED IN THE 1950s

This is exactly what is happening, and it is not just with Musk. As I write in my book Sex and the Citizen, “Of men who father a child outside of marriage, 50 percent of them go on to have a child with another woman. Overall, about 15 percent of men and about 20 percent of women in the United States today have children with more than one partner. The United States is the world leader in this multipartner fertility statistic. No nation has more mothers with children from more than one father than us.”

It would be great if we lived in a world where the Democratic Party was committed to promoting the institution of marriage and could credibly attack Musk for fathering children outside of marriage. Unfortunately, we do not live in that world.