The Product of a Deprived Childhood in a Fatherless Home

Margaret Romao Toigo


Some of the individuals and organizations that support the Federal Marriage Amendment also support a multitude of other causes that are based upon loving and generative principles of helping children and families to have more fulfilling lives.



One example is Alliance for Marriage. AFM President, Matt Daniels, is the force behind the FMA, but the broader -- and suprisingly liberalist -- mission of his organization centers around supporting policies which he believes will ensure that more children are raised in familes that have both a mother and a father, a cause that apparently stems from his tragic childhood.



For what it is worth, I believe that Mr. Daniels is sincere when he says that he is not driven by animosity toward homosexuals but rather by his passionate desire to see other children have the kind of home life he was denied as the only child of a poor and struggling mother and "a gifted and irresponsible aspiring writer" who abandoned his family when Mr. Daniels was only a toddler.



Mr. Daniels' proposed consitutional amendment which reads, "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman." does not prohibit states from choosing to allow civil unions (his more intolerant counterparts don't like that idea one bit) because Mr. Daniels believes that preserving the right of states to decide whether or not to allow unions other than marriage is necessary to the success of amending the Constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the states.



In an article about fatherless families, which was originally published in The Hill on June 16, 2004, Mr. Daniels writes about the integral connection between the institution of marriage and the well-being of children and how marriage connects men to the children they bring into the world by making fatherhood into something more meaningful than a biological event (does the mere posession of a marriage certificate improve a man's character or is it the other way around?).



Of course, any such article would be incomplete without some supporting statistics such as the 25 million American children who are being raised in familes with no father present in the home, an "overwhelming" body of social-science research which shows that many of the social problems commonly thought to be rooted in race would eventually move from the inner cities to the suburbs since these problems are ultimately attributable to family breakdown and other research that shows that the percentage of fatherless families in a community more reliably predicts that community�s rate of violent crime and child poverty than any other factor.


In addition to this emperical evidence, Mr. Daniels shares his own personal experience of growing up without a father in a deteriorating, crime-ridden part of Spanish Harlem, offering it up as "a miniature portrait of the tremendous human and social costs of fatherlessness in America." And his story is truly sad.



After being deserted by his father, Mr. Daniels' mother worked as a secretary for several years until she fell victim to a violent crime which left her disabled, depressed and dependent on welfare for most of the rest of her life. Mr. Daniels believes that, if his father had not abandoned his family, many of the most difficult aspects of his childhood could have been avoided.



You'd think that this story would be one of a man who turned out to be a good-for-nothing loser who likely sank into a life of crime and drug abuse as the result of having been abandoned by his father, but Mr. Daniels, who holds several college degrees, is hardly what anyone could call a loser.



Mr Daniels credits his mother for functioning as his "moral compass" and emphasizing education. He knew that he could use education to get out of his circumstances and he outworked everyone to succeed. Mr. Daniels had what he calls "a survival-driven work ethic," which helped him to graduate from Dartmouth College in 1985 (he won a full scholarship). In 1996, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and in 2003 he earned a doctorate in politics from Brandeis University.



All of this leaves me to ponder that eternal question of whether we are products of nature or nurture or both. Sure, the odds are probably stacked against children living in disadvantaged circumstances. However, Mr. Daniels' unfortunate circumstances may have contributed to his character and subsequent success. Who's to say where Mr. Daniels would be today had he been raised with every advantage, in a family with both a mother and a father in the comfort of upper-middle-class suburbia? Would his survival-driven work ethic have developed if he had been deprived of his childhood hardships?



I also wonder why otherwise kindly and charitable folks do not realize that their fight to prevent gays and lesbians from ever seeking the recognition of their right to the secular, legal benefits and protections of marriage is based upon the arrogant -- not to mention cynical -- idea that families are defined by demographic composition, rather than how groups of people who think of themselves as familes -- regardless of genetics or popular convention -- enrich each other's lives by their sharing of love, trust, loyalty, cooperation and support.