Jeff

Fatherhood is no longer allowed to stand on its own terms. It must be dissolved, redefined, queered, deconstructed, and then handed back to the public as something “brave” and “complex.”

That much was obvious the moment I saw how the New York Times decided to commemorate Father’s Day this year.

On a day once reserved to honor fathers as fathers—men, actual men, who bear the burden of provision, protection, discipline, sacrifice, and presence—The New York Rag™ ran a guest essay in comic-book form titled, “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated.”

It was written by Zach Ellams, a woman cosplaying as a man and presenting herself as a “father,” and it was offered up to us as a Father’s Day meditation. Not a tribute to devoted fathers or a reflection on paternal duty. Not a word for the men who quietly hold homes together, work themselves into the ground, and ask for almost nothing in return.

No, Father’s Day at the Times is now apparently the perfect occasion for a pastel-colored lesson in gender confusion.

And there it is—the whole racket in miniature.

The left hates men, and their propaganda outlets cannot leave fatherhood alone. It cannot let it stand there in plain daylight as a created reality—masculine, ordinary, weighty, and good. It has to tamper with it. It has to pry it apart, scribble over the labels, and then hand the thing back to the public like some deranged IKEA project with three bolts missing and call the result “beautiful.”

That is exactly what this piece is. Catechesis. A sermon from the church of modern identity. The whole point is that fatherhood no longer belongs to fathers and it no longer refers to a man. It no longer arises from the created order, from husband and wife, from the begetting and raising of children, from the basic architecture of family life as God established it.

It is now a title to be redistributed by left-wing activists, approved by editors, and sentimentalized for public consumption.

And they do this on purpose. This was an editorial choice—a longstanding movement designed to erase men from society.

In a country full of fathers—good fathers, weak fathers, absent fathers, aging fathers, fathers trying to repent of past failures, fathers doing the unglamorous work of staying—the New York Times looked across the landscape and decided that the most fitting Father’s Day voice was a woman insisting that she is a father and that her daughter has learned to roll with it.

Of course she has.

Children adapt.

They adapt to divorce, to chaos, to profanity, to instability, to all manner of adult selfishness and disorder.

A child’s ability to survive confusion is not proof that the confusion is healthy. It is proof that children are often forced to carry burdens they never should have been handed in the first place. But the left loves to play this game. They exploit a child’s ability to endure such confusion and repackage it as moral wisdom.

It takes a child’s natural bond to and love for a parent and treats it as a theological endorsement of whatever social experiment or sexual fetish the parent has dragged into the home.

No. A child’s affection does not sanctify a lie. A little girl’s ability to navigate contradiction does not erase the contradiction. And a stupid comic in the New York Times does not turn a mother into a father.

That should be obvious. It should be insultingly obvious. And yet here we are, because our ruling class—and even our evangelical institutions—have spent years feeding the language of family into a wood chipper and calling the debris “progress.” Fatherhood is no longer a reality to honor. It is a category to be erased, softened, emptied, and eventually mocked into irrelevance.

Why?

Because fatherhood is a rebuke.

A real father is a rebuke to the cult of self-invention. He is a rebuke to the fantasy that the body means nothing and that words can be bullied into saying whatever the age demands.

Fatherhood drags us back to reality. It reminds us that men and women are not interchangeable, that children are not props in an adult identity project, and that the family is not a laboratory for ideological experiments cooked up by bored editors in Manhattan.

That is why fatherhood has to be sabotaged, vandalized…destroyed. Not all at once, of course. That would be too obvious. So instead we get the usual sugar coating—soft illustrations, vulnerable storytelling, childlike candor, therapeutic language, and the whole emotional support peacock routine.

Everything is warm. Everything is tender. Everything is carefully arranged to make the lie feel humane and the objection feel cruel.

But the lie is still a lie.

The old world honored fathers because it understood that fathers are not ornaments on a family Christmas tree. Men are not optional. Fatherhood is not one more interchangeable caregiving role to be reassigned by people who think biology is a hate crime.

Fathers matter. Their authority matters. Their sacrifice matters. Their masculinity matters. Their very fatherness matters. Which is why every diseased ideology of the age eventually finds itself taking a crowbar to manhood.

So there is the New York Times, right on cue, using Father’s Day to platform a woman performing fatherhood while the editors nod along as though they have just published something profound instead of something completely preposterous.

The paper could have honored a faithful father. It could have celebrated the ordinary man who gets up before dawn, goes to work, loves his wife, disciplines his children, and does his duty before God without demanding applause from the world.

It could have honored the father who stayed.

Instead, we got a cartoon catechism about a woman who wants to be called dad.

Naturally.

That is where we are. Fatherhood can no longer simply be fatherhood. It must be stripped for parts, rebuilt by ideologues, and handed back to us with a smile and a lecture about how the old definition was too narrow and too primitive.

I reject the whole rotten premise. A mother is not a father. A woman is not a man.

And Father’s Day belongs to fathers.