A Letter to Post Columnist Colbert I. King About His Father's Day Column
Mr. King has long overlooked a major cause of fatherless families
Dear Mr. King,
As a lifelong reader of the Washington Post, I know that for years you have written about fathers and the social costs of fatherless families. I see that this year you have already written several articles about the importance of fathers,1 including your latest column for Father’s Day, What a good father does for a child.
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your perspectives of fatherhood and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
Although I completely agree with your observations on the many negative results of missing fathers, I believe that you have failed to recognize a root cause of much of today’s fatherless families:
One of feminism’s explicitly stated goals is the destruction of family and marriage, and the removal of fathers from both.
If you doubt the accuracy of this last statement, here are some examples that provide proof (please forgive this long list – I felt it necessary to preclude any denial of this feminist goal):
“The nuclear family must be destroyed… Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.” — Linda Gordon
“The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.” — Kate Millet, author of Sexual Politics
“In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.” — Dr Mary Jo Bane, quoted in The Left's War on the Family
“Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” — Sheila Cronin, co-founder of Feminists—A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles
“The father is no longer essential to the economic survival of the unit. Men haven’t kept up with the changes in society; they don’t know how to be parents. Nobody has taught them: where are the cultural institutions to tell them that being a parent is a good thing? They don’t exist. At the same time, women don’t have many expectations of what men might provide.” — Anna Coote, Institute for Public Policy Research (England)
“We have to abolish and reform the institution of marriage...By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God...We must understand what we are attempting is a revolution, not a public relations movement.” — Gloria Steinem, quoted in The Left's War on the Family
“The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging on to it, I don't know.” — Toni Morrison, novelist and feminist, quoted in The Left's War on the Family
“We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.” — Robin Morgan, editor, Ms. magazine, Sisterhood Is Powerful
“How will the family unit be destroyed? … the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare.” — Roxanne Dunbar, “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution”
“Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women.... We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men.” — Nancy Lehmann and Helen Sullinger, “The Declaration of Feminism”, 1971
“Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it.” — Germaine Greer, “The Female Eunuch ‘Revolution’”
“The institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women; it is through the role of wife that the subjugation of women is maintained. In a very real way the role of wife has been the genesis of women's rebellion throughout history.” — Marlene Dixon, radical feminist professor at University of Chicago, “Why Women’s Liberation? Racism and Male supremacy”
“The married woman knows that love is, at its best, an inadequate reward for her unnecessary and bizarre heritage of oppression.” — radical feminists Beverly Jones and Judith Brown, Toward a Female Liberation Movement, 1968
If you still don’t believe that a feminist goal is to destroy fathers, please take time to read about a consciousness-raising session held in 1969 by radical feminist Kate Millet. The session clearly illuminates the hateful, conspiratorial thinking of early Marxist feminists who ominously called for “cultural revolution” and the “destruction of the American family”.
That feminists have largely succeeded in their goal of destroying families can be found by declining rates of marriage (aided by a feminist-indoctrinated media that encourages women to avoid marriage), and increasing numbers of fatherless children, and the risks to these children.
Mr. King, in your recent article, ‘Are Black fathers necessary? Damn straight we are.’, you quoted Lyndon Johnson from a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University:
“Less than half of all Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents.” …Little less than two-thirds are at home with both of their parents, The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.”
Now, thanks to feminist-instilled hatred of men and masculinity and particularly the success of feminism in removing fathers from families, the same crisis of missing fathers in African American families is now a curse inflicted on American families of all races.
But beyond fathers and families, you – and most Post columnists – are unable to see that this denigration of dads is only a very small part of the way that feminism spreads hatred of men and masculinity. You have failed to see the feminist pink elephant in the room:
The unbridled, obsessed, man-hating feminism that has run rampant, almost completely unchallenged, throughout the world for more than half a century.
If you doubt the accuracy of this last statement, please review Feminism is a Hate Movement: In Their Own Words, a post which documents just a small segment of an almost limitless number of hateful, misandrist quotes made by feminists over the past 100+ years.
Or take time to consider the Post’s longtime gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence2 and its 2018 publication of the op-ed Why can't we hate men? , a #MeToo inspired rant written by a women’s studies professor who had the gall to openly and shamelessly express a Nazi-like hatred for men in a major American newspaper.
How in the world could the Post publish an article that, by its very title, can only be described as “hate speech” and that mocks the Post’s own slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”?
And how could so many of the paper’s columnists be so completely oblivious to the hateful sexism of “Why can’t we hate men?” and write their own gender biased articles?
Mr. King, I can only hope that you’ve read this far. If so, I thank you. I pray that I’ve opened your mind to damage done by feminism’s six-decade long campaign against fathers, families and marriage.
If I have, with all due respect, please take time to evaluate and recognize the Post’s feminist gender bias and help me to convince reporters, columnists, and management at the Post that they need to reconsider their entire coverage of gender-related issues to eliminate their hateful, feminist-inspired, anti-male bias.
Your other articles this year on fathers include As youth crime persists, one question looms large (April 19); As youth crime persists, one question looms large (continued) (April 26); ‘Are Black fathers necessary? Damn straight we are.’ (May 3); To bend toward justice, the arc of history has to bend toward family, too (Jan 12)
This observation was recently confirmed by a February 2023 report by The Coalition to End Domestic Violence that described a 10-Year Suppression of the Truth on Domestic Violence by the Washington Post.