Does a child need both a mother and father in his life? Many people today say, ‘Not quite.’ I was trying yesterday to explain to a friend who is a passionate supporter of same-sex marriage why the answer is yes, but the reasons are so abstract as to be almost unreachable. Many common sense truths, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao of living, are like that. They lie partly beyond our ken. Then I came across this excellent quote by Felix Adler, author of an early 20th century book, Marriage and Divorce. He said:

“The child needs father and mother; but it does not need them only as some think, alternately, now the father’s influence and then the mother’s or in some things the father’s influence and in other things the mother’s. The child needs the father’s masculine influence and the mother’s feminine influence always together, the two streams uniting to pour their fructifying influence through the child’s life into the life of humanity.”

 

Please follow and like us: