A response to the response to the responses to the "Top 10 Things Mothers do Better than Fathers"

Hey Cody (can I call you that?) how are you?

When you posted your "Top 10 Things Mothers do Better than Fathers" I, like a bunch of other people, wrote a blog post about it. I spent a couple paragraphs on your post, but I wrote mostly about the responses it produced on the Babble Facebook page.

I am writing this response not to "get you." But I admit I have some concerns about your response to the controversy.

You start out by saying: "I also began to notice that the controversial posts were far more popular than the posts that tried to put real meaning behind the words. The realization of what people are interested in was more of a punch in the gut than anything. I decided to title a post, 'Top 10 Things Mothers Do Better Than Fathers.' It wasn’t my intention to offend fathers. It was written as a humor piece using personal examples from my own life."

Or as DADCAMP put it: "He wrote a personal fluff piece and gave it a generic headline to generate traffic. He admits he crafted it as link bait."

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You seem to be simultaneously poking the bee hive and surprised the bees sting. Even though you said earlier that is exactly what happens.

And let me agree with you, some of the responses were over the top, and there are others of us that need to learn from this. But you need to learn from this too.

You have written some good stuff and maybe one of the good things to come out of this is people will read those as well.

Criticism is not fun. The first response is to become defensive. The same way the first response to a blog post using outdated stereotypes is to attack the author. It is a fairly new phenomenon that men are defending their image in the home as parents. Huggies found this out the hard way.

If you had titled the piece "10 Things My Wife Does Better Than Me" I don't think you would have gotten any of the negative responses. Ironically I doubt anyone would have challenged you parenting abilities if you had just made it about you. They attacked you because they felt attacked by you post. The response may have been nuclear, but you fired the first shot.

And simultaneously you seem to be saying, I made a controversial post and I know that brings out the worst in people, and I made a mistake and I don't understand why people acted so negatively.

If it was a mistake then you could have gotten ahead of this. When you saw the negative comments come rolling in you could have apologized and changed the language to be less inclusive. But then you wouldn't have continued to get the page views.

If it was just a matter of creating link bait, then the response is exactly what you would expect.

I am sure you are a nice enough guy, but I am having a hard time understanding which you believe it to be.

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*This section has been removed because I attributed something to Cody that had actually been written by Cody's wife. My apologies to Cody.

Please don't blame bad parenting on your penis

It is the last week of school. In my normal routine I wake up about 5am, and before I start making lunches I wake up by going through my email and skimming the Facebook.

And a couple of dads I follow linked to this article called Top 10 Things Mothers do Better than Fathers

And this list is nothing, if not predictable. You can read the entire list but they include things like taking care of injuries, bathing your child (because the author dad, when left to his own devices cannot remember) and of corse cooking. Yes, he blames all of his parenting inability on the fact that he has a penis. Despite the fact that their are men doctors and some of the greatest chefs in the world are men. His penis gets in the way of performing these most basic task.

Then, as they shared about, I went to the Babble Facebook page where they are pimping the article. They have a post that says:

"Finish this sentence. The one thing that mothers do better than fathers is ___________. (Then see what this dad said!)"

And the responses are typical.

"Change poopy diapers"

"Comfort!"

"Lol listing off things men CAN'T do doesn't count!"

"I can't stop laughing long enough to fill in that blank. One thing? Really? hahahahahaha"

"Everything" is a common one.

And through all the dad bashing one comment from JT Coonfield stood out to me.

"Yes Candace. Omg, when we were getting ready to go somewhere my husband sd he would fix our daughters hair. Well he was all proud and asked me to come look. I never laughed so hard in my life!!!"

Let's set the stage here. They are getting ready to go somewhere. The dad says he will take care of the daughters hair. Likely this dad didn't grow up doing little girls hair. I'm guessing he isn't an experienced hair designer and didn't take the class on styling little girl's hair at the At-Home Dads Convention. This may have in fact been the first time he has ever attempted to style a little girls hair.

And when he is done. Proud at what he has accomplished. What is the mother's response. To laugh hysterically (I mean she used three fucking exclamation points it was so funny.) How many things do you think this father now wants to related to his own child that he is not an expert in because he know what his wife response will be.

Imagine your kids come home with their first painting from school and your response was not to congratulate them and hang it on the refrigerator, but was to laugh hysterically at what a poor attempt at art that was.

And no, I am not saying that men are little kids that need to be coddled. I am saying anyone attempting something they are new at, when the response from people they care about is to laugh and make fun of them, are not going to be encouraged to keep trying.

And I imagine in this household that the next time the family is getting ready the mom is going to complain that the husband isn't helping out. "Why don't you ever help get our daughter ready?" The answer is found in your laughter.

And this is where I say to the ladies, you cannot have it both ways. If you want to live in a world where mommy knows best and you belittle your husband when he does help out. You can feel powerful and like you posses powers that your husband never will. Congratulations.

But then stop bitching about how your husband never helps out. How he is like having a another child.

You can't have it both ways.

The Truth. You can't handle the Truth.

There was a time when the Church believed, based on the "truth" of the Bible that the universe revolved around the earth. The Church was so stuck to the "truth" they knew that when Copernicanism arose, saying that the earth revolved around the sun, they tried to suppress that truth. If Copernicanism was true the Bible was wrong. The Bible was the word of God, without error. If the earth was not the center of the universe that would mean and end to Christianity.

Of corse we all know the rest of the story. Science showed that the earth did evolve around the sun. Now it is common knowledge and yet the Church and Christianity remain. If you do not also consider the truth of the world then God is not also creator. If God is the creator of the world then the truth of the observable world is also God's truth. Science began as the flip side of the same coin. Men studied God through scripture and nature.

With that in mind I want to look at one of the "gay" verses in the Bible.

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." - Romans 1:18-32

Lets look at the people described in the passage.

They "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things." And therefore, so the things that follow are because of these things listed before.

"For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another" So this is where the anti-homosexual part comes in. But lets go a little further in this passage about these people.

"They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless."

It does not say that may be or perhaps they have a couple of traits, it says "they are." Now those of use who know or have known homosexual people know that this does not describe them. That is an observable truth. As the Church has in the past, some will try to deny the observable truth because they think it contradicts the Bible and the Bible cannot be wrong. As I think history has shown, this inevitably fails.

The other option is that what is being described in this passage is not all homosexual people. And as more science suggest that people are born gay we know that they were not turned that way by God because they "worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator."

We cannot ignore observable truth. We cannot ignore science. These too are God's truth. And if you ignore these to hold on to the "truth" you think is in the Bible you will not find the Truth in either place.

The truth will set you free.