Those looking to fatherhood as a political cause have never had much to get worked up about. So I was intrigued when my usually content-free weekly e-mail came from fathers.com on Friday. In this edition, Ken Canfield, the head of the National Center for Fathering, encouraged me to support the "Bayh-Santorum fatherhood bill, which provides critical resources to states for training and promoting responsible fatherhood."

Fair enough a goal, I suppose. But the next part was really interesting: "Ironically, the Children's Defense Fund is emphatically opposing any fatherhood legislation ..." I thought that was weird. Why wouldn't CDF be happy about "responsible fatherhood?" So I checked around, as best I could. I'm in over my head here; react accordingly.

I think Canfield is talking about S. 2830, which is being pushed by Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum. That fatherhood bill has a lot more to say about marriage than dads (it's titled the "Healthy Marriages and Responsible Fatherhood Act of 2004"). The bill talks money, but only in reference to marriage. And when the text does get around to fatherhood programs, the main strategy to improving fatherhood is ... marriage.

Now, there's lots of text in there about how important dads are, and how important stability is and how bad domestic violence can be. But the reason (I suspect) that the Children's Defense Fund is opposed to this is the same reason that women's groups have been leery of "marriage promotion" for years (see this old-but-still-applicable treatment for more detail than you can shake a stick at): namely, incentivizing marriage isn't always a good thing. Marriage makes it harder for women and children to escape a violent or unhealthy household. That's not to say that marriage isn't a good idea, but government is playing a dangerous game in trying to make bad relationships into good marriages.

The spending on "parenthood promotion" -- highlighting parenting education, the importance of child support, mentoring -- makes more sense, but that's clearly not the thrust of the bill. Nor is it terribly clear how the government can get the word out about "good parenting practices" to fathers. We're talking $100 million in programs, when there's basically no track record of success.

I know there are a great many similar policy battles on this subject swirling about at present, and I haven't been following them, so the well-educated are welcome to use the comments space to set me straight.

For a more moderate last word, let me flag this bit from Jason DeParle's thoughtful NYT Magazine story:

The truth is that no one really knows how to help poor men become better fathers and husbands. The debate is in its embryonic stage, as the debate about poor women was 20 years ago. It took a succession of efforts, most of them failures, before welfare-to-work programs started to work. Why not let 1,000 flowers bloom, or at least a good half-dozen, and rigorously test them -- marriage versus Marriage Plus, counseling versus training?