Happy Families, Healthy Economy

Last week I got a phone call from Mary-Louise Fowler, the coordinator of the World Congress of Families VII (WCF). She said with a worried voice,

“We are in danger of losing some of our best speakers!”

“Why?” I asked. Mary-Louise replied,

“Homosexual activists are attacking the World Congress of Families because many of the speakers believe that children deserve a mother and a father and that marriage between a man and a woman is the best way to preserve that right. Another reason is the fact that our speakers believe that a man is a man and a woman is a woman and that gender is a biological, scientific reality.”

I replied in rather a sarcastic tone,

“So, what’s new?”

You see, I am used to these sorts of attacks. I was removed from my position of Men’s Health Ambassador after only 48 hours because I refused to bow my knee to political correctness and accept the lies of such a militant anti-child lobby.

George Orwell said,

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.

His prescient words were coming true in Sydney, Australia, in the lead up to the World Congress of Families.

I pressed Mary-Louise for more information about the danger of losing some of their best speakers. I was shocked to hear that the anti-child lobby was calling several high-profile speakers at the World Congress of Families ‘homophobes’ and ‘bigots’ because they don’t believe in same-sex marriage and such militants were attacking the speakers and their employers by email, Facebook and Twitter. These speaker’s employers were threatening to sack the speakers or prohibit them from attending the World Congress of Families to be held in Sydney 15-18 May 2013 in Sydney.

Some members of the WCF organising committee were keen to issue a media release exposing this vicious attack on free speech. In a subsequent teleconference it was decided to let this hateful attack on the World Congress of Families ‘go to keeper’ and simply get on with promoting ‘happy families and healthy economies’.

Why am I telling you this?

There is a lesson here for fathers. We can’t always fight every battle. Sometimes it is better to let some things ‘go to keeper’. Sometimes our children play up, merely to gain attention or vent their own anger at being told the truth. Sometimes a father has to simply grin and bear it, knowing and believing that good and common sense will triumph in the end. This was certainly the case with these vicious attacks on the WCF speakers.

Thankfully these great people did not back down from their strongly held convictions. The WCF did not add fuel to the fire by responding to the vitriolic campaign of hate. The cause of love triumphed in the end, not so much by right of reply but rather through the ability to turn the other cheek. Many of the attackers have a deep father wound that keeps resurfacing. As Robert Bly, author of Iron John, wrote in 1990 so prophetically in talking about the father wound,

“In the next decade we can expect these demons of suspicion to cause more and more damage to men’s vision of what a man is, or what the masculine is. Between 20-30% of American boys now live in a house with no father present, and the demons there have full permission to rage”.

Sometimes we as fathers have to understand that we have to let certain things go through to keeper and reserve our energies for the important battles. As it says in the greatest book of all time, ‘Mercy triumphs over judgement’ and ‘love is stronger than death’.

Lovework

Remember to pick your battles as a father. Make sure you fight the important ones for the sake of your children because love is the strongest force in the universe and love will always find a way.

Yours for more love

Warwick Marsh