Who’s really to blame here?

Kelly Boggs, a frequent contributor to Baptist Press News, recently commented on a billboard he saw while sitting in traffic on I-35 in Dallas. It was an ad for a paternity testing service, and displayed boldly the words “Who’s The Father?”, along with a phone number to contact the service.

Rev. Boggs went on to lament the depths of depravity that we’ve sunk to where such a service is necessary (or marketable). I found it interesting, though, that he seemed to focus largely on the mothers in such situations — particularly “women who are so promiscuous that upon discovering they are pregnant, need to play ‘eenie-meenie-minie-moe’ to have some clue as to who the father might be.”

Boggs’ article hinges on the assumption that these services are necessitated by “a large and lucrative market: pregnant women who have been physically intimate with more than one person”, but I’m not so sure. In these days of prolonged adolescence, where “men” (term used loosely) want to live like they’re seventeen well into their thirties, it seems much more likely to me that the market is created by guys who refuse to take responsibility for the children that they’ve helped to bring into existence. The women are then left with little other recourse than going to one of these services to establish paternity and force him to pay the support he rightly owes.

Now, I’m not going to deny that there are likely some very promiscuous women among these services’ clients. There probably are. Still, should a Christian’s first reaction to such a billboard be to look at the moms and assume that they’re whores? I don’t think so.  If we really believe that men are to lead the home and the family as Christ leads the Church, then our first look should be to the dads, and our assumption should be that they’re cowards who need to “man up” — ideally, by being involved in his children’s lives, but at least financially.

Makes me wonder. What do you think?