Fathers and Daughters

Tribune columnist John Kass's column today decries a single mother who, since she has no husband, protested the school father-daughter dance as unfair and discriminatory, and perpetuating the stereotype of an "Ozzie and Harriet" family with a mom and a dad.  The ACLU intervened and the school caved, cancelling the dance.  Read the article here.

It's hard not to grind one's teeth at this, shall we call it, political correctness?  (I thought the woman's position could be made even stronger if she pointed out that if she was a lesbian, and had another mother for the child instead of a father, that second mother was also being discriminated against!)

How do we get past this nonsense?  John Kass suggests we are in sore need of common sense, and I agree with that.  But how to get it back?

I am reading a book about Dante (Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation, Christine O'Connell Bauer, at p. 141-142) in which the author explains that we find meaning in our lives by being receptive and being active.  Either extreme should be avoided.  Pure passivity (accepting without question "what happens to me") gives no meaning.  The other extreme, activity, runs the risk of heresy, whereby the world is bent to my desires.  The answer is some mixture, tending to a mean (I suppose) of passivity and activity.  Dante describes these ingredients as humility and pride.  Life's journey toward meaning is one of tempering pride with humility, a journey requiring thinking and action, prudence and temperance, justice and courage.  (And Dante includes at a higher level, the theological or infused virtues.)  Only then is meaning -- meaning an atunement with reality and NOT insanity -- realizable.

How does this apply to the circumstances related in Kass' column?  Common sense is the term we use for that "mean" approach avoiding the extreme of pride (of trying to bend the world to my hallucination or fantasy).  As Kass said, a bit of thinking would have led the mom to realize she could find a surrogate father in an uncle or other relative.  This sense can also be said to be "common" because it is shared by others.  Through common sense we live in a world inhabited by others, and not in our own world of fantasy, to which the real world must bend.  To be "common" in this sense is not to be low, but to participate in the shared world the common currency of which is respect, charity, and forgiveness.

How can we help?  Try to bring in common sense.  Show that the fight against victimization often only creates more victims.