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"Every man needs to know that no matter how lofty his job or position, he will never have a greater duty or more important title than dad," candidate George W. Bush said at the National Summit on Fatherhood in June 2000.
President Bush has been a major proponent of programs that promote engaged, responsible fatherhood. As governor, he worked on the Texas Fatherhood Initiative to increase public awareness on the vital role men play in their children's lives and he has carried those themes into his presidency.
But when it comes to Michael Newdow, the atheist father of a 9-year-old girl, who is seeking to have the words "under God" stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance, the Bush administration believes decisions regarding his child's rearing are purely a maternal pursuit.
Whereas parents typically may go to court in order to vindicate the legal rights of their children, here the government is asserting, in its brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, that Newdow has no such standing because he doesn't have primary custody of his daughter.
"(T)he prerogative of suing to enforce the child's rights rests exclusively with the mother because, in this case, she has the legal authority to make final and binding decisions concerning the child's "health, education and welfare,' " Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote in his brief before the U.S. Supreme Court.
With the public, the issue of standing in Newdow's case has taken a back seat to the highly charged merits. But for millions of divorced and never-married dads, whether noncustodial parents have the legal right to represent their children's interests in court is markedly more significant than whether school kids say two little words.
Dads are more than a bank account for their children and their mothers - despite what the nation's family courts might think - and any father who is interested in being an involved parent should be given an equal chance to do so. But if the Bush administration position is adopted by the court and Newdow's case is thrown out due to lack of standing, the inevitable result will be a further detaching of dads - who make up the bulk of noncustodial parents - from their kids.
With rights come responsibilities, as the chestnut goes, but the reverse is also true. Fathers who responsibly support their children should be given the legal stature of full-fledged parents, not some babysitter or kindly uncle status.
Newdow, an emergency room physician and lawyer, now has physical custody of his daughter about 30 percent of the time and fought to have joint legal custody as well. When talking to Newdow his bitterness toward the California family court system is obvious. He says basic fairness demands that he should share his daughter's life equally with that of her mother. "I'm an equal parent. I'm paying 7,000 percent of her care, I want 50 percent of her time," says Newdow, who pays $2,000 per month in child support.
But the mother, Sandra Banning, a born-again Christian who was never married to Newdow, has been fighting his custody demands for years. Also, with the help of culture warrior Kenneth Starr, she has filed a brief opposing Newdow in the Supreme Court, asserting that she wants her daughter to say the full pledge.
Because mother and father disagree, it would seem at first glance to make sense that Banning's interests prevail, since she has been granted the power to make education-related decisions for their daughter. But that is not the proper analysis.
Newdow is claiming that the school is inflicting a constitutional injury on his daughter by exposing her to a daily ritual that takes sides on a religious question and essentially denounces her father's atheism as wrongheaded. It doesn't matter what the mother wants; Newdow has the right to ask a court to make an objective judgment on a practice that may run afoul of the Establishment Clause.
Imagine the mischief that could occur if noncustodial parents were not allowed to assert their children's legal rights because of an objection by the other parent. What if a custodial parent approved of corporal punishment at school that resulted in a child's severe beating? Or if a custodial parent was protective of her church and refused to allow the noncustodial parent to file for an injunction to keep a priest from sexually abusing their child? Both these hypotheticals were raised in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on Newdow's behalf by the United Fathers of America and the Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights.
In a country where the parents of about a million children get divorced each year, the welcome mat at the courthouse door should not depend on custody arrangements. All involved parents have the right to act in the best interest of their children, and to right a legal wrong.
And, no matter what the Bush administration thinks, Newdow is no exception.