CHICAGO — In a Father’s Day address heavy with personal and political meaning, Barack Obama told worshipers at a Chicago church Sunday that government must do more to help families — but he also exhorted parents, especially fathers, to play their part by raising healthy children.
In a popular South Side Chicago church, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee decried the shortage of police on the streets and money for schools, as well as a proliferation of guns in the wrong hands.
But America needs more than jobs and opportunity in its communities, the senator from Illinois told the hometown congregation.
“We also need families to raise our children,” he said. “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. It’s the courage to raise one.”
Obama sounded a theme that he has used in past Father’s Day speeches in which he called on fathers to rise to their duties.
But the story of fatherhood — never a simple one for Obama, abandoned by his father when he was very young — was especially poignant on Sunday.
It came in the aftermath of a painful separation from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a father figure who, as Obama’s longtime pastor, played a crucial role in his spiritual maturation as a young man.
A few weeks ago, Obama publicly broke relations with Wright after controversy about the minister’s strident sermons turned into a personal disagreement over their divergent views.
As the first stop in Obama’s quest for a new religious home, Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God offered a symbolic new beginning.
Obama, who often speaks of a “Joshua generation” standing ready to take the mantle of leadership from its civil-rights forbears, stood in a pulpit that Bishop Arthur Brazier, who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., recently handed over to his son, Byron.
A month ago, as the Wright controversy unfolded painfully for Obama, the elder Brazier organized a gathering of black pastors in a show of support for him. Obama chose the Braziers’ church as the place to revisit a key message of his campaign.
“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important,” Obama said. “And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation.”
But too many fathers are “missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said.
“They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men,” he said. “And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
In his recent speech on race relations, Obama spoke of a historic lack of economic opportunity for black men and the “shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family,” which he said contributed to the erosion of black families.
Welfare policies didn’t help, he said at the time.
As he has in the past, Obama preached on Sunday about the individual’s responsibility to leave that legacy behind.
