Today, many dads will get a Hallmark card and a hug from their kids. But in 2009, we have to ask: Does the word “father” still retain any special meaning?

The answer isn’t clear. We often hear that “family” has become a fungible term, which can embrace almost any combination of adults and kids. Fathers may be nice to have around, but no one really needs one any more.

Even in families where an adult male is present, his duties are vague and subject to negotiation. In enlightened families – the thinking goes — husband and wife will split the breadwinning and domestic work, and will have interchangeable parental duties. Fathers no longer have any unique role to play.

Many men are getting this message, and are questioning their value as fathers. They are marrying less often and later, and when they do marry they’re more prone to leave at some point. The men who stay include an increasing number of “arrested adolescents” — guys absorbed in their own entertainments, who are not inclined to make the sacrifices that family welfare requires.

Statistics suggest that the phenomenon of the fading father has major consequences for the well-being of American families. Female-headed households are far more likely to struggle with poverty. Children without a father in the home are much more prone to risky behaviors, ranging from school leaving to juvenile delinquency and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

The impact of father absence is particularly tragic in the black community. Today, about 70 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock. Is it a coincidence that such a disproportionate number of our prison inmates are black men?

But we don’t need statistics to confirm the central importance of fathers. All of us have witnessed the unique and worthy role that a good father plays in a family. Even if our own dads fell short, we can point to a grandfather, an uncle or a friend’s father who brought the meaning of fatherhood to life.

How did this man embody the father’s role?

He was the bedrock of his family’s moral code, and did the heavy lifting of enforcing that code. That meant that when his 16 year-old son—weighing in at 195 pounds—stayed out until 3:00 a.m., came home drunk or mistreated a girl, this dad made sure that the young man faced big-time consequences.

This father was also his family’s primary intermediary with the world—what we used to call its “protector.” He was the last line of defense against economic privation and predatory cultural influences, and the one who willingly took the big hits when things got tough.

Perhaps most importantly, this father gave his wife a warrior’s love—at once sacrificial, protective and unconditional. His 16-year-old son saw this. Under his dad’s steadying influence, he eventually outgrew his teenage self-absorption, and learned to control his behavior and respect women himself. When the time came, he was able to build on his father’s example and give his own family the sacrificial love and protection it needed to flourish.

Despite what our culture tells us, good fathers are indispensable. Encouraging our boys and men in the noble vocation of fatherhood is the best thing we can do on this Father’s Day, 2009.

President Obama and his congressional allies have to find a cool trillion dollars for their national health care plan, according to the Washington Post. The Congressional Budget Office confirmed this price tag Monday, but cautioned that the enormous sum would still insure less than half of those currently uninsured.

There’s little room left to borrow what’s needed, especially now that the national deficit has ballooned to Hindenburg zeppelin-like proportions (and will likely have a similar end). Obama and friends want a combination of hundreds of billions in cuts from health programs for the poor and elderly, plus whopping tax increases—which they’re likely to try to get by taxing private health benefits.

And that’s only what the plan’s proponents are willing to admit. There’s more at stake, write Yuval Levin and William Kristol in the Weekly Standard:

The fact is, the Democrats’ proposals are a liberal wish list of expansions of the role of government in health care, combining an array of taxes, regulations, incentives, and mandates aimed over time to create a massive and unfunded new entitlement that would limit patient choices, ration care, and bankrupt the Treasury.

The Democrats’ plan would force everyone into the system through an individual mandate and lead employers to drop their health coverage; their new public insurance plan would then price private insurers out of the game and attract the refugees from private coverage into the public system. All of this would put us well on the road to government-run health care.

Instead of this, what if you could save 40 percent on national health costs, make people healthier, and do so without the huge costs that even Democrats admit are necessary?

It’s happening right now at Safeway company, reports CEO Steven Burd, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Safeway’s big savings started with a common sense understanding of the factors that account for poor health in this country:

Safeway’s plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior.

The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

Safeway then incorporated this insight into the premiums it charges employees for health insurance. According to Burd:

The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member’s behaviors.

Our plan utilizes a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors. Currently we are focused on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Employees are tested for the four measures cited above and receive premium discounts off a “base level” premium for each test they pass. Data is collected by outside parties and not shared with company management.

If they pass all four tests, annual premiums are reduced $780 for individuals and $1,560 for families. Should they fail any or all tests, they can be tested again in 12 months. If they pass or have made appropriate progress on something like obesity, the company provides a refund equal to the premium differences established at the beginning of the plan year.

The results have been remarkable. Over the past four years, health care costs have increased 38 percent for most American companies, while Safeway’s costs have remained flat, according to Burd.

Burd believes much more could be done to control costs if companies were free to reward behavior-based good health practices. For example, the cost of insuring a smoker is about $1,400 per year, but the reward for no tobacco use is limited by law to $312, he says.

Surely, though, the employees must be up in arms about “discriminatory premiums” and other concerns about Safeway’s health care plan. Far from it, says Burd:

When surveyed, 78% of our employees rated our plan good, very good or excellent. In addition, 76% asked for more financial incentives to reward healthy behaviors.

We have heard from dozens of employees who lost weight, lowered their blood-pressure and cholesterol levels, and are enjoying better health because of this program. Many discovered for the first time that they have high blood pressure, and others have been told by their doctor that they have added years to their life.

Is anyone in Washington listening?

In 2006, Pete Hegseth was serving in Samarra, Iraq, with the 101st Airborne when Al-Qaida-linked terrorists blew up the Golden Mosque, launching a deadly civil war. Hegseth, 29, witnessed countless other terrorist-perpetrated horrors during his tour in Iraq. He saw civilians gunned down in cold blood, and a mother and two sons whose car hit a roadside bomb — mangling her and ripping off the young men’s legs.

Earlier in his military career, Hegseth — a native of Forest Lake — served as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. There, he saw close up the hateful ideology that has inspired the slaughter of innocents around the world.

No wonder that reports about a planned Xbox 360 video game called “Rendition: Guantanamo” grabbed Hegseth’s attention.

In the game, players control an orange-jumpsuited detainee who shoots his way out of Guantanamo, killing as many guards — people like Hegseth — as he can. The detainee is a sympathetic figure, innocent of wrongdoing and seeking to escape systematic torture and abuse.

Hegseth summarized the game’s take on Guantanamo: “The detainees had become the victims and heroes, and their captors were the oppressors.”

The game’s maker — Scotland-based T-Enterprise — expected the game to generate huge sales and millions in profits, and planned to target the lucrative Middle East market, according to a report in the London-based Telegraph this spring.

Not if Hegseth had anything to say about it. On June 2, he and the group he heads — Vets for Freedom, the nation’s largest organization of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans — launched a grass-roots campaign to halt its distribution here. Talk-radio hosts, bloggers and writers quickly joined the effort.

Within 24 hours, T-Enterprise ran up the white flag and announced that it was shelving the game.

It was no small victory. “Rendition: Guantanamo” had promised to be a particularly pernicious propaganda tool, as its director, Zarrar Chishti, made clear in May.

“We are making a statement [with the game],” he told news outlet Deadline Scotland. Though the detention facility may close, “We did not want Guantanamo to be forgotten.”

To guide the project, T-Enterprise hired Moazzam Begg, a notorious former Guantanamo inmate and U.K. citizen captured in Pakistan in 2002.

“Begg was a central figure in Al-Qaida,” Hegseth said. “He trained in Afghanistan and fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora after 9/11. He was released from Guantanamo because of our special relationship with the U.K., and since then has made an endless stream of unsubstantiated allegations about torture, abuse and even murder at the facility.”

T-Enterprise “approached me with this idea about making a game based on my experience in Guantanamo,” Begg told the Telegraph. “I’m involved to make sure it is as true to life as possible.”

Chishti corroborated this. “Moazzam will do three days of sound … [then] we will 3D-render him into the game,” he told Deadline Scotland.

T-Enterprise brushed a thin veneer over its anti-U.S. agenda by setting the game in the near future, when Guantanamo has supposedly been sold to mercenaries. Since pulling the game, the company has denied that the main character was based on Begg, contradicting its earlier statements.

“Rendition: Guantanamo” is clearly unsavory. But it’s still just a video game. Why get so worked up?

“The game is one small corner in a larger battle to shape perception of American conduct in the war on terror generally, and at Guantanamo Bay specifically,” says Hegseth. “It’s an attempt to rewrite history, to create the perception that the war is misguided and that in fighting it, America has lost its values, lost its way.”

The battle to shape perceptions has many fronts, he points out. “If you want to reach young people, you can’t do it through the pages of the New York Times. You find alternative ways to win them over, such as video games like this one.”

“The game’s premise is that Americans are holding you — not because of your conduct on the battlefield or because you espouse a radical ideology, but merely because you’ve been wrongly swept up as a Muslim man in Afghanistan. The American soldier comes off as an oppressor and an enemy of freedom.”

We have so demonized our detention effort at Guantanamo that in our fantasy worlds, the terrorists who use women and children as human shields are becoming the heroes, while our soldiers are the bad guys.

Thanks to Pete Hegseth and Vets for Freedom, we now have one less front in the war on terror to worry about.

President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus is now a certified failure.

No need to be a Rush Limbaugh lemming to reach that conclusion. Listen to Obama’s own economic gurus, as reported in the Star Tribune:

On Jan. 9, two of the president’s top economic advisers predicted that with the stimulus plan, the unemployment rate this year would not exceed 8 percent. It now stands at 9.4 percent. That figure is higher than aides Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein said it would be even if the stimulus plan were never adopted.

Got that? According to Obama’s economic brain trust, the stimulus has not only failed, the unemployment rate is worse than if there had been no stimulus at all. And we’ve squandered over three quarters of a trillion dollars of taxpayer money!

But wait! Almost 1.6 million jobs have disappeared since the stimulus’ approval, but Obama boasted this week that we’ve actually gained jobs during that same period. “The stimulus has already created or saved 150,000 jobs,” he claimed.

In fact, the president assures us that this summer’s economic roses are just beginning to bloom. According to the Star Tribune, “Obama doubled down on his promises, vowing to accelerate stimulus spending with the goal of creating or saving 600,000 jobs by summer’s end.”

William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal detects some rhetorical sleight of hand here. In exposing it, he quotes Greg Mankiw, a former Bush economic advisor:

‘The expression “create or save,” which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius,’ writes Mr. Mankiw. ‘You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.

Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.

McGurn adds:

Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%.

Invoke the magic words, however, and — presto! — you have the president claiming he has ‘saved or created’ 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

Obama can only get away with his Alice-in-Wonderland language because a star-struck press corps is eating out of his hand, says McGurn:

If the ‘saved or created’ formula looks brilliant, it’s only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don’t expect much to change.

So long as the news continues to repeat the administration’s line that the stimulus has already ‘saved or created’ 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.

McGurn ends with a quote from former Bush advisor Tony Fratto:

‘You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama’s jobs claims that they did toward President Bush’s tax cuts,’ says Mr. Fratto. ‘But I’m still waiting.’

We’re increasingly uncomfortable with religion these days.

As a society, we tolerate pastors, priests, rabbis and other religious folks, so long as they confine their message to a vanilla “God is love” theme and bless babies, brides and caskets.

But when religious leaders speak out on the issues of the day — especially using morally tinged language — the elite gatekeepers of public opinion in the media, government and academia warn shrilly that a new Dark Age is upon us.

More and more, we see outright hostility to religion — particularly to Christianity. Consider the wild popularity of a recent spate of best-sellers by “New Atheist” superstars, including Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

Far from being dispassionate critics of faith, the New Atheists are zealous crusaders for their own creed: materialism. They are passionately committed to the idea that the universe is a random accident, that transcendent truth is a myth, and that man’s life has no inherent purpose or meaning.

Why the growing audience for notions like these?

Religion poses a serious challenge to our cherished idea of personal autonomy. Unlike our forebears, we define freedom as the right to live as we choose — to “be ourselves” — unconstrained by social norms or a morally grounded sense of guilt or shame.

Judeo-Christianity throws a wrench in this, teaching that universal standards of right and wrong trump our personal desires.

In addition, it raises troubling questions about the vision of scientific “progress,” so central to our modern age. The mere fact that we are capable of, say, genetically altering or cloning human beings doesn’t give us moral license to do so, it cautions.

It’s tempting to embrace the New Atheist gospel — that man makes himself and has no higher judge. But before we do, we would be wise to consider the potential consequences.

What, for example, is the source of the bedrock American belief in human equality? It has no basis in science or materialism. Some people are brilliant, powerful and assertive, while others can’t even tie their shoelaces. If “reason” alone is the standard, the notion of equality appears to be nonsense.

And why should we act with charity toward the poorest and weakest among us? “Reason” — untempered by compassion — suggests that autistic children and Alzheimer’s sufferers are drags on society. In ancient Rome, disabled babies were left on hilltops to die. Why lavish care and resources on them?

We Americans take the moral principles of equality and compassion for granted. Yet these ideas are deeply counterintuitive. We’ve largely forgotten that their source is the once-revolutionary Judeo-Christian belief in a loving God, who created human beings in his image and decreed charity to be the first of virtues.

Can we reject belief in such a God and still retain the fruits of faith — including a belief in the dignity and infinite value of each human being?

The signs aren’t promising.

Human beings are prone to selfishness, lust, vindictiveness and cruelty. Once we cease to believe that the moral rules constraining us are rooted in transcendent truth, they become mere preferences — a matter of personal taste, and so expendable.

Theologian David Bentley Hart, a critic of the New Atheists, puts it this way: “How long can our gentler ethical prejudices … persist once the faith that gave them their rationale and meaning has withered away?”

The historical record here should give us pause. The French Revolution, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union — all sought to replace Judeo-Christian ethics with reason, and ended in massive bloodletting.

Nor does science offer moral guidance. That way lies Social Darwinism — the notion of the survival of the fittest. Unless scientific ambition is constrained by religion, it can come to see humanity as just another form of technology, to be tinkered with and perfected with utility in mind.

Hart dismisses the New Atheists as intellectual lightweights. They push “attitudes masquerading as ideas” and fail to honestly consider the likely consequences of their creed, he writes. But he takes a different view of Christianity’s greatest critic — philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared in 1882 that “God is dead.”

“Nietzsche was a prophetic figure precisely because he, almost alone among Christianity’s enemies, understood the implications of Christianity’s withdrawal,” Hart has written. “He understood that the effort to cast off Christian faith while retaining the best and most beloved elements of Christian morality was doomed to defeat.”