2008 Woodie Awards
Obama urges parental responsibility in Father's Day speech
Jeff Long and Christi Parsons, Chicago Tribune
Issue date: 6/19/08 Section: News
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In a popular South Side church, Obama, D-Ill., 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 presidential candidate 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 familiar from previous 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 own father when he was very young-was especially poignant on Sunday.
It came in the aftermath of a painful separation from 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 the Apostolic Church of God offered a symbolic new beginning.
Obama, who often speaks of a "Joshua generation" standing ready to take over the mantle of leadership from its civil rights forbearers, stood in a pulpit that Bishop Arthur Brazier, who marched with 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 on Sunday.
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