Obama’s schedule on Saturday, when he returned to Chicago after a campaign swing through Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Obama campaign added the speech to Mr. So I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle that that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my children.”īut he also acknowledged his own flaws as a father, citing the breakneck schedule of the presidential campaign and the rare days he spends with his children. “The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you. “I know the toll it took on me, not having a father in the house,” he continued. Obama spoke of the burden that single parenthood was on his mother, who raised him with the help of his maternal grandparents. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”
What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. “We need fathers to realize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception. “But we also need families to raise our children,” he said. Obama cited the need for stronger law enforcement services and resources for education, more job opportunities and other resources for communities. Obama announced that he would be a co-sponsor of a bill with Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, that his campaign said would address the “national epidemic of absentee fathers.” If passed, the legislation would increase the enforcement of child support payments and strengthen domestic violence prevention services. Obama told the mostly black audience to take responsibility for the education and nutrition of their children, and lectured them for feeding their children “cold Popeyes” for breakfast.
Obama has frequently returned to the topic of parenting and personal responsibility, particularly for low-income African American families. The church’s pastor, Byron Brazier, is an Obama supporter. Instead, he chose the 20,000-member Apostolic Church of God, a vast brick structure on the South Side near Lake Michigan.
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Obama did not take his Father’s Day message to Trinity United Church of Christ, the church from which he resigned in May after a series of disputes over controversial remarks by the church’s former pastor, the Rev. His themes have been also been sounded by the comedian Bill Cosby, who has stirred debate among black Americans by bluntly speaking about an epidemic of fatherless African-American families while suggesting that some blacks use racism as a crutch to explain lack of economic progress.
“You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.” “Don’t get carried away with that eighth-grade graduation,” he said, bringing many members of the congregation to their feet, applauding. Obama noted that “more than half of all black children live in single-parent households,” a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, directly addressed one of the most sensitive topics in the African-American community: whether absent fathers bore responsibility for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. The speech was striking for its setting, and in how Mr. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. Obama said, to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. “Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Mr. CHICAGO Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city’s largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent father to deliver a sharp message to African-American men, saying, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.”
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