In any group of divorced men, at most, 1 out of every 5 did not beat, cheat, or subject his wife to any sort of abuse or addiction.

It should have read

In any group of divorced men, at most, 1 out of every 5 did beat, cheated, or subjected his wife to any sort of abuse or addiction.

Four out of every five men who are divorced by their wife DID NOT engage in this sort of behavior.

I hope that is clear.

Many in the church are asking where are the fathers? The answer, the church and in many cases their wives and the mothers of their children are dismissing fathers and the role of men as unnecessary.

I don’t recall the feminist who said it, but the "We need men like fish need bicycles." way of thinking is alive and well, and often inside the church.

The truth is, men are NOT abandoning their families, they are being kicked out of the family by their wives. Men don’t typically abandon their children. Instead, they are often being kept away from their children by a vindictive an often an unfaithful former wife.

The stereotype is that men are abusive, unfaithful, porn addicted, out of control dangerous creatures. The reality is that few men are like this. Yet the whole divorce industry operates under the assumption that men behave this way. Orders of protection are granted to women just because they filed for divorce.

I personally was physically hit by my ex-wife when I confronted her about her affair and when she categorized my attempts to seek joint custody with equal parenting time in response to her filing for divorce as "taking away HER children." And my story is not unique.

The thing is, on Father’s day, the sermon is usually about how men fall short. Look at what candidate Obama said on this past Father’s day, we have to do something about all the irresponsible men.

What about the greater number of RESPONSIBLE men who due to no fault of their own, no bad behavior of their own, were betrayed and divorced by the woman who stood in the church and pledged to always love him and be faithful to him?

In any group of divorced men, at most, 1 out of every 5 did not beat, cheat, or subject his wife to any sort of abuse or addiction. It’s likely that one out of that five had an unfaithful wife.

So why so much focus on the negative behavior of fathers when it’s the minority? Two out of every three divorced dads DID NOT CHOOSE divorce. So out of 10 divorced dads, roughly speaking 2 of the were unfaithful, 2 of them were betrayed, and 6 or 7 of them did not file for the divorce. The numbers may overlap. But the reality is men are NOT choosing to divorce or abandon their families.

So I’d like to see a Mother’s day sermon that puts the same sort of scrutiny back upon woman that men have faced for the past 30 or so years. Instead of how wonderful mothers are, ask why they are choosing to divorce faithful men who don’t beat, don’t cheat, and their worst crime may be romantic/relational cluelessness.

Men are not abandoning families, they are being cast out by their wives, the mothers of their children, and a court system that buys the lie that men are evil and women are victims.

It’s time for the church to stop treating the majority of men as if they were the minority that does engage in bad behavior. It’s time for churches that want dads to stop spreading the lie about dads abandoning their children and start encouraging moms who’ve divorced faithful dads to stop interfering the the father child relationship.

It’s time for churches to spend 100X more effort on eliminating no-fault-divorce compared to it’s efforts against same-sex-marriage. Same sex marriage will impact about 1% of the population. The other 99% can still get a no-fault divorce. That’s the bigger problem.

Yet there is no effort to address that issue that matches the scale of the same-sex-marriage issue.