We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say but in the lives they lead.

Second marriage is an issue that our Founding Fathers wisely left to the states.

My argument is simple which is that for several thousand years in Western civilization marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.

There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

These are people who haven't gone through the legal means to becoming citizens like our forefathers did. They want all the benefits but none of the responsibilities.

So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children in the long overdue review of family law published this week fills me with horror and despair.

We have a tremendous lack of knowledge of how far we have gotten away from the Constitution of the United States. Democrats and Republicans alike have taken us away from the original intent. You see I believe in this document as our founding fathers intended it.

Having robbed children of any sense that their Father is in Heaven and that they are His creation we then launched an experiment in raising them without earthly fathers too. Having neither a Father in heaven or a father in the home many young men make gangs their families.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history for instance because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.

It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

In my view far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting the New York Times the Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.