What do intellectuals have against men?

Back in June 1999, American Psychologist printed “Deconstruction of the Essential Father,” asserting that kids don’t need a dad. The implication was that children stand just as good a chance of growing up healthy and well-adjusted if raised by one parent, or unmarried parents, or homosexuals, as if raised by their own biological dad and mom in a happy marriage.

Now, the New York Times has taken the argument a step further. It says men are totally unnecessary.

“Men, Who Needs Them?” asks Greg Hampikian, a professor of biology at Boise State University.

Men are becoming “less relevant to both reproduction and parenting,” he asserts. How so? From a biological perspective, “women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither.”

Did you know that men are not even necessary for reproduction? One would think that even artificial insemination requires a man at some stage, but the professor says no: A recent genetic experiment apparently proved that “the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can.”

Hail scientific progress.

The Times article states that even those who reproduce by more archaic methods need to understand just how insignificant the male contribution really is. When you developed in your mother’s womb, you received literally everything from Mom. The only thing contributed by the man who impregnated her was dna, which is “infinitesimally small … less than one millionth of your mass.”

But Professor Hampikian isn’t finished. He reduces the role of men not merely to our raw biological contribution to human reproduction, but even less: the weight of that contribution—in trillionths of grams. “[Y]our father’s 3.3 picograms of dna comes out to less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107 billion babies ago.”

Males’ combined contribution to humankind throughout history hasn’t even amounted one whole pound! Who needs them?

Okay, well, maybe dads work to provide for their kids, read to them, help with homework, play catch, go camping, teach responsibility, give them a sense of values, protect them from dangers in society, help them toughen up and face adulthood—not to mention helping moms shoulder the burdens of parenthood through the years. But what does all that amount to, when you consider that, biologically speaking, they each contributed a measly three picograms of dna?

Only an intellectual could find cosmic wisdom in such niggling numbers. These are the kinds of dead-ends that human reasoning can lead to when we put blinders on and view everything in crudely material terms.

“If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw or turkey baster,” Professor Hampikian pontificates. “If all the men on Earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.”

There’s more: “Ultimately the question is, does ‘mankind’ really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis.”

It is truly a bizarre fantasy: a world populated entirely by women inseminating themselves with frozen and manufactured spermatozoa. The only drawback to Dr. Hampikian’s utopia, presumably, is that approximately half of the babies produced this way would be little boys. Little boys fated to grow up in a female-dominated world, bereft of purpose, their one contribution to society—their seed—practically nullified by science.

Really, what are we to make of this report? What does the Times mean by publishing it—except to fuel the already spectacularly successful effort to undermine traditional family?

“With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely,” the article says. A sad truth? Not as Professor Hampikian sees it. “Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.” Thus, in a single scholarly flourish, men are erased from the family altogether.

Trouble is, it’s a big lie. Studies that aren’t deliberately trying to prove the superfluity of men have shown time and again that fatherlessness hurts children. It is the number one predictor for a whole range of pathologies. Kids who grow up without fathers are far likelier to fail at school, commit violent crime, use drugs, get pregnant as teens, run away, and commit suicide. Furthermore, many more studies show that fathers fill a unique and special place in children’s lives. Kids tend to draw on Dad in particular to learn duty and responsibility, to build a personal drive for achievement, to gain emotional balance and stability, to grow in assertiveness and independence, to develop a sense of judgment, justice and fairness. Read “Teen Time With Dad Critically Important” on today’s front page.

The fact that there are women who manage to rear well-adjusted, healthy children by themselves is a credit to them—they’re doing a two-person job alone—but it can hardly be taken as proof that men are expendable.

It would be one thing if this were some dabbler venting on his personal blog. But this is a PhD who teaches biology in a public university, who is regularly consulted and published in sources like Scientific American, USA Today, Datelinenbc, npr and cnn, writing for the New York Times.

The reduction of child rearing to mere biology is fantastically stupid. The thinking behind this article could be easily dismissed—I’m sure most people would consider it extreme and ridiculous—except that, in truth, it is only a fringe version of what has become quite mainstream thinking about fathers.

Our culture simply has no clue what a man’s purpose is in society and within the family.

The problem today is hardly that men are overestimating their value to their families—it’s that too many are neglecting it. Too many think of themselves as little more than sperm donors, while they shirk their responsibilities as providers, protectors, educators, disciplinarians, leaders.

God created us male and female for a reason. It wasn’t an experiment or an accident. In His Word He explains why a man is so essential to the well-being of children and family. He intends a man to fill a specific role that resonates with profound spiritual meaning. If you want to know more, read “Fatherhood 101.” As Herbert Armstrong explains in Chapter Four of The Missing Dimension in Sex, even the process of human reproduction—including the man’s indispensable part—portray awesome spiritual realities that actually illuminate the gospel!

Intellectuals, having rejected that revealed knowledge, are left adrift in their own inexhaustible reasoning. The harder they think, the more they work themselves into ridiculous intellectual knots, trampling common sense, ignoring plain and beautiful realities. Even to the point of trying to erase half of humanity and pretending the other half could carry on just fine. Unbelievable.