A good father does these basic things: provides for his family, protects his family, and gives spiritual and moral guidance.

Legislators in Kansas, Arizona and 23 other states who are properly determined to protect religious freedom can begin by asking themselves: Does any religious conviction justify denying lesbians and gays a basic legal promise of non-discrimination in hiring, public accommodations, and housing? Surely the answer to this question is no. Correcting that inequity would begin the process of recognizing that both sides - gay couples and religious objectors - have rights and that reasonable accommodation is possible only when both sides have something to gain.

More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.

We would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.

Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as close and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.

A good father does these basic things: provides for his family, protects his family, and gives spiritual and moral guidance.

To recover the fatherhood idea, we must fashion a new cultural story of fatherhood. The moral of today's story is that fatherhoodis superfluous. The moral of the new story must be that fatherhood is essential.