Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."
The “Father of our Country,” George Washington, was ironically not himself a father — not a biological one anyway. He was a stepfather and raised two of his step-grandchildren, one of whom was named after him. With his step-children/grandchildren and many nieces and nephews, he relished his large family and domestic life.
At 17, his stepdaughter Patsy Custis died of a seizure in his arms, and he never recovered from it. Since she was 2, he had brought her up. He was her father.
Five years ago, we welcomed a foster daughter, Zoe (not her real name), who was 4 and a half when she came to live with us. Fifteen minutes after coming into our home she tried to strangle our golden retriever. Things only got worse from there.
What had happened with Zoe’s biological mother was unspeakable, and Zoe had been severely and extremely detrimentally impacted by her abuse.
But what had not happened with her biological father, Mark (not his real name), was terribly damaging. He simply was not there, for any reason, at any time. His sole contribution, other than his sperm, was viewing her once in the newborn nursery and, unfortunately, signing his name on her birth certificate.
When Zoe was taken away from her mother, Mark was living in a condemned hotel room with his new girlfriend. The girlfriend had two older children, as well as a toddler and a baby by him, and was expecting another baby (his) in a few months.
As the stated goal of foster care is “reuniting the child with his or her biological family,”
Mark necessarily factored into Zoe’s foster care plan. Accordingly, she would now be spending two and a half hours with him, two or three times a week.
It is an untrue adage “there are no free lunches.”
As Mark did not work, he was available anytime to be picked up by an agency driver and driven to a restaurant for a long, free lunch with Zoe and her case worker. These bi- or triweekly lunch arrangements were more than amenable to him.
And they were absolutely heavenly to Zoe, who was uncontrollably jubilant upon returning from their outings. Her father, before a total stranger, was now “Daddy.”
Surely, though, wasn’t that better than returning from the mandated supervised visits with her mother, with Zoe invariably violent or hysterical?
No! Both parents were detrimental to Zoe’s mental health. To see her reeling from one extreme to the other was heartbreaking.
There is much, much more to this story. Every day Zoe was with us was both difficult and heartrending. As we discovered more about her past and how much help she would need to recover from it, we realized the inadequacy of the foster care system when it came to handling the tragic possibilities of parents who cannot or do not parent their children. We also learned first-hand of the heroes working in these programs: underpaid, overworked and yet somehow tireless.
Zoe’s story has a happy ending. After years of paperwork and hearings, she was adopted by a wonderful family. They are perfect for her, and she for them.
After leaving the “system,” she never saw her “father” again.
There is a desperate need for foster care in this country. The statistics are harrowing: Foster children average 8.3 moves between different homes before they age out of the system. Eighty percent of them exhibit mental health issues. More than one-fifth of the prison population has experienced foster care, and it factors majorly into every societal blight, from drug addiction to human trafficking. In the United States, 400,000 children are now in foster care, many of them homeless. Terrible circumstances, in critical need of attention and solutions.
And beneath it all is the crux of the problem: the essential need for parents to parent.
So, happy Father’s Day to fathers and step-fathers everywhere, who take their “job” seriously, who make it their mission to care for the children in their sphere, who show up for the umpteenth double-header or dentist appointment, bandage the neighbor kid’s knee, pay for camps and colleges, who take in foster children.
Happy Father’s Day as well to all the mentors and coaches, the teachers and leaders, who help along the way, nurturing and encouraging children, who inspire by setting a good example, who fill the gaps.
John F. Kennedy, our 35th president, took office 181 years after our first president. And the world changed dramatically. Yet, the truth of this quote by Kennedy never changes: “Children are the world’s most valuable resource, and our best hope for the future.”
Washington would certainly have agreed.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.