I’m resisting (almost) the temptation to call this post “Wade” in the Water, as it features the National Fatherhood INitiative, now I’m in HHS, oops now I’m NOT” guy helping African Americans talk about themselves. This is obviously a grassroots movement.

It would be filed next to “Wade Horn jumps ship,” so the water analogy is maybe appropriate.

(See below)

Bio Sketches of Presenters from the “Connecting Marriage Research to Practice Conference”

Presented by the Administration for Children and Families and held at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Friday Center

September 12–14, 2006

Wade Horn—Since his 2001 unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate as the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Wade F. Horn has provided strategic leadership for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), overseeing a $47 billion budget and 65 programs that serve vulnerable children, youth and families. #

Among Dr. Horn’s achievements in implementing President George W. Bush’s policy initiatives include increasing the effectiveness of Head Start and early childhood education programs, promoting positive youth development and building partnerships with community and faith-based organizations in delivering social services to the poor.

He has also advanced the President’s agenda for reauthorizing the bipartisan 1996 welfare reform legislation by incorporating responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage services into the broad array of ACF programs. Also under his watch, ACF launched a mentoring program for children of incarcerated parents and a public awareness campaign to help rescue and restore victims of human trafficking.

Most recently, Dr. Horn has helped to spearhead the Department’s strategic response to the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, ensuring the continued delivery of human services to displaced Gulf Region families. #

Dr. Horn’s results-oriented leadership as a federal official reflects a life-long commitment to the well-being of children, which he has demonstrated as a husband, father, child psychologist, college professor and public policy expert. Dr. Horn was president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, where he pursued a creative strategy using public awareness campaigns, research findings and conferences to encourage and support involved, committed and responsible fatherhood. He also was an adjunct professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an affiliate scholar of the Hudson Institute. #

In addition to having published numerous articles, essays and books, Dr. Horn has served on national panels, boards and commissions including the National Commission on Children, the National Commission on Childhood Disability and the U.S. Advisory Board on Welfare Indicators. But among his many accomplishments, Dr. Horn is most proud of his marriage since 1977 to his wife, Claudia, and his two grown daughters, Christen and Caroline.

Less than a year later,

this news on ALTERNET, a site concerned about civil liberties issues, or so it says:

The Bush administration’s point man for conservative — and often morality-driven — social policy, such as abstinence-only sex education, has resigned. But only time will tell whether his programs remain federal policy.

May 31, 2007 |

Last month’s resignation of Wade Horn, former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and point man for conservative social policy, came just as support was crumbling and mistrust mounting for a costly and, many would argue, unsuccessful initiative — abstinence education.

“At this point we’ve spent more than a billion dollars on this program that was never proven in the first place,” said Heather Boonstra, public policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization specializing in reproductive health issues.

Horn left government in early April for a private-sector position at Deloitte Consulting LLP after heading the Administration for Children andFamilies (ACF), a division of HHS. There, Horn shepherded a host of contentious initiatives, for example: marriage promotion for poor women as an anti-poverty strategy, reduced access to higher education for welfare recipients, standardized testing of low-income preschoolers, programs to strengthen fatherhood by pushing matrimony and relationship skills, and chastity for 19- to 29-year-olds.

Many of these policies had come under fire over the years from members of Congress, feminists and advocates of low-income families — increasingly so in Horn’s final months at HHS. But it was Horn’s approach to sex education, with its prime emphasis on virtue, that drew the most opposition and suffered the most discrediting setbacks in the form of political defection and unfavorable research findings.

Did he miss a step after jumping ship? Probably not. After all, when it says in Genesis, “go forth and multiply,” if this cannot be down by sowing one’s biological wild oats (not if one is going to practice what one preaches re: marriage, and abstinence outside of it…), one can certainly “father” and “found” a lot of replicating fatherhood organizations, and set a system in place that they learn how to clone themselves, interbreeding with federal agencies, nonprofits, and faith-based institutions.

That’s why I say, we’re still “Wading in the Water” over this issue, only it ain’t water.

Perhaps he’d do better to think about more arts in the schools, giving kids something better to do than, well, fail to be ‘ABSTINENT” inbetween classes or after school. Butg how can we do that with the millions going to indoctrination about sex (and how not to engage in it) and marriage (and how to stay married even if it “kills” you or whatever things you were inspired to do outside the home)

Great Performances: Free To Dance – Biographies – Alvin Ailey