Cover Story II: Paternity Fight - Pols and activists argue over dads.

The National Fatherhood Initiative, an advocacy group that promotes responsible fatherhood and the importance of marriage, is running a series of public-service ads about the "nature of fatherhood": Male lions roar to protect their young from predators, penguin dads balance eggs on their feet in sub-zero temperatures, adult male elephants temper the delinquent behavior of their young bulls. "Just a reminder," conclude the slickly produced spots, "of how important it is for fathers to spend time with their children."

What these arresting, 30-second images from the animal kingdom say about the importance of fathers is driving feminists wild. The notion that children desperately need their dads threatens the feminists' core belief in women's autonomy. That's why NOW denounces the "dangerous policy" of paternal responsibility promoted by the ads. At a time when fatherhood is becoming respectable again-Al Gore recently attended a National Father hood Initiative conference, and James Earl Jones and Tiger Woods have appeared in the group's commercials-a battle continues to rage over what exactly fatherhood means.

The most embattled version of fatherhood is the traditional notion that children need dads who are married and living with them. Feminists (and, oddly enough, fathers'-rights groups) are promoting versions of fatherhood that undermine this traditional idea.

The feminists enjoy the notion of the Dispensable Dad, who is good for child-support payments, but not much else. A third of all children are born out of wedlock, and feminists support beefed-up government efforts to collect child support from these never-married dads. This financial help advances NOW's destructive goal of making single motherhood more viable. Increasing child support is also a favorite policy of federal and state governments; the hope is that absent fathers will increase their involvement with the offspring who receive their monthly checks.

But this hope is probably unrealistic. About half of single mothers were living with their child's father at the time they gave birth, but by the time the government shows up to try to squeeze child support from him, he is long gone and no longer interested in either mother or child.

One expert, Heritage Foundation welfare guru Robert Rector, holds out little hope for activating absent dads who have never paid child support and no longer have a relationship with their offspring's mother. Further, says Rector, "Collecting child support and encouraging a guy to stop by with a pair of tennis shoes from time to time won't appreciably help children who face all of the negative consequences of growing up in a single - mother household."

The absence of fathers caused by divorce has been the focus of another interest group active in the fatherhood wars-the growing fathers'- rights movement, which seeks to make marital breakups more father- friendly. These aggrieved divorced dads lobby for reforms in divorce laws, such as eliminating custodial preferences in favor of mothers. In an article in the June American Spectator sympathetic to the movement, Cathy Young faults "sexism against fathers" for the neglected plight of disenfranchised dads who want to be more involved in their children's lives.

Young rightly criticizes feminists for caricaturing divorced dads as abusive losers whose families are better off without them, but she-like the fathers'-rights movement-then swings too far in the other direction, by placing most of the responsibility for broken homes squarely on women. She points out that the "dirty little secret of the divorce debate is that two-thirds of all divorces involving children are initiated by mothers." She notes that wives often seek the end of a marriage even in the absence of "grave offenses" and concludes that men are less pro-divorce than women. But the fact that a woman is more likely to initiate a divorce tells us only that she is more likely to be unhappy in the marriage, and absolutely nothing about the cause of the unhappiness. Women's higher expectations for marriage no doubt have a lot to do with their unwillingness to be content with a crummy one (though both mothers and fathers should be more willing to put up with the disappointments and demands of marriage).

Regardless of who is most responsible for a divorce, one parent generally wants nothing more to do with the other, so the imposed joint-custody arrangements favored by the fathers'-rights movement are unworkable in most situations.

The idea of avoiding custody fights entirely-by getting and staying married for the well-being of the children-invites the full wrath of the feminists. NOW is currently promoting an article published last year in American Psychologist arguing that "neither mothers nor fathers are unique or essential." In "Deconstructing the Essential Father," two Yeshiva University professors maintain that children are perfectly fine as long as they have "parenting figures" of either sex, who need not be biologically related.

It's the institution of marriage that's being deconstructed by the researchers, who see the call for responsible, married fatherhood as a backlash to the gay-rights and feminist movements. Predictably, they favor policies that support the legitimacy of "diverse family structures." The unique masculine contribution of fathers is not merely dismissed as unimportant; the authors argue that a father's presence in the home may even impose costs, because "some fathers' consumption of family resources in terms of gambling, purchasing alcohol, cigarettes, or other nonessential commodities, actually increase[s] women's workload and stress level." Fathers, in other words, are a burden.

This perspective is mirrored in our political life. In contrast to the relentless efforts by government to collect support from absent fathers, and the energetic lobbying by divorced dads, there have been few policy attempts to strengthen married fatherhood. One such effort, federal legislation that would fund services for absent fathers, but also provide modest support for groups that promote marriage and responsible fatherhood, met with hysterical opposition from NOW; the feminists argued that the legislation would trap women in abusive relationships. Despite the opposition, the House approved the bill-the Fathers Count Act-by an overwhelming margin; a similar bill is pending in the Senate.

Some national politicians find feminist rhetoric irresistible. While Vice President Gore did mention the "M-word" at the National Fatherhood Initiative conference, he felt constrained to appease his feminist friends by stipulating that any group receiving federal money to promote fatherhood must include domestic -violence- prevention programs.

At the state level, one of the principal goals of the 1996 welfare- reform legislation-to discourage illegitimacy and promote marriage-has been largely ignored. Very few governors have been willing to talk about the importance of marriage. (George W. Bush in Texas and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas are notable exceptions.) And only Okla homa governor Frank Keating has proposed a plan to fund pro-marriage initiatives.

The future of American fatherhood depends on whether we can frankly acknowledge the need to reduce the number of fatherless homes. More politicians will have to find the courage to extol the importance of married fatherhood, or the domesticated species of fathers will be in greater danger of extinction than their furry counterparts in the wild, who never question "how important it is for fathers to spend time with their children."