Another chance to bash dad

Several years ago, CBS acknowledged Father's Day, as usual, on its folksy Sunday Morning show. Television critic John Leonard, who is anything but folksy, interviewed two young men about their deceased father.

Far from honouring the latter, though, the sons condemned him as a bad father. Maybe Mr. Leonard was exploiting an opportunity to make men think about what a good father might be. Or maybe he was doing so to make men feel ashamed of themselves.

No one can get into anyone else's mind, but anyone can draw conclusions from what people say or do. As an outspoken feminist, Mr. Leonard has focused for years primarily on women -- more specifically, on the ways in which men (including but not restricted to those who producetelevision shows and commercials) harm women.

Given the symbolic link between women and children, it should have surprised no one that Mr. Leonard would expand his focus on Father's Day to include the ways in which men harm children.

Consider the historical context of that episode. After two or three decades, popular culture had transformed public perceptions of fatherhood. The lineage of endearing-but-bumbling (or worse) fathers from Ozzie and Harriet to All in the Family, Home Improvement and The Simpsons had all but replaced the wise-father lineage from Father Knows Best to The Waltons and 7th Heaven.

During the 1980s (and continuing well into the 1990s), society went through a kind of convulsion, or mass hysteria, over what journalists and clinicians dubbed "recovered memory syndrome." Incest and other forms of molestation,