Tom Brady Contributes to the Moral Decay of America, and Other Nonsense

Maybe you’d forgotten about the freak-out some parents and media figures had when they made the shocking discovery that Tom Brady and Bridget Moynahan were having sex in a relationship outside of marriage. Well, Meredith O’Brien brings it all back with a post on the Herald‘s Mommy Blog.

I got to have an awkward, torturous conversation, highlighted by pretzel-like contortions at the dinner table last night when my kids asked me how Patriots quarterback Tom Brady (whose jersey they have, a poster of whom decorates my 6-year-old son Casey’s wall) can become a father without being married to the mommy. . . .

“Um . . . Well . . . It’s complicated. He’ll be the dad, but he won’t live with the baby . . . What’s that? HOW did they make the baby? Well, Casey, they just did. It takes a mommy and a daddy to make a baby together . . . Why did they make the baby? I don’t know. . . .”

It’s the “he’s a public figure that children admire so he should live a chaste and sober life” argument. Otherwise known as the Helen Lovejoy, “Won’t someone think of the children!” argument. How can Brady possibly go to sleep at night with all that guilt?

He can sleep easy because it’s not Brady’s job to live a morally impeccable life. If O’Brien’s son idolizes Brady it’s probably because he throws footballs well, not because he lives according to his mother’s moral code. Not to mention that O’Brien may be doing her son a disservice by not giving him age-appropriate information about the biology of how babies are made.

Commenters at Universal Hub are also arguing about whether O’Brien should lighten up or whether she’s correct to blame Brady and other celebrities having babies out of wedlock for the difficult conversations parents are having with their kids. Now that No. 12 is a parent himself, maybe we should ask him how he feels?