Ever since I read that appalling story highlighting the coming burden on China’s health-care system now that people aren’t starving to death anymore, I’ve grown attuned to news stories reporting on good news in such a way as to appear desperate to find some little nugget of bad news to highlight. Optimists can find the silver lining in the dark clouds; their opposites work in the media and academe.

Here’s the latest. USA Today reports on research that shows “Religious men, especially evangelical Protestants, are more involved and attentive husbands and fathers than men who are not religious.”

University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox found that

“evangelical Protestant men are more likely to expect their school-age children to tell them where they are at all times and more likely to hug and be affectionate toward their kids than religiously unaffiliated men. They also spend more time in youth activities with their kids.”

Great news, right? Well … nah, it can’t be. So USA Today finds some doofus at the University of California-Riverside to carp that “because some evangelical Protestant churches promote strict patriarchal values, they might do more harm than good to family structures” (emphasis added).