By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

Some days, I find myself thinking about the conversations we never expect to have in public. Georgia’s legitimation law is one of them. Those discussions usually take place in courthouse hallways between attorneys and fathers who are just beginning to understand how fragile their connection to their own child can be. But right now, the internet is giving this law a lot of attention — due to its potential impact on celebrities, including Cardi B, Offset, and Stefon Diggs. 

As everyone scrolls, jokes, and speculates, I’m pulled somewhere else entirely: into the quiet places where this law has already rewritten the stories of men whose names will never trend, even though their pain is just as real.

Here’s one example. The Fathers Incorporated (FI) team once sat on a bench outside a courtroom in Clayton County with a father who kept staring at the floor in disbelief. He loved his son and had raised him from the first week. He knew the smell of his hair after a nap and carried his photograph on his phone. In one motion, however, due to Georgia’s legitimation law, the court told him he was no one to that child. 

He found out that here in Georgia, biology is not the door that opens fatherhood: a legal process is. His voice cracked when he said he had no idea, and his hands trembled the way men’s hands do when the world has shaken part of their foundation loose.

That memory sits beside the current moment, where a newborn child has entered the world to Cardi B and Stefon Diggs, while Cardi remains legally married to Offset. The headlines keep repeating “estranged,” “separated,” and “filed for divorce,” as if words and emotional distance decide everything. But the law does not measure separation by silence, disappointment or the number of months two people have lived apart. The law defines marriage by whether it has been dissolved or not. Even if hearts left years ago, paperwork and process remain. And when a child is born in that space, the state steps in with assumptions older than the families getting tangled up in them.

People online are stunned to hear that in Georgia, when a married woman gives birth, her husband stands as the legal father, even if everyone knows he is not the biological one. It feels ancient, like something carried forward from a time when children automatically followed the marriage, not the DNA. The law recognizes husbands over biology. 

A man can help create a child, love that child, support that child, and still be legally invisible until he files for legitimation. 

This shocks people who have never seen this Georgia law up close, but it is the framework fathers here encounter again and again. Those of us who work in this space watch it cut across families every week.

The momentary celebrity spotlight magnifies what everyday fathers have lived quietly for generations. If Stefon Diggs is indeed the biological father, and if Georgia law applies to this child, Diggs will have to walk through a legitimation process to be recognized legally. If the child was born during Cardi’s still-intact marriage to Offset, then Offset stands in that first legal position, even if it doesn’t match the reality of the relationships or the science. (Learn more in these FAQs on legitimation in Georgia.)

Right now, millions of people are debating this on social media, learning the word “legitimation” in the same breath they’re laughing at Offset’s deleted “My kid lol” post. But there’s nothing funny about the weight this law carries for fathers who do not have a press team or a lawyer on speed dial. For them, this isn’t gossip. It’s Tuesday.

The legal framework for Georgia families shapes who appears on a birth certificate, who can make medical decisions, who can pick a child up from school, who has custody rights, and who can pass down insurance, pensions, and even their name. And when the law and the biology tell two different stories, the child becomes the one living in the space between.

I think about the men who come through FI and our Gentle Warriors Academy. Some of them discover legitimation only after a relationship ends. Some believed signing the birth certificate was enough. Some never learned the language of the law because they were too busy learning how to be good fathers. 

No matter how the state defines fatherhood, these men have already been doing it.

The look that washes across men’s faces when they hear for the first time that they must legitimate their child in order to be recognized as a father is one I wish more people could see before they tweet a joke about a celebrity’s baby. It’s disbelief. It’s fear. It’s a fracture in the sense of belonging. 

This moment with Cardi, Offset, and Diggs is a classroom. It forces us to look more closely at legitimation as an unjust system we’ve accepted as normal. It reminds us that laws built in older eras may not fit today’s realities. It exposes how little the public understands about what it takes for an unmarried biological father to gain rights in Georgia. And it gives us a chance — right now, in the middle of the noise — to start educating the thousands of fathers who may be quietly living some version of this story.

Georgia parents need clear guidance on legitimation:

• If you are unmarried when your child is born, legitimation is the only path to legal rights for the father (not a birth certificate, not a child support order, not even paternity established through DNA).
• If the mother is married to someone else when the child is born, her husband stands in the legal father’s role until a biological father petitions a court for his rights.
• If you believe you are the biological father, you must take action, not just wait for life to sort itself out.
• If you assume love alone is enough, the law may disagree.

None of this is just about fathers. It is about children whose lives are shaped by whether the adults around them understand the legal landscape. Their sense of identity, stability, and belonging rests on decisions made in courtrooms they will never see. When the law misaligns with lived reality, they are the ones who carry the consequences.

This is why FI continues to stand in the gap, assisting fathers with the process and advocating for legitimation reform. The fathers we work with do not have the luxury of misunderstanding. They cannot afford to wait for clarity. They want to be there. They want to show up, and they love deeply. But they also live within systems that require more than heart — they require action (legal action).

The Cardi-Offset-Diggs uproar may fade from the timeline in a few days, but the lesson it exposes cannot. Georgia’s legitimation laws deserve scrutiny, public awareness, and modernization. The state must invest in educating families, not just in moments of crisis, but long before a child’s identity becomes a question on a legal form.

A newborn child has just arrived into a situation that most of the world is watching with fascination, confusion, and debate. But behind that story are countless fathers who have walked the same path with no audience and no spotlight. Their stories matter just as much. Their right to be recognized matters. And the children who depend on them deserve a system that reflects the families they are growing up in, not the ones imagined when these laws were first written.

If ever there was a time to lift legitimation into the center of the public conversation. It’s a reminder for every father: Your presence is powerful, but in Georgia, your paperwork must match your love. 

Let’s make sure every father knows that. 

Let’s make sure the laws honor that. 

And let’s do the work so that children never have to navigate the gap between the man who raised them and the man the state says is theirs.

Kenneth Braswell is a nationally recognized leader in the responsible fatherhood movement, storyteller, and visionary advocate for fathers and families. As CEO of Fathers Incorporated (www.fathersincorporated.com) and Director of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, he has spent over 31 years changing narratives, shaping policy, and empowering fathers across the country. His award-winning work spans media, federal engagement, grassroots mobilization, and national thought leadership—amplifying the voices of men, building bridges between systems and communities, and centering the transformative power of fatherhood in the pursuit of family well-being.