|
Family Groups -Fathers - case for father custody
(available to download free from http://www.fathermag.com/news/3788-fathcustbook.shtml)
"Very large numbers of men,
ex-husbands who have lost everything in the
divorce court, sons of ex-husbands who see how their fathers
have been
displaced and made role less, bachelors confronting a sixty
percent divorce rate and the near certainly of anti-male discrimination
from judges are bewildered and angered by this betrayal of
the family by the legal system.
These males, whom society ought to encourage
to become providers for
families, are afraid of marriage, afraid that feminist propagandists
may be right in saying the nuclear family is obsolete. It
is obsolete if women are allowed to be promiscuous or to retain
custody of children rendered fatherless by their repudiation
of their marriage vows and to collect subsidization from males
they have married or had a one-night stand with.
It is obsolete if marriage is entered into ³in
contemplation of divorce,² as a
temporary suspension of promiscuity following which the wife
is privileged
to call it off, return to promiscuity, and still claim custody
of the
children. Such a wife has not given her husband a family,
she has loaned him
one, allowed him to fall in love with his children and then
taken them away
from him.
The ex-husband thus defrauded is under no obligation
to the ex-wife. His
obligation to his children is to rescue them from the female
kinship system
where the law places them, and this obligation is thwarted
by his financing
of their mother¹s legal kidnapping of them. His support
money is what is
making the nuclear family obsolete by promoting ³alternative
families²
matriline promoting the ³emerging white underclass,²
the female kinship
system and its pathology. The law is destroying his family
and compelling
him to renounce his role of family protector and to help in
this
destruction.
The psychic mechanisms essential to accomplishing
this destruction are the
guilt-trip, the Mutilated Beggar Argument, the instilling
in the father of
the notion that he is doing the right thing for his kids by
abandoning them
to the female kinship system: ³They are my children,²
he is supposed to be
thinking, ³and I love them and I can¹t abandon them.²
In fact he is
abandoning them.
He needs to have his consciousness raised so
that he can see this.
This consciousness-raising is the responsibility
of the fathers¹ rights
movement.
If enough fathers could be made to see that
the financing of women¹s
liberation is inflicting on society the most damaging of all
transformations
short of total destruction the alteration of the kinship system
they could
put a stop to it and restore sexual law-and-order and the
male role as head
of the family, custody of the children of divorce and the
abolition of
alimony and child support payments and an end to the ³illegitimacy
revolution² which increased the number of fatherless
children from 5.3
percent in 1960 to 30.1 percent in 1992 while reducing the
birth rate by
one-third. It would replace mothers¹ reliance on divorce
and government
assisted matriarchy with patriarchal marriage and the family.
***
³Most Americans,² says feminist Stephanie
Coontz, ³support the emergence of
alternative ways of organizing parenthood and marriage. They
don¹t want to
reestablish the supremacy of the male breadwinner model, don¹t
want to have
male overachievers or to define masculine and feminine roles
in any
monolithic way.²
Ms. Coontz sounds like Cosmopolitan, which has
been quoted: ³The woman we¹re profiling is an extraordinarily
sexually free human being² whose new bedroom expressiveness
constitutes a ³break with the old double standard.²
These women are the ³most Americans² Ms. Coontz
speaks of?those who want to get back to matriarchal promiscuity.
They are making patriarchy and the family
seem obsolete and making matriarchy seem modern and normative.
This
portentous change will continue until fathers realize the
threat posed by
the female kinship system and insist on the custody of their
children.
There is no comprehension by Ms. Coontz or at
Cosmopolitan or among
lawmakers and judges of how this female promiscuity attacks
the male role
and therefore removes the husband¹s economic responsibility
to the wife or
ex-wife, of how it removes both ³the male breadwinner
model,² and the
grounds for mother custody. ³I have met men,² says
Ms. Coontz,
who tell angry stories about having been tricked
by a woman into thinking it
was ³safe² to have sex. ³Why should I have
to pay child support?’² demanded
one. ³Doesn¹t that just encourage women to have
babies outside of marriage?²
It is, of course, totally unethical for a woman to assure
a man that sex is
³safe² when it isn¹t. But what is the alternative?
If a man could get off
the hook by claiming ³she told me it was safe,²
no unmarried father would
pay child support.
The alternative is patriarchy, based on chastity
and the double standard. No
unmarried father should pay child support which subsidizes
the alternative
to patriarchy and bribes women to be ³totally unethical.²
Society does not
need ³family diversity.² It needs patriarchal families.
³Family diversity²
is undermining society. If mothers can get support money from
men without
submitting to the regulation imposed by marriage, why should
they accept
regulation and give husbands a role and a family? This necessity
for males
to have a role and a family is why wives must submit to husbands.
To say
that an unwed mother is entitled to be supported is to deny
that chastity
gives a woman bargaining power. Removing the double standard
frightens
responsible men away from marriage.
³There are women you screw and women you
marry.² If all women are willing to
screw, there are none to marry. Feminists don¹t want
to understand this. Ms.
Coontz, for example, says ³The ?traditional¹ double
standard?may have led
more middle-class girls to delay sex at the end of the nineteenth
century
than today, but it also created higher proportions of young
female
prostitutes.²
Of course. These are the ³women you screw.²
Patriarchal society puts these
women to work as part of its program to regulate sexuality.
They are an
essential part of the system, but men do not marry such women
since it is
impossible to have a family with them.
Following World War II, when India became independent
of British rule, a
number of legal innovations were proposed, including the abolition
of
prostitution. Prime Minister Nehru was sympathetic to the
idea but was
dissuaded from supporting it by a group of learned Brahmins
who pointed out
to him that where there are no brothels every home becomes
a brothel. In
such a society there would be no rules regulating female sexuality:
women
would have, as Ms. Friedan puts it, an ³inalienable human
right to control
our own bodies.²
This is the essence of the female kinship system.
Her right is
inalienable regardless of the marriage contract. The meaningfulness
and
enforceability of that contract are essential to the patriarchal
system and
since the law now refuses to enforce it since the legal system
will not
support the family. it is necessary to remove all discretion
from that system
and make father custody automatic. The present situation,
with men having to
trust women and lawyers, is too threatening to men. Ms. Friedan
speaks for
millions of women when she says women have a right to disregard
the marriage
contract.
Judge Noland speaks for most judges when he
says human reproduction ought to
be modeled on that of cattle. It is no wonder so many men
are afraid of
marriage, no wonder so many men are afraid of judges willing
to do the
bidding of disloyal wives? judges whose weakness therefore
encourages wives
to be disloyal. No wonder the proportion of single adults
has skyrocketed
from 21% in 1970 to 41% in 1992, no wonder so many children
have no fathers.
In 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus¹s discovery of
America, it was the
fashion among parlor intellectuals to condemn the great explorer
for the bad
things he did, one of these being the introduction of prostitution
into
America.
Where sex was free, as it was in tribal America,
women were liberated and
prostitutes would have starved because they had nothing to
sell. Where sex
is free wives have nothing to sell either, so men have no
stable families
and no motivation to become high achievers. Women offer their
love ³freely
and joyously²?but only temporarily. This is the female
kinship system.
American men are slowly realizing that this
kinship system is now taking
over our own society, preventing men from having families,
preventing
prospective wives from having anything to sell, because the
marriages they
offer men (thanks to the legal system¹s betrayal of the
family) are based on
a contract whose fraudulence is becoming obvious. American
men have yet to
realize that there is only one solution to this breakdown
automatic father
custody.
Ms. Coontz thinks Charles Murray is cruel for
wanting to deny child support
to women who bear illegitimate children: Charles Murray of
the American
Enterprise Institute advocates denying child support to any
woman who bears
a baby out of wedlock. Girls, he declares, need to grow up
knowing that if
they want any legal claims whatsoever on the father of their
child, ³they
must marry.² Answering objections that this gives men
free reign (sic) to
engage in irresponsible sex, Murray offers a response straight
out of a
Dickens novel. A man who gets a woman pregnant, he observes,
³has
approximately the same causal responsibility² for her
condition ³as a slice
of chocolate cake has in determining whether a woman gains
weight.² It is
her responsibility, not the cake¹s, to resist temptation.²
It is her responsibility if she expects to gain
the rewards offered by the
patriarchal system. These rewards include the raising of her
standard of
living by 73 percent. Any diminution of these rewards weakens
marriage and
patriarchy (which, of course, Ms. Coontz thinks desirable).
Any offering of
similar rewards to women who bear children out of wedlock
likewise weakens
marriage and patriarchy.
It is a betrayal of chaste wives, including
the legal wife, or future legal
wife, of the father of the illegitimate child. It makes the
father less
likely to marry such a legal wife, another reason why women
ask, ³Where are
the men?² Murray tells women who want legal claims on
the father that ³they
must marry.² But with the divorce rate at sixty percent
and with more young
wives than young husbands committing adultery, marriage offers
too little to
fathers to induce them to accept the responsibilities of supporting
a
family.
It is becoming clear to very large numbers of
men that bearing the yoke and
drawing the plow for an ex-wife or providing (through marriage
which
obligates the husband to the wife but not the wife to the
husband) an
opportunity for a wife to ³make an amazing discovery
about herself² (that
adultery is fun and therefore the wife¹s right) is not
what they want from
marriage and that marriage, in fact, is becoming merely an
exciting way for
women to be promiscuous. There is no way the father can perform
his
obligation of safeguarding his family and his property without
society¹s
guarantee of father custody in the event of divorce.
Ms. Coontz¹s proposal to make the ex-husband
or ex-boyfriend pay reveals her
insincerity in proposing an ³alternative way of organizing
parenthood.² She
really wants wives or ex-wives to go back to being dependent
on men. She
just doesn¹t want men to take responsibility for anything
except subsidizing
Mom¹s sexual independence.
If, as feminists wish, patriarchy is to be done
away with, women must either
become truly economically independent (not dependent on support
money from
ex-husbands or on affirmative action benefits or on welfare)
or they must
give up custody of children in divorce cases. If patriarchy
is to be
preserved, female withdrawal of loyalty to husbands, to marriage,
to family,
needs to be answered not only by male withdrawal of economic
subsidization, the abolition of alimony and child support
payments but by a
switch to father custody.
Ms. Coontz quotes feminist Katha Pollitt¹s
rejection of the ³family values
crusade²: We¹d have to bring back the whole nineteenth
century: Restore the
cult of virginity and the double standard, ban birth control,
restrict
divorce, kick women out of decent jobs, force unwed pregnant
teen mothers to
put their babies up for adoption on pain of social death,
make
out-of-wedlock children legal nonpersons.
That¹s not going to happen.
A woman who rejects pre-marital chastity and
the double standard, who claims
the right to unrestricted divorce and the right to repudiate
her marriage
vows, to assert that legitimacy, and therefore fatherhood
are
meaningless such a woman is proclaiming her independence of
the patriarchal
system and telling men they may not share in her reproductive
life telling
them that she means to live under the female kinship system.
Fine. But she
is throwing away her bargaining power with men who do believe
in the
patriarchal system and she has no right to expect males to
subsidize her
sexual independence. She doesn¹t need a man.
A husband subsidizes a wife in order that he
may have a family, and women
who think as Katha Pollitt thinks must be deemed unmarriageable
unless men
have automatic custody of the offspring procreated with them
in marriage.
Ms. Pollitt evidently supposes that automatic mother custody
and its
corollary, automatic subsidization of ³her² children,
are unchangeable facts
of nature. She supposes that men must never play their Money
Card, never
demand custody of their children, never refuse to leave their
homes when Mom
orders them out.
Bringing back the nineteenth century would threaten
women with other things
that Ms. Pollitt supposes aren¹t going to happen, the
return of the sanctity
of motherhood, the Angel in the House, the feminine mystique,
the
role-playing, perhaps the ³iron masks² detested
by Ms. Friedan, in which
wives ³choke with impotent rage, the panicky play-acting
of the old roles,
with mutual contempt for our own duplicity and the ones we
dupe, the
bitterness, the rage underneath the ruffles, which we used
to take out on
ourselves and our kids and finally on the men in bed?.²
No self-respecting feminist would go back to
that sort of role-playing, so
Katha Pollitt thinks. But that sort of role-playing was what
formerly got
mothers custody of the kids ³wearing masks,² says
Ms. Friedan, ³so that they
wouldn¹t lose custody of their children.² That was
what enabled judges to
affect concern for what they really ignored, the best interests
of the
children who (it was convenient to say) needed the Angel in
the House, even
though that mother-headed house was eight times more likely
to make them
delinquent, five times more likely to drive them to suicide,
and so on. When
mothers give up that sort of role-playing they give up their
spurious claim
to moral superiority, signified by their pretended acceptance
of the double
standard and greater sexual and parental responsibility; they
give up the
pretense that their white wedding-gown betokened virginity.
They abandoned their pledge to bear only legitimate
children and their
pledge that their children will have fathers to provide them
with greater
benefits than single mothers can provide. Giving up these
pretenses and the
benefits contingent on them, Ms. Pollitt may suppose, is ³not
going to
happen² either, but they have already been forfeited
as society has entered
the era of the female kinship system by rejecting sexual regulation.
It remains only for men to realize what has
already happened and to stop
subsidizing women¹s withdrawal from the male kinship
system and dragging
³their² children with them. Women¹s marriage
vows and their acceptance of
what Katha Pollitt rejects as things ³not going to happen²
were formerly the
quid pro quo which motivated fathers to be providers for families.
Now
following the actual or threatened withdrawal of these things
men are
supposed to behave as though nothing had changed, as though
they still had
stable families.
A group of feminists came together in New York
in April, 1981 to talk about
what wasn¹t being talked about: abortion rights as the
key to women¹s sexual
freedom?.Women¹s autonomy must include the right to express
ourselves as
sexual beings?.[W]omen cannot control our own destinies unless
we can
control our own reproductive function. At the heart of the
New Right¹s
attack on abortion rights was a traditional definition of
women as
childbearers victims of nature rather than as autonomous human
beings with
the fundamental right to define our own sexuality?[with] the
guarantee of
total sexual freedom and autonomy for women.
The notions that underlie ³free abortion
on demand²?that women are not
slaves to their reproductive systems; that women have the
right to choose
when, how and with whom they wish to be sexual? these ideas,
the bedrock of
radical feminism, are still not truly accepted. As long as
women who choose
not to have children, or to live alone or with other women,
or to have a
variety of sexual partners as long as such women are stigmatized
as
³selfish² or ³narcissistic,² or ³perverted,²
no woman is really free.
Ms. Harvey¹s program seems to exclude men
from meaningful participation in
reproduction, but ³total sexual freedom and autonomy
for women² must include
a woman¹s right to enter a stable and enforceable contract
to share her
reproductive life with a man. It also includes, in Ms. Harvey¹s
thinking,
the right to walk out of this contract with the children in
her custody.
Which is it to be? She flaunts ³the first law of matriarchy:
women control
our own bodies. Such a woman is not marriageable.
No man must suppose himself obligated to subsidize
her or to allow her
custody of his children. Her program, ³the bedrock of
radical feminism,² is
incompatible with civilized society. If she chooses not to
have children,
fine. If she chooses to live alone or with other women, fine.
If she chooses
to have a variety of sexual partners, fine. But society must
condemn her if
she makes her children ³victims of nature² by trapping
them in the female
kinship system, and men must condemn and oppose a legal system
which permits her to do so and compels fathers to subsidize
them.
Ms. Harvey rebels against the patriarchal system
which allows men to share
in reproduction. But such sharing does not deny women ³the
right to choose
when, how and with whom they wish to be sexual²; it asks
them to make this
choice, but to make the choice meaningful and permanent, something
that men
and children can depend on. Ms. Harvey wishes to make the
choice over and
over again, promiscuously, irresponsibly, ³freely and
joyously.²
Her choice denies freedom and joy to the victims
of her sexual disloyalty,
the cuckolded or divorced husband and the children shepherded
into the
female kinship system. The wife¹s sexual loyalty is her
primary contribution
to marriage, as the husband¹s paycheck is his. Feminists
rejoice that
women¹s growing economic independence has reduced the
value of the husband¹s
paycheck to the point where wives can afford to withdraw their
sexual
loyalty (³control our own reproductive freedom²)?-thereby
making marriage
meaningless to the husband and placing the children at risk.
Worse than meaningless, for the husband is not
only deprived of his
children, his property and the role on which he hoped to build
his life, but
he must actually pay to have these losses inflicted upon himself
otherwise
his wife might be unable to afford the divorce, otherwise
the judge might
hesitate to give the mother custody of the children.
The father¹s role is destroyed by the society
which was supposed to create
it, since ³fatherhood is a social invention.²
Very large numbers of men ex-husbands who have
lost everything in the
divorce court, sons of ex-husbands who see how their fathers
have been
displaced and made roleless, bachelors confronting a sixty
percent divorce
rate and the near certainly of anti-male discrimination from
judges are
bewildered and angered by this betrayal of the family by the
legal system.
These males, whom society ought to encourage
to become providers for
families, are afraid of marriage, afraid that feminist propagandists
may be
right in saying the nuclear family is obsolete. It is obsolete
if women are
allowed to be promiscuous or to retain custody of children
rendered
fatherless by their repudiation of their marriage vows and
to collect
subsidization from males they have married or had a one-night
stand with. It
is obsolete if marriage is entered into ³in contemplation
of divorce,² as a
temporary suspension of promiscuity following which the wife
is privileged
to call it off, return to promiscuity, and still claim custody
of the
children. Such a wife has not given her husband a family,
she has loaned him
one, allowed him to fall in love with his children and then
taken them away
from him.
The ex-husband thus defrauded is under no obligation
to the ex-wife. His
obligation to his children is to rescue them from the female
kinship system
where the law places them, and this obligation is thwarted
by his financing
of their mother¹s legal kidnapping of them. His support
money is what is
making the nuclear family obsolete by promoting ³alternative
families²?
matrilines promoting the ³emerging white underclass,²
the female kinship
system and its pathology. The law is destroying his family
and compelling
him to renounce his role of family protector and to help in
this
destruction.
The psychic mechanisms essential to accomplishing
this destruction are the
guilt-trip, the Mutilated Beggar Argument, the instilling
in the father of
the notion that he is doing the right thing for his kids by
abandoning them
to the female kinship system: ³They are my children,²
he is supposed to be
thinking, ³and I love them and I can¹t abandon them.²
In fact he is
abandoning them.
He needs to have his consciousness raised so
that he can see this.
This consciousness-raising is the responsibility
of the fathers¹ rights
movement.
If enough fathers could be made to see that
the financing of women¹s
liberation is inflicting on society the most damaging of all
transformations
short of total destruction the alteration of the kinship system
they could
put a stop to it and restore sexual law-and-order and the
male role as head
of the family, custody of the children of divorce and the
abolition of
alimony and child support payments and an end to the ³illegitimacy
revolution² which increased the number of fatherless
children from 5.3
percent in 1960 to 30.1 percent in 1992 while reducing the
birth rate by
one-third. It would replace mothers¹ reliance on divorce
and government
assisted matriarchy with patriarchal marriage and the family.
As the mammal is the fetalization of the reptile
and retains some of the
generalized features the reptile lost when it specialized
out from the
amphibian; as the primates neotenically retain fetal freedoms
that the rest
of the mammals have lost; as man remains an infant longer
than the ape and,
to his infancy, adds another span of uncommitted freedom,
his specific
childhood; so this principle of paidomorphy is now seen to
be the power of
human evolution and the capacity and promise of its further
advance.
It is in childhood that fatherlessness does
its greatest damage. This is why
63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes, why
90 percent of
all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes,
and so forth
(see pages 12ff.).
Applied to specific human history, [Heard continues]
this insight makes
comprehensible the vast acceleration of the growth of consciousness
since
the rise of man. For as man has no instincts he holds together
and advances
through social heredity. Hence, the human advance has been
and must always
be through the reciprocity of the two parallel lines of man¹s
physical
heredity and his social heredity. The social heredity is the
die that stamps
its pattern of developing behavior on the matrix of the human
brain. While
the physical parents beget, bear, and rear increasingly impressionable,
teachable young, the begetters of the social heredity have
to keep
themselves young and open so that they may creatively accept
new data and
incorporate the new evidence into those new comprehensive
conceptions that
can feed the fresh, open minds of each generation.
³Among nature peoples,² says homosexual
Arthur Evans, ³sex is part of the
public religion and education of the tribes.Its purpose is
its own
pleasure.² That is why they are ³nature peoples²uncivilized.
The great
discovery of patriarchy was that sex could be put to work
to create
civilization by allowing men to be sociological fathers. Ms.
Harvey thinks,
with ³nature peoples² and Arthur Evans, that sex
ought to be wholly
recreational and irresponsible, and supposes (if she thinks
that far ahead)
that the children resulting from it, if they are not aborted,
must be
subsidized not by sociological fathers but by ex-husbands,
discarded
boyfriends or agencies of a feminist welfare state. Only thus
can women be
³autonomous human beings with the fundamental right to
define our own
sexuality.² The program implies a denial of freedom to
male sex partners,
who must submit to both exile from meaningful reproduction
and to
subsidizing women¹s promiscuity.
Fatherhood used to be a social creation. But
lawmakers and judges have
allowed themselves to be bullied by feminists into imagining
that the props
needed by fathers are oppressive to women and should be done
away with, thus
leaving men without the role security formerly provided by
the legal system.
This is the feminist ³progress² which Riane Eisler
and Katha Pollitt
celebrate. This is also why almost one-fifth of men between
ages 39 and 43
are bachelors, why forty percent of the young men studied
by Judith
Wallerstein are ³drifting, out of school, unemployed.²
Ms. Eisler writes of ³the attempt by a
growing number of women to gain
sexual independence: the power to freely choose how and with
whom to mate
and whether or not to have children the attempt by more and
more women to
reclaim the right to sexual pleasure and finally leave behind
the notion
(supported by both religious and secular dogmas) that women
who are sexually
active are ?bad women¹ or ?sluts¹² There have
always been such women (³women you screw²), but
men cannot hope to have families with them.
Their abandoning the role of loyal wives
necessitates men¹s withdrawing
their subsidization of them. Ms. Eisler supposes men will
continue to give
them their children, their name, their property, their homes,
and their
future income. The increasing numbers of ³sluts²
makes father custody
increasingly necessary. The recovery of men¹s motivation
to be reliable
providers without a guarantee of father custody is something
else which is
not going to happen.
|
