The Feminist Anti-Kid Crusade
By CareyRoberts Posted in User Blogs — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The rad-fems are at it again -- this time they've set their sights on children.Call it one of those simple yet profound truths: only a father can help a boy become a man. And only a daddie can teach a girl about healthy male-female relationships.
Both dads and moms are unique and special. Maybe that's why dads love to mix it up with rough-and-tumble play. Perhaps it's why fathers teach kids a thing or two about risk-taking. And no doubt it has something to do with that tough love thing.
Countless studies point to the same conclusion: kids with hands-on dads do better in school, in the community, and in life. I could almost write a book about it - and fortunately, someone already has: www.fatherhood.org/fatherfacts.asp .
But there's a somber side to this story. Kids who lose their father are two to three times more likely to get in trouble with the law and are more likely to suffer from a broad array of social pathologies.
The saga can be traced back to the mid-1960s when marriage was portrayed as an oppressive institution and no-fault divorce laws arrived on the scene. Within 10 years, the U.S. divorce rate almost doubled.
And what happened to the million-or-so kids whose parents divorced each year? Operating under the "tender years doctrine," family courts almost always awarded custody of the youngsters to mothers.
But the tender years apple cart was upset in 1971. That year the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Reed v. Reed case that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents courts from basing opinions on sex. Before long, gender-neutral custody statutes had replaced maternal preference standards in almost every state.
Despite those changes in the law, judicial bias persisted. In 1994, mothers were awarded custody in 85% of cases. Eight years later, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, that number remained unchanged. [www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p60-217.pdf]
Keep in mind, every time a father is relegated to the status of an every-other-weekend visitor, it's the children who lose out. It's those same kids who end up as social misfits and statistics in your newspaper police report.
So children's rights advocates began to push for laws based on a presumption of joint physical custody.
Not only is joint custody firmly rooted in the notion of gender equality, it's also ideal for kids. As Dr. Joan Kelly, former president of the Academy of Family Mediators concluded, shared parenting "is a desirable outcome which clearly is in the best interests of children and families." [www.fatherseqrts.org/determin%20custody] By 1991, over 40 states had shared parenting laws in place.
But the M.O.M.s - Mothers Opposed to Men - were not going to remain silent. In 1996 the National Organization for Women passed a resolution that began with this chestnut: "many judges and attorneys are still biased against women, and fathers are awarded custody 70% of the time when they seek it." [www.now.org/organization/conference/1996/resoluti.html]
So there you have it - the fact that mothers were winning custody 85% of the time was proof of widespread anti-female bias in the legal system.
The M.O.M.s then proceeded to do everything in their power to throw dirt on the joint custody idea. But nobody would listen to them. In fact powerful politicos - Republicans and Democrats alike - began to speak out on the importance of fatherhood.
So three years ago the M.O.M. Squad met at tiny Siena College in upstate New York to plot their next move. This time they decided to drag the domestic violence boogeyman out of the closet. [www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2006/0222roberts.html]
Soon the M.O.M.s were cranking out red-meat claims like, "In custody cases where the mother alleges battery by the father, the father is awarded custody two-thirds of the time." That shrill allegation made its way into the recent PBS fake-umentary, Breaking the Silence.
But once again, the M.O.M.s were blowing smoke. [www.fathersandfamilies.org/NEWS/BTSResearchCritiqueWithComments.pdf]
Despite the fact that kids with involved dads do better, regardless of all the joint custody laws, and in spite of the laughable antics of the M.O.M. brigade, mothers continue to be favored in custody decisions by a 7 to 1 margin.
All this, of course, is done in the name of the "best interests of the child."
Family researcher Judith Wallerstein once lamented, "I have been deeply struck by the distress children of every age suffer at losing their fathers." Maybe we should all begin by listening to the voices of the little ones.
the kids' world that is, can be practically erased from the lives of the ones they love and cherish most. Not only are kids in fatherless homes more likely to fail academically and socially, they are also more likely to suffer abuse at the hands of strangers, commit suicide, or end up divorced as adults. If mothers in some dingy, paganized corner of the Third World were being forced to live away from their children, the United Nations would have set up a fund and sent in the Blue Helmets decades ago.
Also at work in the de-fathering of America is the statistic of women filing for divorce in about 85% of cases involving kids. Before we shake our heads at one more of the many scourges liberalism has unleashed on American culture, remember that it was governor Ronald Reagan who signed the nations's first No Fault divorce bill, opening the flood gates of single parenthood and fatherlessness for an entire generation of kids. As noble as the Chivalry impulse may be, it plays right into the hands of feminist victimologists - manhaters, the whole lot. They have successfully portrayed husbands as potential abusers, young men as potential rapists, and little boys as nothing more than defective girls. The soldier? To them, he is a monster. And they control our schools. Where does this put us in a generation or so if left unchecked? Think France.
G. K. Chesterton called families "little nations that grow their own citizens." The conquering of the family by liberalism and secularism is a de facto conquering of nations. Islamo-terrorism is simply one more ideological pathogen invading the weakened immune system of Western culture. It's an ugly sore - of a kind with abortion-on-demand, gay seperatism, NAMBLA, and animal rights. It's not that we can't beat these things back into the caves from whence they crept... it's that we've lost the will to do so.
One more quote from G. K. Chesterton - "When you stop believing in God, you'll believe in anything."
"I have been deeply struck by the distress children of every age suffer at losing their fathers."
This is quite a problem. Wouldn't it make more sense, from the feminist point of view, to simply fix our oppressive, patriarchal society so that children can be free from the unnatural bond that their fathers have on them?