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Child-custody cases should be decided fairly

May 26, 2004 ~ 2:04 p.m.

My lady friend and long-time reader/fan myarms2yours recently responded to this entry, particularly to what I wrote concerning the British protest group, Fathers 4 Justice:

�It�s a shame how little men are allowed to decide what happens to their children in cases of abortion or the break-up of a relationship. The women take all, it seems. I sympathize completely with Mr. Davies and his Fathers 4 Justice.�

My friend responded, �I would have to agree with the fact that many fathers get the raw end of the deal in a divorce/single situation. However, I also think there are a larger number out there who get what's coming to them.�

That is true. My point in the entry that got her attention was just a small aside to the larger story, which was the flour bomb that a F4J member threw at Tony Blair during a House of Commons speech. Nevertheless, there are �dads� out there�fathers only in terms of biology�who don�t pay child support and are virtually absent from their children�s lives. If these are the sort of men that F4J harbors, in a vain attempt to win them �justice,� then I think the group has a lot to explain.

I do not give money to F4J, nor do I publicly or privately support them in any meaningful way. I just stated that I sympathize with them, because fathers who have been active and hard-working and loving toward their children quite often get a boot in the behind in child-custody cases simply for the crime of being male. This is a real phenomenon�a feminist victory (though the feminists themselves will never admit when they win) that has turned gender relationships upside-down. It�s not right.

I get a kick out of those who support feminism, who claim that they would be affronted by the subjugation of men and say that is as wrong as to the inequities that women battled for so long (and no denying that much is correct), and yet: They are pro-choice. If a man has a differing opinion as to the destruction of his baby�tough! It�s not your body, buster, he is told. So, you man, go home and cry for yourself and your unborn, and never-to-be-born child. We really don't care. When it comes to casual pre-marital sex, of course, both sexes are to blame. Both bore a responsibility to their own lives and that of any potential life their rash actions may have created, and both blew it.

But that�s another matter �

They should also, if they truly believe in perfect male-female equality, fight for that very equality in child-custody cases.

Firm, impartial court cases should, in an ideal world, reward the victors in individual child custody cases fairly. But, due to unwritten but very well understood feminist augmentations to the law concerning such cases, good fathers, even those who are demonstrably more fit to take care of their kid(s) than the mother, lose out.

If this is what F4J is fighting for, they are in the right. If they are just a cover for deadbeats, I will never have another good word to say about them.

And I will say this much�the law can be infuriatingly slack in targeting deadbeat dads for compensation for the women and children they ran out on. That is also something that needs correction and none too soon.

� M.E.M.

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