By David Warren, Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, June 15, 2008
Father's day can be a lonely and bitter time for those dads
who have been separated from their children.
Photograph by: Photo.com
For some tens of thousands of fathers, in your Canadian province alone, "Father's Day" is an especially bitter occasion. These are the men separated from their children by court order, many never to see them again. Each knows that his children have been subjected to vicious propaganda against him, that in many cases a child's own mother -- a woman the father once trusted enough to marry -- has turned the child's heart against him. (I know of many cases.)
It could be worse: for the father may have been replaced in his own household by a new man, or even a new woman. Someone who will never care for his children as he did, however badly he may have expressed it; who will at least be lacking the biological compulsion to look out for one's own flesh and blood.
In a further twist, whether or not mom has found a new squeeze, the ostracized dad may be making court-ordered spousal support payments sufficiently onerous to put him on a cot in some closet -- hounded by process servers, and under the threat of jail if his payments fall behind. (I know this experience at first hand.)
There is no cure for it. The legal papers make clear -- go to lengths to make clear -- that he will be hounded until the day he dies. Male suicide rates, not only in this province but across North America, are at their highest level since the depth of the Depression in the 1930s. They are four times higher than the female suicide rate, and while no government has the guts to gather statistics on this, it is an easy guess that family court disasters lie behind a large proportion of them.
The legacy of feminism has been to make us acutely aware of women's sensibilities, no matter how frivolous; and obtusely indifferent to men's, no matter how grave. Men are consistently demonized in the feminist propaganda, women consistently presented as victims, in defiance of the facts of human nature, which show the capacity for evil to be well-distributed. Under the pressure of feminist lobbying, our entire family law system has been skewed so that the man almost invariably pays, the woman almost invariably collects, regardless of the circumstances. Only in the most extraordinary cases is the man granted custody of the children, or even equal access.
The keystone of the feminist order is "domestic violence." Men are so universally presented as having "anger management issues," that even in the extreme case, where a woman has murdered her husband, the court will invite feminist "experts" to argue that the man must have deserved it. And the man in this scene is unable to defend his own posthumous reputation, for dead men tell no tales.
The statistics show domestic violence to be well-distributed between the sexes, although there are knots and wrinkles before we get to that result. For instance, men are actually more likely to physically bully and abuse women than vice versa (on the average, women are physically smaller). On the other hand, women are more likely to physically bully and abuse children and the elderly (who are smaller and weaker than they).
And there can be no justice, no approximation to justice, unless each charge is considered on its merits, free of malicious, "politically correct" ideology.
I hold no brief for men, or women. They are absolutely necessary to each other, and on their mutual sympathy the future of every society depends. Very few men or women are saints. By no means is any father, who has fallen afoul of, say, Ontario's Kafkaesque "Family Responsibility Office" entirely innocent. At the very least he exercised poor judgment in his selection of a mate.
But men are not exceptionally evil, nor women neither. Some of each are monsters, in their several ways.
All are subject to temptations, and our skewed family law has the effect of putting so many temptations in the way of women, that many fail to resist. Not because they are women, but because of skewed law, many women employ the dirty tactic of laying false charges that, under our present order, will immediately get them custody and whatever else they may
want -- with little risk of punishment, even if they are caught lying. This simply stands to reason.
Indeed, the removal of common sense from family law -- and its replacement, over the last two generations, with various feminist mantras -- has made this problem almost impossible to fix. For the debate is now inevitably over, "How much feminism is the right amount?"
Whereas, there is no "right amount" of feminism, if feminism has become a hateful ideology declaring that the interests of one class (women) take priority over the interests of another (men).
To those fathers who had the wisdom to marry good women, and who wake this morning to the joy reflected in the face of each beloved child: You have your reward, and it is very beautiful. Join us now in praying for all the others.
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