Virginia
July 1st 03, 03:41 PM
Only 25% of first marriages fail. It's that 25%'s constant remarrying
and divorcing that raises the overall divorce rate to 50% of all
marriages (which includes 1st 2nd 3rdetc marriages all together).
In the last ten years we've seen a decrease in first mariage divorces
from 30%-25% and an increase in SAHP in couples with young children.
Dave wrote:
> Articles on what is the reality of divorce and child support are a rare find
> these days. Stephen Baskerville nails it right on the head with this
> article.
>
> --------------------------
> Divorce as a Revolution
> Salisbury Review
> June 21, 2003
> by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
>
> For some thirty years now a quiet revolution has been waged throughout the
> Western world. Most people are now familiar with the social consequences of
> the divorce explosion: the growth of single-parent homes and massive
> increase in fatherless children. The Pandora's box of social problems this
> has released has also reached general awareness. Virtually every major
> personal and social pathology can be traced to fatherlessness more than to
> any other single factor: violent crime, substance abuse, unwed pregnancy,
> truancy, suicide, and more. Fatherlessness far surpasses both poverty and
> race as a predictor of social deviance.
> These problems are alarming enough in themselves. What is seldom appreciated
> is that they are also responsible for a vast expansion in the power and
> reach of the state. In fact, so is divorce itself. In contrast to its social
> fallout, the political consequences of divorce are hardly understood at all,
> yet they may ultimately be the most destructive.
>
> The result of three decades of unrestrained divorce is that huge numbers of
> people - many of them government officials - now have a vested professional
> and financial interest in encouraging it. Divorce today is not simply a
> phenomenon; it is a regime - a vast bureaucratic empire that permeates
> national and local governments, with hangers-on in the private sector. In
> the United States divorce and custody comprise over half of civil
> litigation, constituting the cash cow of the judiciary and bringing
> employment and earnings to a host of public and private officials, including
> judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, mediators, counsellors, social workers,
> child support enforcement agents, and others.
>
> This growth industry derives from the impact of divorce on children. The div
> orce revolution has spawned a public-private industrial complex of legal,
> social service, and psychotherapeutic professionals devoted to the problems
> of children, and especially children in single-parent homes. Many are women
> with feminist leanings. Whatever pieties they may voice about the plight of
> fatherless, poor, and violent children, the fact remains that these
> practitioners have a vested interest in creating as many such children as
> possible. The way to do it is to remove the fathers.
>
> It is commonplace today that fathers are disadvantaged in divorce courts
> everywhere when it comes to child custody. In today's political jargon we
> attribute this to 'discrimination' and 'gender bias'. But this does not
> convey the half of it. Divorce courts and their huge entourage of personnel
> depend for their existence on broken, single-parent homes. The first
> principle of family court is therefore: remove the father. So long as
> fathers remain with their families, the divorce practitioners earn nothing.
> This is why the first thing a family court does when it summons a father on
> a divorce petition - even if he has done nothing wrong and not agreed to the
> divorce - is to strip him of custody of his children. While mothers also
> fall afoul of divorce courts, fathers are their principal rivals.
>
> Once the father is eliminated, the state functionally replaces him as
> protector and provider. By removing the father, the state also creates a
> host of problems for itself to solve: child poverty, child abuse, juvenile
> crime, and other problems associated with single-parent homes. In this way,
> the divorce machinery is self-perpetuating and self-expanding. Involuntary
> divorce is a marvelous tool that allows for the infinite expansion of
> government power.
>
> No-fault divorce is the middle-class equivalent of public assistance,
> creating single-parent homes among the affluent as welfare did among the
> poor. In the United States, where the trend began, all the major
> institutions of the divorce industry were originally created as ancillary to
> welfare: juvenile/family courts, child support enforcement, child protection
> services. No-fault divorce extended these 'services' to the middle class
> because that was where the money was, and with it political power.
>
> Like welfare, divorce involving children is almost wholly female-driven.
> Though governments invariably claim that fathers 'abandon' their children,
> there is no evidence this is true, nor even that fathers agree to most
> divorces. Cautious scholars like Sanford Braver of Arizona State University
> consistently find that at least two-thirds of divorces are filed by women,
> usually with no legal grounds. Yet lawyers and feminists report much higher
> proportions. Shere Hite, the popular researcher on female sexuality, found
> 'ninety-one percent of women who have divorced say they made the decision to
> divorce, not their husbands.'
>
> This is hardly surprising, given the almost irresistible emotional and
> financial incentives the industry offers mothers to divorce, including
> automatic custody plus windfall child support and other financial rewards,
> regardless of any fault on their part. A Canadian/American research team
> found that 'who gets the children is by far the most important component in
> deciding who files for divorce.' What we call 'divorce' has in effect become
> a kind of legalised parental kidnapping.
>
> Once the father loses custody, he becomes in many ways an outlaw and subject
> to plunder by a variety of officials. His contact with his own children
> becomes criminalised in that he can be arrested if he tries to see them
> outside of authorised times and places. Unlike anyone else, he can be
> arrested for running into his children in a public place such as the zoo or
> church. In the United States fathers are arrested for telephoning their
> children when they are not authorised or for sending them birthday cards.
> Fathers are routinely summoned to court and subjected to questioning about
> their private lives. Their personal papers, bank accounts, and homes must be
> opened and surrendered to government officials. Anything a father has said
> to his spouse or children can be used against him in court. His personal
> habits, movements, conversations, purchases, and his relationship with his
> own children are all subject to inquiry and control by the court.
>
> Despite prohibitions on incarceration for debt, a father can be jailed
> without trial for failure to pay not only child support but the fees of
> lawyers and psychotherapists he has not hired. A judge can summon a legally
> unimpeachable citizen who is minding his own business and order him to turn
> over his earnings or go to jail.
>
> As the logic of involuntary divorce plays itself out, divorce is forced on
> not only one parent but both. Mothers are not only enticed into divorce with
> financial incentives, in other words; they are being pressured into it by
> threats against their children. Last year, Heidi Howard was ordered by the
> Massachusetts Department of Social Services to divorce her husband or lose
> her children, although authorities acknowledged neither parent had been
> violent. When she refused, the social workers seized her children and
> attempted to terminate the couple's parental rights. Massachusetts News
> reporter Nev Moore says such cases are common in Massachusetts.
>
> Family law is now criminalising rights as basic as free speech and freedom
> of the press. In many jurisdictions it is a crime to criticise family court
> judges or otherwise discuss family law cases publicly. Under the pretext of
> 'family privacy', parents are gagged from publicly disclosing how government
> officials have seized control of their children. In Australia it is a crime
> for a litigant to speak publicly concerning family courts, even without
> mentioning specific cases.
>
> In Australia, the US, and Britain, family courts have closed web sites
> operated by fathers' groups. Britain, Australia, and Canada have all
> resurrected archaic laws prohibiting the criticism of judges in order to
> prosecute fathers' groups. In the United States judges cannot be sued, but
> they can sue citizens who criticise them. The confiscation of property can
> also be used to criminalise political opinions. Following his testimony to
> the US Congress critical of the family courts, Jim Wagner of the Georgia
> Council for Children's Rights was stripped of custody of his two children
> and ordered to pay $6,000 in the fees of attorneys he had not hired. When he
> could not pay, he was arrested.
>
> The swelling hysteria over 'domestic violence' appears fomented largely for
> similar ends. 'All of this domestic violence industry is about trying to
> take children away from their fathers,' writes Irish Times columnist John
> Waters. 'When they've taken away the fathers, they'll take away the mothers.
> ' Donna Laframboise of Canada's National Post investigated battered women's
> shelters and concluded they constituted 'one stop divorce shops', whose
> purpose was not to protect women but to promote divorce. These shelters,
> often federally funded, issue affidavits against fathers sight-unseen that
> are accepted without corroborating evidence by judges to justify removing
> their children. Special domestic violence courts in Canada can now remove
> fathers from their homes and seize their houses on a mere allegation of
> domestic violence.
>
> Divorce, not violence, is also behind the explosion of restraining orders,
> which are routinely issued without evidence of wrongdoing, separating
> fathers from their children and homes. Almost 90% of judicial magistrates in
> New South Wales acknowledged that protective orders were used in divorce -
> often on the advice of a solicitor - to deprive fathers of access to their
> children. Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Women's Bar
> Association, writes that restraining orders are doled out 'like candy.'
> 'Everyone knows that restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to
> virtually all who apply,' and 'the facts have become irrelevant,' she
> reports.
>
> Fathers are further criminalised through child-support burdens, which
> constitute the financial fuel of the divorce machinery, underwriting
> unilateral divorce and giving everyone involved further incentives to remove
> children from their fathers. Government claims of unpaid child support
> constitute one of the most dishonest and destructive hoaxes ever foisted on
> the public. In a US government-funded study, Sanford Braver discovered that
> most fathers pay fully and on time and that 'estimated' arrearages are
> derived not from official records but from surveys of mothers. Braver's
> findings have never been refuted by any official or scholar. Yet ever-more
> draconian 'crackdowns' and arrests continue.
>
> Last summer Liberty magazine published documentary evidence that 'deadbeat
> dads' are largely the creation of civil servants and law-enforcement agents
> with an interest in giving themselves criminals to prosecute. In most
> jurisdictions, child support guidelines are set by enforcement personnel,
> the equivalent of the police making the laws. These officials can separate
> children from their fathers, impose impossible child support obligations,
> and then jail fathers who inevitably fail to pay.
>
> Child support trials operate on a presumption of guilt, where 'the burden of
> proof may be shifted to the defendant,' according to the US National
> Conference of State Legislatures, which favours aggressive prosecutions.
> Contrary to Common Law and the US Constitution, courts have ruled that 'not
> all child-support contempt proceedings classified as criminal are entitled
> to a jury trial,' and 'even indigent obligors are not necessarily entitled
> to a lawyer.' Thus impoverished parents who lose their children through
> literally 'no fault' of their own are the only defendants who must prove
> their innocence without counsel and without a jury of their peers.
>
> Cases like Darrin White of British Columbia are the result. With no evidence
> of wrongdoing, White was denied all contact with his children, evicted from
> his home, and ordered to pay more than twice his income as child and spousal
> support, plus court costs for a divorce he never agreed to. White hanged
> himself from a tree. 'There is nothing unusual about this judgement,' said a
> British Columbia Supreme Court Judge, who pointed out that the judge applied
> standard support guidelines.
>
> Fathers driven to suicide by family courts are acknowledged by officials in
> Canada, Australia, and Britain. A suicide epidemic has been documented by
> Augustine Kposowa of the University of California in the Journal of
> Epidemiology and Community Health. Kposowa attributes his finding directly
> to family court judgements, though media reports of his study emphasised
> fathers' lack of 'support networks'.
>
> Why is so little opposition heard? Though the conservative media are waking
> up, the silence of conservative politicians is deafening, given that every
> prophecy about the dangers of judicial activism, bureaucratic
> aggrandizement, and ideological extremism is vindicated in the war on
> fathers. What is perhaps most diabolical about the divorce industry is its
> ability to co-opt so many people, including its critics. By creating
> problems to be solved - and then dispensing government money to solve them -
> the machine gives everyone an interest in fatherless children. Even critics
> develop a stake in having something to criticise.
>
> In Canada and the US, domestic violence legislation dispenses a gravy train
> of federal money to the states/provinces and localities. This is often
> earmarked with appeals to 'law enforcement', though the effect is to divert
> it from the prosecution of criminals to the prosecution of fathers.
> Likewise, child support enforcement is propelled by federal payments
> rewarding local governments for each dollar collected, filling local coffers
> and giving officials an incentive to squeeze revenue from (after they have
> forced divorce on) as many fathers as they can find.
>
> Especially questionable are government enterprises to 'promote fatherhood',
> which disperse grants to local governments and organizations ostensibly to
> 'reunite fathers with their children'. Yet they are premised on first
> separating them from one another. What is advertised as a program to
> facilitate 'access and visitation' means supervised contact centers, where
> fathers must pay to see their children in institutions. 'Encouraging good
> fathering' means state-sponsored television advertisements with actors
> depicting fathers abandoning their children. One American state receives
> federal money to implement 'Five Principles of Fatherhood', including: 'give
> affection to my children' and 'demonstrate respect at all times to the
> mother of my children'. One cannot help but wonder what penalties the state
> will bring to bear on fathers who fail to show sufficient 'affection' and
> 'respect'.
>
> Involuntary divorce is the instrument not simply of tyrannical judges,
> unscrupulous lawyers, and doctrinaire feminists, but of a new political
> class whose interest is to subject the private corners of life to state
> control. Two conservative scholars recently argued in the Journal of
> Political Economy that the vast expansion of governmental machinery during
> the twentieth century proceeded largely from women acquiring the vote.
> Women, far more than men, voted to create the welfare state. But: 'Why would
> men and women have differing political interests?' ask John Lott and Larry
> Kenny. 'If there were no divorces . . . the interests of men and women would
> appear to be closely linked together.' The premise of their question invites
> the answer: 'As divorce or desertion rates rise, more women will be saddled
> with the costs of raising the children.' Conservatives have accepted the
> feminist argument that the arm of the state is a necessary defensive shield
> to protect women from the costs of divorce, attributed to male desertion.
> But male desertion is not a major cause of divorce. The welfare state and
> expansive government therefore are not defenses against divorce but
> preconditions for it. Divorce is a political weapon and an offensive one at
> that, promoted by the same bureaucratic and ideological interests that are
> undermining and politicising fatherhood and expanding the power and reach of
> the state to deal with the consequences.
>
> What then can check the march of the unilateral divorce machine?
>
> One theme of intellectuals who dissented from the ideological-bureaucratic
> dictatorships of eastern Europe was 'nonpolitical politics': to oppose
> ideology not with contrary ideology but with non-ideology, to resist
> politicisation by re-creating the ordinary business of 'civil society' and
> private life. If any group should adopt this philosophy today, it is
> fathers. For all the effort to 'restore fatherhood' through programs like
> Fathers Direct, ultimately the only ones who can restore fatherhood are, of
> course, fathers themselves. Almost by definition, fathers alone can truly
> 'save the children' by re-creating the family with themselves in it.
>
> In so doing, fathers may also hold the potential to start redeeming a
> political culture that for thirty years has been sinking into the mire of
> permanent rebellion. Their current plight indicates how far the divorce
> 'revolution' has brought us all into a brave new quasi-Freudian world where
> not only traditional institutions are attacked and brought low, but so now
> are private individuals, simply because they hold the most basic position of
> human authority, the head of a family. Whether they are up to the challenge
> remains to be seen.
>
>
> Stephen Baskerville
>
>
and divorcing that raises the overall divorce rate to 50% of all
marriages (which includes 1st 2nd 3rdetc marriages all together).
In the last ten years we've seen a decrease in first mariage divorces
from 30%-25% and an increase in SAHP in couples with young children.
Dave wrote:
> Articles on what is the reality of divorce and child support are a rare find
> these days. Stephen Baskerville nails it right on the head with this
> article.
>
> --------------------------
> Divorce as a Revolution
> Salisbury Review
> June 21, 2003
> by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
>
> For some thirty years now a quiet revolution has been waged throughout the
> Western world. Most people are now familiar with the social consequences of
> the divorce explosion: the growth of single-parent homes and massive
> increase in fatherless children. The Pandora's box of social problems this
> has released has also reached general awareness. Virtually every major
> personal and social pathology can be traced to fatherlessness more than to
> any other single factor: violent crime, substance abuse, unwed pregnancy,
> truancy, suicide, and more. Fatherlessness far surpasses both poverty and
> race as a predictor of social deviance.
> These problems are alarming enough in themselves. What is seldom appreciated
> is that they are also responsible for a vast expansion in the power and
> reach of the state. In fact, so is divorce itself. In contrast to its social
> fallout, the political consequences of divorce are hardly understood at all,
> yet they may ultimately be the most destructive.
>
> The result of three decades of unrestrained divorce is that huge numbers of
> people - many of them government officials - now have a vested professional
> and financial interest in encouraging it. Divorce today is not simply a
> phenomenon; it is a regime - a vast bureaucratic empire that permeates
> national and local governments, with hangers-on in the private sector. In
> the United States divorce and custody comprise over half of civil
> litigation, constituting the cash cow of the judiciary and bringing
> employment and earnings to a host of public and private officials, including
> judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, mediators, counsellors, social workers,
> child support enforcement agents, and others.
>
> This growth industry derives from the impact of divorce on children. The div
> orce revolution has spawned a public-private industrial complex of legal,
> social service, and psychotherapeutic professionals devoted to the problems
> of children, and especially children in single-parent homes. Many are women
> with feminist leanings. Whatever pieties they may voice about the plight of
> fatherless, poor, and violent children, the fact remains that these
> practitioners have a vested interest in creating as many such children as
> possible. The way to do it is to remove the fathers.
>
> It is commonplace today that fathers are disadvantaged in divorce courts
> everywhere when it comes to child custody. In today's political jargon we
> attribute this to 'discrimination' and 'gender bias'. But this does not
> convey the half of it. Divorce courts and their huge entourage of personnel
> depend for their existence on broken, single-parent homes. The first
> principle of family court is therefore: remove the father. So long as
> fathers remain with their families, the divorce practitioners earn nothing.
> This is why the first thing a family court does when it summons a father on
> a divorce petition - even if he has done nothing wrong and not agreed to the
> divorce - is to strip him of custody of his children. While mothers also
> fall afoul of divorce courts, fathers are their principal rivals.
>
> Once the father is eliminated, the state functionally replaces him as
> protector and provider. By removing the father, the state also creates a
> host of problems for itself to solve: child poverty, child abuse, juvenile
> crime, and other problems associated with single-parent homes. In this way,
> the divorce machinery is self-perpetuating and self-expanding. Involuntary
> divorce is a marvelous tool that allows for the infinite expansion of
> government power.
>
> No-fault divorce is the middle-class equivalent of public assistance,
> creating single-parent homes among the affluent as welfare did among the
> poor. In the United States, where the trend began, all the major
> institutions of the divorce industry were originally created as ancillary to
> welfare: juvenile/family courts, child support enforcement, child protection
> services. No-fault divorce extended these 'services' to the middle class
> because that was where the money was, and with it political power.
>
> Like welfare, divorce involving children is almost wholly female-driven.
> Though governments invariably claim that fathers 'abandon' their children,
> there is no evidence this is true, nor even that fathers agree to most
> divorces. Cautious scholars like Sanford Braver of Arizona State University
> consistently find that at least two-thirds of divorces are filed by women,
> usually with no legal grounds. Yet lawyers and feminists report much higher
> proportions. Shere Hite, the popular researcher on female sexuality, found
> 'ninety-one percent of women who have divorced say they made the decision to
> divorce, not their husbands.'
>
> This is hardly surprising, given the almost irresistible emotional and
> financial incentives the industry offers mothers to divorce, including
> automatic custody plus windfall child support and other financial rewards,
> regardless of any fault on their part. A Canadian/American research team
> found that 'who gets the children is by far the most important component in
> deciding who files for divorce.' What we call 'divorce' has in effect become
> a kind of legalised parental kidnapping.
>
> Once the father loses custody, he becomes in many ways an outlaw and subject
> to plunder by a variety of officials. His contact with his own children
> becomes criminalised in that he can be arrested if he tries to see them
> outside of authorised times and places. Unlike anyone else, he can be
> arrested for running into his children in a public place such as the zoo or
> church. In the United States fathers are arrested for telephoning their
> children when they are not authorised or for sending them birthday cards.
> Fathers are routinely summoned to court and subjected to questioning about
> their private lives. Their personal papers, bank accounts, and homes must be
> opened and surrendered to government officials. Anything a father has said
> to his spouse or children can be used against him in court. His personal
> habits, movements, conversations, purchases, and his relationship with his
> own children are all subject to inquiry and control by the court.
>
> Despite prohibitions on incarceration for debt, a father can be jailed
> without trial for failure to pay not only child support but the fees of
> lawyers and psychotherapists he has not hired. A judge can summon a legally
> unimpeachable citizen who is minding his own business and order him to turn
> over his earnings or go to jail.
>
> As the logic of involuntary divorce plays itself out, divorce is forced on
> not only one parent but both. Mothers are not only enticed into divorce with
> financial incentives, in other words; they are being pressured into it by
> threats against their children. Last year, Heidi Howard was ordered by the
> Massachusetts Department of Social Services to divorce her husband or lose
> her children, although authorities acknowledged neither parent had been
> violent. When she refused, the social workers seized her children and
> attempted to terminate the couple's parental rights. Massachusetts News
> reporter Nev Moore says such cases are common in Massachusetts.
>
> Family law is now criminalising rights as basic as free speech and freedom
> of the press. In many jurisdictions it is a crime to criticise family court
> judges or otherwise discuss family law cases publicly. Under the pretext of
> 'family privacy', parents are gagged from publicly disclosing how government
> officials have seized control of their children. In Australia it is a crime
> for a litigant to speak publicly concerning family courts, even without
> mentioning specific cases.
>
> In Australia, the US, and Britain, family courts have closed web sites
> operated by fathers' groups. Britain, Australia, and Canada have all
> resurrected archaic laws prohibiting the criticism of judges in order to
> prosecute fathers' groups. In the United States judges cannot be sued, but
> they can sue citizens who criticise them. The confiscation of property can
> also be used to criminalise political opinions. Following his testimony to
> the US Congress critical of the family courts, Jim Wagner of the Georgia
> Council for Children's Rights was stripped of custody of his two children
> and ordered to pay $6,000 in the fees of attorneys he had not hired. When he
> could not pay, he was arrested.
>
> The swelling hysteria over 'domestic violence' appears fomented largely for
> similar ends. 'All of this domestic violence industry is about trying to
> take children away from their fathers,' writes Irish Times columnist John
> Waters. 'When they've taken away the fathers, they'll take away the mothers.
> ' Donna Laframboise of Canada's National Post investigated battered women's
> shelters and concluded they constituted 'one stop divorce shops', whose
> purpose was not to protect women but to promote divorce. These shelters,
> often federally funded, issue affidavits against fathers sight-unseen that
> are accepted without corroborating evidence by judges to justify removing
> their children. Special domestic violence courts in Canada can now remove
> fathers from their homes and seize their houses on a mere allegation of
> domestic violence.
>
> Divorce, not violence, is also behind the explosion of restraining orders,
> which are routinely issued without evidence of wrongdoing, separating
> fathers from their children and homes. Almost 90% of judicial magistrates in
> New South Wales acknowledged that protective orders were used in divorce -
> often on the advice of a solicitor - to deprive fathers of access to their
> children. Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Women's Bar
> Association, writes that restraining orders are doled out 'like candy.'
> 'Everyone knows that restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to
> virtually all who apply,' and 'the facts have become irrelevant,' she
> reports.
>
> Fathers are further criminalised through child-support burdens, which
> constitute the financial fuel of the divorce machinery, underwriting
> unilateral divorce and giving everyone involved further incentives to remove
> children from their fathers. Government claims of unpaid child support
> constitute one of the most dishonest and destructive hoaxes ever foisted on
> the public. In a US government-funded study, Sanford Braver discovered that
> most fathers pay fully and on time and that 'estimated' arrearages are
> derived not from official records but from surveys of mothers. Braver's
> findings have never been refuted by any official or scholar. Yet ever-more
> draconian 'crackdowns' and arrests continue.
>
> Last summer Liberty magazine published documentary evidence that 'deadbeat
> dads' are largely the creation of civil servants and law-enforcement agents
> with an interest in giving themselves criminals to prosecute. In most
> jurisdictions, child support guidelines are set by enforcement personnel,
> the equivalent of the police making the laws. These officials can separate
> children from their fathers, impose impossible child support obligations,
> and then jail fathers who inevitably fail to pay.
>
> Child support trials operate on a presumption of guilt, where 'the burden of
> proof may be shifted to the defendant,' according to the US National
> Conference of State Legislatures, which favours aggressive prosecutions.
> Contrary to Common Law and the US Constitution, courts have ruled that 'not
> all child-support contempt proceedings classified as criminal are entitled
> to a jury trial,' and 'even indigent obligors are not necessarily entitled
> to a lawyer.' Thus impoverished parents who lose their children through
> literally 'no fault' of their own are the only defendants who must prove
> their innocence without counsel and without a jury of their peers.
>
> Cases like Darrin White of British Columbia are the result. With no evidence
> of wrongdoing, White was denied all contact with his children, evicted from
> his home, and ordered to pay more than twice his income as child and spousal
> support, plus court costs for a divorce he never agreed to. White hanged
> himself from a tree. 'There is nothing unusual about this judgement,' said a
> British Columbia Supreme Court Judge, who pointed out that the judge applied
> standard support guidelines.
>
> Fathers driven to suicide by family courts are acknowledged by officials in
> Canada, Australia, and Britain. A suicide epidemic has been documented by
> Augustine Kposowa of the University of California in the Journal of
> Epidemiology and Community Health. Kposowa attributes his finding directly
> to family court judgements, though media reports of his study emphasised
> fathers' lack of 'support networks'.
>
> Why is so little opposition heard? Though the conservative media are waking
> up, the silence of conservative politicians is deafening, given that every
> prophecy about the dangers of judicial activism, bureaucratic
> aggrandizement, and ideological extremism is vindicated in the war on
> fathers. What is perhaps most diabolical about the divorce industry is its
> ability to co-opt so many people, including its critics. By creating
> problems to be solved - and then dispensing government money to solve them -
> the machine gives everyone an interest in fatherless children. Even critics
> develop a stake in having something to criticise.
>
> In Canada and the US, domestic violence legislation dispenses a gravy train
> of federal money to the states/provinces and localities. This is often
> earmarked with appeals to 'law enforcement', though the effect is to divert
> it from the prosecution of criminals to the prosecution of fathers.
> Likewise, child support enforcement is propelled by federal payments
> rewarding local governments for each dollar collected, filling local coffers
> and giving officials an incentive to squeeze revenue from (after they have
> forced divorce on) as many fathers as they can find.
>
> Especially questionable are government enterprises to 'promote fatherhood',
> which disperse grants to local governments and organizations ostensibly to
> 'reunite fathers with their children'. Yet they are premised on first
> separating them from one another. What is advertised as a program to
> facilitate 'access and visitation' means supervised contact centers, where
> fathers must pay to see their children in institutions. 'Encouraging good
> fathering' means state-sponsored television advertisements with actors
> depicting fathers abandoning their children. One American state receives
> federal money to implement 'Five Principles of Fatherhood', including: 'give
> affection to my children' and 'demonstrate respect at all times to the
> mother of my children'. One cannot help but wonder what penalties the state
> will bring to bear on fathers who fail to show sufficient 'affection' and
> 'respect'.
>
> Involuntary divorce is the instrument not simply of tyrannical judges,
> unscrupulous lawyers, and doctrinaire feminists, but of a new political
> class whose interest is to subject the private corners of life to state
> control. Two conservative scholars recently argued in the Journal of
> Political Economy that the vast expansion of governmental machinery during
> the twentieth century proceeded largely from women acquiring the vote.
> Women, far more than men, voted to create the welfare state. But: 'Why would
> men and women have differing political interests?' ask John Lott and Larry
> Kenny. 'If there were no divorces . . . the interests of men and women would
> appear to be closely linked together.' The premise of their question invites
> the answer: 'As divorce or desertion rates rise, more women will be saddled
> with the costs of raising the children.' Conservatives have accepted the
> feminist argument that the arm of the state is a necessary defensive shield
> to protect women from the costs of divorce, attributed to male desertion.
> But male desertion is not a major cause of divorce. The welfare state and
> expansive government therefore are not defenses against divorce but
> preconditions for it. Divorce is a political weapon and an offensive one at
> that, promoted by the same bureaucratic and ideological interests that are
> undermining and politicising fatherhood and expanding the power and reach of
> the state to deal with the consequences.
>
> What then can check the march of the unilateral divorce machine?
>
> One theme of intellectuals who dissented from the ideological-bureaucratic
> dictatorships of eastern Europe was 'nonpolitical politics': to oppose
> ideology not with contrary ideology but with non-ideology, to resist
> politicisation by re-creating the ordinary business of 'civil society' and
> private life. If any group should adopt this philosophy today, it is
> fathers. For all the effort to 'restore fatherhood' through programs like
> Fathers Direct, ultimately the only ones who can restore fatherhood are, of
> course, fathers themselves. Almost by definition, fathers alone can truly
> 'save the children' by re-creating the family with themselves in it.
>
> In so doing, fathers may also hold the potential to start redeeming a
> political culture that for thirty years has been sinking into the mire of
> permanent rebellion. Their current plight indicates how far the divorce
> 'revolution' has brought us all into a brave new quasi-Freudian world where
> not only traditional institutions are attacked and brought low, but so now
> are private individuals, simply because they hold the most basic position of
> human authority, the head of a family. Whether they are up to the challenge
> remains to be seen.
>
>
> Stephen Baskerville
>
>