Tag Archives: Children

News

Why is the left so angry with Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin?

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Rep. Michele Bachmann

Here is a perceptive column from Stuart Schneiderman.

Excerpt:

Hot Republican women are a political issue, but they are also a cultural force. If that bastion of patriarchal oppression, the Republican party, is nominating more and more women, and being represented by more and more attractive women, what are the cultural consequences?

It is worth mentioning, even if only in passing, that the hot Republican women in question are not in the same category as Paris Hilton and Lady Gaga. They do not represent the kind of hotness that plays well in music videos. They are adult women; they have husbands and families; they have worked hard on their careers and have garnered a measure of success.

But they have done it without compromising their womanhood. None has ever pretended to be anything other than a woman.

If you believe that the world of men can only accept women who leave their femininity at the door, then these Republican women are saying that you are wrong.

Moreover, these women are not feminists. They are not leftist ideological zealots. They did not try to overthrow the patriarchy. They took the opportunities that were available, and they did not spend their time agitating about the opportunities that were not available. They competed and succeeded on the playing field that existed, and did not ask for special favors and dispensations because they were women. They did not spend their time airing grievances because they were too busy with their lives to involve themselves in such self-indulgent exercises.

That’s why I keep posting videos of Republican women who are also mothers on this blog, like Michele Bachmann, Nikki Haley and Marsha Blackburn. It’s important for women to understand that you can be a success in this world without neglecting your family, and without demanding that your alleged victim status be remedied by the coercive power of the state.

UPDATE: Governor Jan Brewer (Arizona) and Governor Linda Lingle (Hawaii) are also making news this week.

Please see below for links and videos about Michele Bachmann.

Campaign speeches, interviews and debates

Speeches:

Reactions from her first debate performance:

Profiles of Michele Bachmann:

Michele Bachmann on television news

Let Americans spend their own money

Time to prioritize spending

Obama’s plan is to raise your taxes

Michele Bachmann in the legislature

Against socialism:

For economic growth:

Against ACORN funding:

News

Divorced father kept from seeing his own child for 15 months

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This news story is from the government-run CBC in Canada.

Excerpt:

A divorced B.C. father who hasn’t seen his young daughter for several months blames the family court system and is joining others in a call for change.

“Before all this happened, my daughter had a great relationship with me,” said Dieter Geesing. “I feel really helpless. This is not right.”

Geesing said his ex-wife has been allowed to bar him from his daughter because a court order requiring her to co-operate is unenforceable.

“I love my child. It’s not fair to her. You are cheating her of her childhood,” he said tearfully. “This child has a right to interact with her father.”

Geesing is a forestry specialist and his daughter is his only child. He and his wife separated in 2008, when the girl was eight years old. Since then, he said, his wife has tried to shut him out of his daughter’s life completely.

[…]A court order in June 2009 gave the parents joint guardianship, with the child’s “primary residence” at her mother’s home.

[…]The court also instructed the mother to pay for and attend counselling to help establish a “healthier” relationship between father and daughter. A letter from the counsellor to the judge shows Geesing’s ex-wife has since failed to co-operate.

[…]Records show there have been no consequences for the child’s mother. Geesing has been told he has no legal recourse but to go back to court to ask the judge for help, which could take several months.

[…]When contacted, Geesing’s ex-wife refused comment. Her lawyer did not respond to messages.

I think that a lot of Christians are familiar with the pro-life view and the pro-marriage view, and maybe they could even defend them with arguments and evidence. But for some reason, these father’s rights issues have not really been viewed as the same kind of injustice. I’ll bet that the mother in this case knew that the laws would not be enforced against her – that she would not be held to account for acting selfishly and maliciously. This lack of enforcement undoubtedly encourages more women to divorce their husbands and destroy the lives of their children.

Here”s a video I found about the Canadian divorce industry:

I also note that my favorite Canadian MP Maurice Vellacott has introduced a bill at the federal level to fix this problem. He is a Conservative Party MP.

Commentary

How divorce courts put men in debtor’s prisons

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Story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs.

[…]Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.

Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”

About 45% of first marriages end in divorce, with women initiating about 70% of divorces and getting full custody about 90% of the time. False accusations are regularly used by the person who initiates the divorce in order to get restraining orders and de facto custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with them. It is a massive transfer of wealth from men to women at gunpoint, and a massive loss of liberty for men.

People keep expecting men to step up and take on the role of husband and father, but when the chips are down, 77% of young unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and his policies of destroying the economy. A job is a requirement for men to marry and to take on the role of husband and father. Not only are the schools and universities biased against men, but the industries where men dominate have also been hit hardest by the recession.

We need to spend less time on fashionable causes like environmentalism, gun control, pacifism, animal rights and universal health care, and more time on economics. It’s men who have the most to lose emotionally and financially from a divorce. Not only that, but women commit domestic violence against men at rates equal to men, but the laws (e.g. – VAWA) don’t recognize the truth. The vast majority of the social programs are for women only.

A good start would be to read this summary of the divorce courts by Stephen Baskerville, and also listen to the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage. Either we are going to encourage men to marry and praise them for marrying or we are going to discourage them and then blame them for not marrying. Men respond to incentives. As long as society as a whole chooses to remain ignorant of the facts and chooses to continue to blame men, men won’t marry.