Tag Archives: Dad

Commentary

Interview with Doug Giles, father of two extraordinary daughters

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Pearcey Report)

Summary:

Like most parents, Clash Radio host and Townhall.com columnist Doug Giles is proud of his children. His daughter Hannah helped take down ACORN in 2009, when she partnered up with James O’Keefe to produce revealing undercover videos. Giles’ other daughter, Regis, started the campaign “Girls Just Wanna Have Guns,” which, among other things, aims to instruct young women on how to protect and defend themselves against predators.

He has every reason to brag about his no-nonsense girls, both of whom partially inspired his new book, “Raising Righteous and Rowdy Girls,” which provides 14 chapters on how to rear females in today’s world. The Townhall.com contributor advises parents to teach their girls classiness and the value of intellect, but it’s not all work and no play for the Giles clan. Giles thinks it’s important for young women to know how to hunt, fight, rebel, date decent guys and even party.

Sample questions:

TheDC: So what makes a “righteous and rowdy girl?”

DG: Well, a common misconception among evangelicals, which I’m one of them, is that if your daughter is righteous, she has to be this petty-coat wearing damsel in distress who says, “Oh my, I need a knight in shining armor to come and rescue me.” The problem is that there are no knights in shining armor. A lot of the guys have bought into the misandrous fly and they’ve become more feminine or effeminate and more of  a dandy instead of the historic Clint Eastwood type who can kick butt and take names.

So I wanted to want to show that girls can be righteous, they can be classy, they can excel in academics and at the same time they can have a rowdy good time rebelling against this cultural swill that is shoved up their tailpipe and down their throat 24/7 by this Godless culture. The rowdy aspect is, like in my book, I teach them again how to fight, how to shoot guns, how to protect themselves, because especially in the state of Florida, I believe nearly 80 percent of the abductions that occur with young people happen to females, so I don’t like that. I want to make sure my kids don’t have that scenario play out on them and they become victims of some weirdo.

If you’re going to put your kids in public school or university, there’s such anti-American sentiment there that I didn’t want my kids to be some sponge and that professor be the Super-Soaker who tries to erode what my wife and I have taught them, so the rowdy aspect comes into play where we tell our kids they have a right to rebel, question, and rage against the machine to be the James Dean, Harley Davidson-wearing rebel against secularism, socialism, slutification and the wussification of our culture. Yes they can be righteous to where they can live clean lives, but that doesn’t mean they live in some kind of sterile environment separated from culture. They can infiltrate the culture with comedy, class, wisdom, intellect, but also with a rebellious attitude that says we’re not going to allow our nation go down the crapper because it’s what everybody else is doing.

TheDC: So did your daughters go to public school and have to deal with this sort of propaganda and anti-American agenda from their teachers?

DG: Yeah, absolutely. They went to public school all the way until high school and then we yanked them. It’s so bad down here that the best schools look like Leavenworth. I mean literally, strewn with barbed wire, there are cops parked up on the sidewalk right by the doors, it’s 186 percent overcrowded, so we said screw this. The girls started homeschooling with Florida Virgil School and they just excelled academically. But they were part of the mucked-up mix for several years and during that time period, they would hear all this stuff that we hear on Fox News, just America completely denigrated. If you didn’t dance to their call, you were made to be the weird person. I just refused to have my daughters feel like that when traditional values, Judeo-Christian world view, and conservative principles and capitalism caused America to be the great American experiment, so I made certain that as much as I could from their little tiny hearts and little tiny minds that they were educated to our great foundations, to our Christian worldview, and when they heard the other stuff coming from the teachers ridiculing those things, that they had the right and the moxie to question that and confront it when it was served to them on a regular basis.

I guess I’m going to buy this book! I don’t think that any Christian women will allow me to parent children like this though – they think that strong fathers who set goals for their children are “bullies”.

News

Calgary dad mourns daughter murdered by her stepfather

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Story from the Calgary Sun.

Excerpt:

He barely knew his daughter Clare, having seen her only five times since the divorce.

James Shelswell said he was looking forward to Clare growing older, and the far-off day when he might finally bond with the child he surrendered when she was only four months old.

Instead, Shelswell will fly this week from Calgary to Abbotsford B.C., to attend Clare’s funeral.

On Sunday, Clare was murdered, her throat slashed open after an apparent domestic dispute between her mom and step-dad over how to discipline the kids.

Peter Wilson, 29, is charged with killing his step daughter.

And now, all that’s left for her biological dad is to say goodbye to the stranger who was once his baby girl.

“She didn’t really know me — I’d seen her maybe five time in five years,” said Shelswell.

If his daughter dying in pain and terror at the hands of the man she knew as her dad wasn’t devastating enough, Shelswell has been told [by his ex-wife] he’s not welcome at the funeral.

[…]“I asked if she was in the room when it happened and why she didn’t protect Clare — she said it happened in a different room, and I asked if my other daughter saw it. She said no.”

His ex, said Shelswell, then made it clear he is not welcome at Clare’s private funeral service.

“She said I shouldn’t go to the funeral, and I have no rights to my kids,” said Shelswell.

[…]In Calgary, Shelswell, who is re-married with two kids, is a man whose fury is mixed with remorse.He laments that he didn’t have enough money to fight back with a lawyer, back when his wife took their Calgary-born daughters away to B.C.

He says he settled into a pattern of paying child support, and looking forward to yearly visit with his girls — the last, a happy trip to Vancouver, included the aquarium and McDonald’s.

This is my worst nightmare, but it illustrates the general truth that biological dads are the least likely person to harm their own children, which I blogged about before. This paper from the Heritage Foundation cites a very interesting study that shows more about which who is really dangerous to children. Here’s another paper that explains why marriages are the safest arrangements for women and children. The very institution that is under attack by third-wave feminists who abhor the “unequal” gender roles that emerge in marriage.

Here’s a government report:

Mothers are almost twice as likely to be directly involved in child maltreatment as fathers.

[…]Generally speaking, the same characteristics that make a man a good father make him less likely to abuse or neglect his children. Fathers who nurture and take significant responsibility for basic childcare for their children (e.g., feeding, changing diapers) from an early age are significantly less likely to sexually abuse their children.35 These fathers typically develop such a strong connection with their children that it decreases the likelihood of any maltreatment.

The involvement of a father in the life of a family is also associated with lower levels of child neglect, even in families that may be facing other factors, such as unemployment and poverty, which could place the family at risk for maltreatment.36 Such involvement reduces the parenting and housework load a mother has to bear and increases the overall parental investments in family life, thereby minimizing the chances that either parent will neglect to care for or to supervise their children.

On average, fathers who live in a married household with their children are better able to create a family environment that is more conducive to the safety and necessary care of their children. Consequently, children who live with their biological father in a married household are significantly less likely to be physically abused, sexually abused, or neglected than children who do not live with their married biological parents.

When feminists make fathers out to be monsters, and lobby for extremely liberal divorce laws enforced by extremely anti-male divorce courts, the result is that more children are assaulted, sexually-abused and even murdered at the hands of live-in boyfriends and stepfathers.

Sorry to all of my male readers who are honorable stepfathers, but the fact is that stepfathers on average are not as safe for children as biological fathers. And that’s why we should not be encouraging the break-up of marriages with no-fault divorce laws and anti-male divorce courts. Women also need to be more careful about who they choose to have children with!

By the way, if you guys are looking for a great movie to watch that is extremely pro-fatherhood, watch “Taken” with Liam Neeson. Be warned, it is very mature subject matter. Definitely, definitely for grown-ups only. If you are a man, you will ADORE this movie. Oh, and it’s not PC, so don’t watch it if you are all multicultural and moral relativistic.

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.