Tag Archives: Father

Polemics

Why Democrat policies discourage men from marrying, part 3

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This article is the third of a three-part series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage and child-rearing. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

How no-fault divorce discourages men from marrying

This time we’ll look at my favorite argument against marriage. Today’s article is from Dr. Stephen Baskerville, author of the amazing book “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family”. I own two copies, one for me and one to lend out.

Let’s get a look at the problem posed to marriage by the Democrat policy of no-fault divorce:

…80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

…Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

When I was a student in graduate school, I used to hate going out the door and leaving my pet parrot behind with my brother. I did not believe then, and do not now, that anyone in the world is capable of taking care of my bird except me. I felt awful leaving the house, and I would call home between classes just to check on him. That is how parents feel.

I could go on and on about the way that I have bonded with that little creature. And this is basically why marriage is a virtual impossibility to me, given the divorce laws enacted by Democrats and their special interest groups, (trial lawyers, feminists, academic elites, etc.). I do not think I could survive being separated from my children for years by lawyers and courts.

To justify this, the divorce machinery has generated hysteria against parents so inflammatory that few dare question it: child abuse, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support”–all propagated by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, with federal funding. The accused parent loses his children and is abandoned by friends, family members, parishioners, and co-workers–all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

Each of these figures is largely a hoax. There is no evidence of large numbers of fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Divorce courts separate parents from their children, with false accusations as a rationalization.

Child abuse and domestic violence have no precise definition. They are not adjudicated as assault, and accused parents do not enjoy the constitutional protections of criminal defendants. Allegations are “confirmed” not by juries but by judges or social workers. Domestic “violence” need not be violent or even physical. Official definitions include “extreme jealousy” and “constant criticizing.”

Child abuse is itself the creation of welfare bureaucracies. An intact family is the safest place for women and children, since child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes from which the father has been removed. Britain’s Family Education Trust reports that children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family. Domestic violence too is far more likely with the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet trumped-up accusations are rampant in divorce courts, usually to eliminate fathers. Elaine Epstein of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases, a trend documented in the Illinois Bar Journal, Yale Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, and others.

The principal impediment to child abuse is thus the father. “The presence of the father placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes a study in Adolescent and Family Health. By eliminating fathers, officials pose as the solution to the problem they themselves create. Appalling as it sounds, we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

And it’s not just the separation, the legal fees, the false allegations and the criminal record. It’s the fact that I would be driven into poverty by the courts.

The “deadbeat dad” is another creation of divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have voluntarily abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as one attorney writes, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Originally justified to recover welfare costs, child support has become an entitlement for all mothers, regardless of their behavior, and a subsidy on middle-class divorce. It allows the mother–simply by divorcing–to confiscate her husband’s income. It is tax-free to the recipient, and nonpayment means incarceration without trial. The Journal of Socio-Economics notes that child support serves as an “economic incentive for middle-class women to seek divorce.” Economist Robert Willis calculates that one-fifth to one-third of child support payments are used for children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent.

State governments also generate revenue from child support, giving them a financial incentive to make it onerous and to encourage divorce. Federal taxpayers subsidize this family destruction scheme with about $3 billion annually. Officials have admitted that the arrearages are far beyond the parents’ ability to pay.

Government’s divorce apparatus has become a machine for destroying families, seizing children, and incarcerating parents without trial. It is the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States.

So, the creation of no-fault divorce, an intrusion by the state on private contracts, makes marriage impossible for rational men. The stakes are just too high to be taking chances.

You can hear Dr. Baskerville on the radio with Dennis Prager and Milt Rosenberg in podcasts linked here.A more complete version of the article can be found here in Touchstone Magazine. I highly recommend the more complete version. If you are a single man, or you have male children, you really need to read it. Dr. Baskerville wrote recently about marriage and the Christian church here.

This series on Democrat’s opposition to marriage and family is now complete. If you absolutely, positively have to have more on marriage, then you can read one of my most popular posts about an ideal marriage I know about, or some guest posts from my very happily married friend Andrew on marriage, here and here.

Commentary

How socialism undermines family, community and the dignity of labor

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Free Canuckistan! Thanks for the link, Binks!

I saw this amazing post over on the Pugnacious Irishman, and I would highly recommend you take a look at it. Rich comments on an essay by Charles Murray on whether the United States should start implementing European-style social policies.

Here is Rich’s summary of the Murray article:

In the annual Irving Kristol Lecture given at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner, he argues that while such Europe-style policies might produce an economic benefit or two, they are ill conceived because they suck the meaning out of life.  They do this by enfeebling the institutions necessary for robust meaning in life: family, community, vocation, and faith.  Lastly, he argues that in the next few decades, science will provide ample evidence that such policies are ill conceived.

But how does European democratic socialism destroy human flourishing?

Murray writes:

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don’t get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren’t many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements…. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith.

…It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life–the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships–coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness–occurs within those four institutions.

Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

And then comes Murray’s central thesis. Big government socialism, by taking responsibility away from individuals in the areas of importance and meaning, actually causes more problems than it solves. Murray calls this government involvement in these areas “taking the trouble out” of life.

Murray continues:

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality–it drains some of the life from them.

It’s inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met–family and community really do have the action–then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions.

When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

…We have seen growing legions of children raised in unimaginably awful circumstances, not because of material poverty but because of dysfunctional families, and the collapse of functioning neighborhoods into Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zones.

This next point is something I first read about in George Gilder’s book “Men and Marriage”. When the government steps in and takes away the responsibilities of a man, especially husband and father responsibilities, it destroys the male will to be a responsible contributor to society. If the welfare state awards money to women to raise children without the father, what honor is there in being a good man?

Earlier, I said that the sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people needed to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.”

If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome.

I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people–already has stripped people–of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, “I made a difference.”

Murray’s article and Rich’s commentary continue, but for me this was the important point. When government distributes wealth, it gets involved in the decision-making of the most important areas of life: marriage, education, parenting, taxes, etc. Speaking as a man, when you take away choice and responsibility from me, you cannot expect me to engage in work or family or community in the same way I would if I were in charge.

By the way, I explained why European socialism leads to the decline of religion in a previous post.