Tag Archives: Media Bias

Suzanne Venker on the decline of men and male roles

Fox News editorial from a woman who defends men.

Excerpt:

In November of last year, I wrote an article for Fox News called The War on Men (which I subsequently expanded to an eBook). To keep it pithy, in the piece I focused on one effect of this war: the lack of marriageable men. But there’s so much more to it. The truth is, men have become second-class citizens.

The most obvious proof is male bashing in the media. It is rampant and irrefutable. From sit-coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot to biased news reports about the state of American men, males are pounced on left and right. And that’s just the beginning.

She talks about the problems that boys face in feminized schools, and also in university, and then explains some of the reasons why men are shying away from marriage:

When men become husbands and fathers, things get really bad. In family courts throughout America, men are routinely stripped of their rights and due process. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is easily used against them since its definition of violence is so broad that virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse.

“If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” notes Dr. Helen Smith, author of the new book, “Men on Strike.” This is particularly heinous since, as Smith adds, violence in domestic relations “is almost 50% from men and 50% from women.”

Shocked? If so, that’s in part because the media don’t believe men can be victims of domestic violence—so they don’t report it. They would rather feed off stories that paint women as victims. And in so doing, they’ve convinced America there’s a war on women.

Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced. Unlike women, however, men don’t organize and form groups when they’ve been persecuted. They just bow out of the game.

America needs to wake up. We have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction—from a man’s world to a woman’s world.

That’s not equality. That’s revenge.

It’s not just the American White Male who sees these problems. I am an American Brown Male, and I have the same problems.

Is she right that men and women commit domestic violence equally? That’s not what we are told in school and in the media, but let’s look at the studies and see.

Studies on domestic violence

Let’s see what’s happening with domestic violence rates in the UK.

Excerpt:

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09.

Similar or slightly larger numbers of men were subjected to severe force in an incident with their partner, according to the same documents. The figure stood at 48.6% in 2006-07, 48.3% the next year and 37.5% in 2008-09, Home Office statistics show.

The 2008-09 bulletin states: “More than one in four women (28%) and around one in six men (16%) had experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. These figures are equivalent to an estimated 4.5 million female victims of domestic abuse and 2.6 million male victims.”

In addition, “6% of women and 4% of men reported having experienced domestic abuse in the past year, equivalent to an estimated one million female victims of domestic abuse and 600,000 male victims”.

And the numbers from the government of Canada are the same.

Canada numbers:

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

So it’s pretty even. Women are about as likely to commit violence as men are. And in lesbian relationships, the rate of domestic violence is extremely high, from 17% to 45%, depending on the study. I think in general, women are more violent when there is no man present, because they have more difficulty restraining their emotions and resolving disagreements with rational arguments instead of fist, feet and weapons.

You also see higher rates of violence by mothers against their own children, than with fathers. Mothers are more than twice as likely to abuse children as fathers. Biological fathers are programmed to protect children – it’s the stepfathers and live-in boyfriends who harm children. In fact, one of the roles of the father in the marriage is to restrain the woman’s outbursts and anger so that the children are not harmed, and to protect them from threats from outside the home, too.

The negative perception of men deters men from marrying

I am very conscious of the perception that women have of men these days. Instead of looking to men for leadership, the presumption is that our role is to entertain women. And not to make judgments or claims of knowledge. The worst part is that most women don’t know and don’t care about how men are perceived today. I think that is the worst problem for me with wanting to get married. I just don’t believe that there are any women out there who are really looking for a husband in the traditional sense of the word, and with the traditional male roles. The negative perception of men and the way that women prefer men who are non-judgmental, non-religious and ignorant are two major reasons why I personally am cold about marriage.

“Two Dads are Better Than One”: pro-gay adoption ABC profile of convicted pedophile

Earlier, I blogged about how Mark Newton had been convicted for pedophilia and received a 40-year prison sentence. This was reported earlier by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Since then, I was notified about a pro-gay-adoption article from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in which the pedophile and his partner were profiled.

The article has been pulled from the ABC web site, but I found it in Google cache, and made a PDF of it.

Full text:

Headline: Two dads are better than one
Date: 14 July, 2010 5:04PM AEST
Author: Ginger Gorman

A shiny child’s bike lies on its side on the front lawn of an immaculate garden.

Around the back gay dads Pete and Mark chase their son’s pet chickens around, trying to catch them.

Drake, 5, exclaims that the little birds are too fast for him.

It’s a happy, relaxed family scene. But it wasn’t an easy road to get there. After many hurdles Drake was born by surrogacy in Russia.

“We decided that we would have a child, that it was time for us to have a family. We wanted to experience the joys of fatherhood and we started our surrogacy over in the United States back in 2002,” Pete said.

At the time, Pete and Mark were living and working in the US.

“Surrogacy rules and laws are much easier in the United States,” Mark said.

While not everybody was comfortable with the idea of surrogacy, Mark said the couple felt their options were limited.

“We knew that there were certainly plenty of women willing to do it so if it OK with them, then I guess it was OK with us,” he said.

Mark and Pete used the internet to find prospective mothers for the child they longed to have. Apart from the woman’s health, Pete said one of the big concerns was how genuine the candidates were.

“We have heard about a lot of scams and certain people who represent themselves as so-called surrogate mothers who are really out there just to make money,” he said.

Pete said the couple also wanted to make sure that any woman they employed as a surrogate fully understood the commitment she was making.

There was also the issue of whether the mother would actually give up her baby, Mark added.

After many failed attempts in the US, the cost was becoming prohibitive. The pair decided to try Russia as cheaper alternative.

That decision presented its own problems. Language was the main one. The couple took on a private Russian tutor and Pete gave up his job in Australia to oversee the process.

“We were very dedicated to making this work….we decided that at some point we didn’t have a budget. Our budget was anything that we had earned, anything that we had saved, anything that we could borrow to make this happen,” Pete said.

In the end Pete said they found a woman who they ‘clicked with personality-wise’.

“She was very quiet. She didn’t have a lot of demands or conditions that some of the other woman that we had met had. She seemed like somebody we could work with,” he said.

At the first attempt, Drake was conceived via artificial insemination using Mark’s sperm.

When asked why it was Mark’s sperm and not Pete’s, Mark laughed.

“A flip of the coin I think,” he said.

During the pregnancy the couple stayed in limited contact with the mother via a translator. Mostly they were in touch just when there were practical things to care of such as visiting a doctor or getting an ultrasound.

“We made it clear to her that we wanted her to take vitamins, that we wanted her to eat well. We provided the money to do that and we just had to hope that she would do it,” Mark said.

Neither man was at Drake’s birth because they felt it was important to protect the mother’s privacy.

When their son was five days old, Mark and Pete were handed their child. To their surprise, Drake’s mother gave them the baby and walked away.

“I think she had resigned herself to this much earlier on and was trying not to let emotions get in the way,” Mark said.

In fact, it wasn’t the mother who got in the way of Drake coming back to Australia with his two Dads. What followed was two and a half years of bureaucracy before the child received permanent Australian residency and another year before he got citizenship.

On arrival in Australia customs quizzed Mark and Pete for hours. Police were also sent around to their house on a Sunday morning to investigate.

“When people see two guys together, you know it’s like, ‘Where’s his mother?’ We’ve had a lot of people ask that,” Pete said.

“I think that even if one of us was a woman, we wouldn’t have had the same suspicions and problems that we went through.”

Thinking back to the police visit, Pete said the police seemed to want reassurance that the situation was ‘right’.

They checked if the couple had equipment to raise a child like a bed, clothes and bottles.

Mark said he’s sure that they were under suspicion of paedophilia. But despite the difficulties, he said the couple would do it again with no hesitation.

“We’re a family just like any other family,” he said with pride.

ABC has since pulled the article from their web site, to cover up what they did. The caption from the image in the article is: “Proud dads Pete (left) and Mark (right), had their son Drake by surrogacy in Russia. (Ginger Gorman – ABC)”. And you can still download the MP3 file from the article here, although I took a copy here. You can hear the proud dads talking with the ABC journalist in the MP3 file.

You can also find an article from a campus newspaper written by Mark Newton in which he advocates for gay marriage. I saved it as a PDF here. The article is from a campus newspaper called the Daily 49er from California State University, Long Beach.

UPDATE: Ace journalist Robert S. McCain is trying to dig into the story, but the ABC journalist who wrote the story has blocked him.

UPDATE: This post has been linked by the American Spectator and the Australian Daily Telegraph, as well as many other blogs. (See the trackbacks)

Gay man gets 40-year sentence for molesting boy he adopted from Russia

Warning: The following story may be disturbing and offensive to some readers. Reader discretion is advised.

UPDATE: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation published an article praising the gay adoption by Mark Newton in 2010. I have posted the full text in this post and saved off a PDF. The article has since been pulled.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the latest example of gay adoption gone awry – this time from Australia. (H/T Mysterious S.)

Excerpt:

Standing before an American court convicted of the most heinous of child sex crimes, the double lives of Australian citizen Mark J. Newton and his long-term boyfriend Peter Truong were laid bare.

[…]Moments later Newton was sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing the boy he and Truong, 36 from Queensland, had ‘‘adopted’’ after paying a Russian woman $8000 to be their surrogate in 2005.

Police believe the pair had adopted the boy ‘‘for the sole purpose of exploitation’’. The abuse began just days after his birth and over six years the couple travelled the world, offering him up for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse and uploading the footage to an international syndicate known as the Boy Lovers Network.

[…]Evidence before the court revealed the abuse began before the couple returned to Australia. One video is said to show Newton performing a sex act on the boy when he was less than two weeks old.

Judge Barker said the pair brainwashed the child to believe the sexual abuse was normal. Newton was also said to have trained the boy to deny any inappropriate behaviour if he was ever questioned by authorities.

Newton and Truong came to the attention of police in August 2011 after their connections to three men arrested over the possession of child exploitation material came to light. The couple had visited the three men in the US, New Zealand and Germany with their son.

[…]Newton and Truong claimed they were being targeted because they were homosexual.

This story comes on the heels of the new Labour Party leader Kevin Rudd’s promise to legalize gay marriage.

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