Feminist Fatherphobia

An Eagle Forum Report ask the question: Should Parents or the 'Village' Raise Children? They go on to detail various aspects of "Feminist Fatherphobia." Below are excepts:

Feminist Fatherphobia in Family Courts - . . . the elephant in the parlor is the millions of children of divorced parents who need their two parents just as much as children in intact marriages, if not more. Maintaining the father's love and authority is crucial when a child's life is turned upside down by divorce. The silence of the pro-family movement and of the churches is deafening. Don't they care about the need for fathers of the more than 21 million children under age 21 who the U.S. Census Bureau reports are living with only one of their parents? Citing a principle called the "best interest of the child," family courts award sole or primary custody of most children of divorced parents to mothers, thereby reducing fathers to occasional visitation and zero authority. . . . This system has produced a tremendous divorce-custody-child-support industry, with well-paying work for lawyers and non-parents who pretend to be experts. It's in their financial interest to minimize the father's custody, visitation and authority so that he will keep paying and paying to win time with his own children.

Every successful civilization has placed the responsibility for rearing the next generation on children's own parents, both mother and father. Replacing that proven practice with the notion that a "village" should raise children, according to non-parents' subjective and misguided notions of what is in a child's "best interest," is a radical departure from the traditional rule that parents should possess shared responsibility for raising their own children. A law requiring a presumption of equal shared custody after divorce would enable children to maintain strong ties with both parents at a time of family disruption. It would also eliminate much of the acrimonious conflict caused when one parent seeks a court ruling for sole or primary custody, because that decision depends on the bias of a judge and the non-parents he appoints to advise him . . . [Read More]

Feminist Fatherphobia in Welfare 'Reform' - The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, known as Welfare Reform, has been cheered as a stunning achievement of the Republican Congress and its Contract With America. The law helped to move millions of welfare recipients out of dependency and into productive jobs, but its unintended consequences brought many thousands of "never welfare" families into the welfare bureaucracy. Financial incentives are often built into tax credits, reductions or bonuses to influence human behavior in home ownership, energy, water, transportation, and waste management. But sometimes the law contains incentives that produce unplanned or unexpected or undesirable results.

The Great Society welfare system is now recognized as a social disaster that created fatherless children, illegitimacy and women's dependency on the government. Channeling taxpayer handouts to mothers provided a powerful financial incentive for fathers to depart; they were not needed any more. Unfortunately, policy changes in the 1988 and 1996 welfare laws created similar financial incentives for state governments to exclude middle-class fathers from the home. The law incentivized the states to manufacture "non-custodial" fathers and to order money transfers (usually through wage garnishment) to the mothers, thereby putting a large segment of the middle class under the control of welfare bureaucrats. . . .

Federal funding thus provides powerful monetary incentives for states to maximize the number of single-parent households with high transfer payments, and to minimize equal child custody which would lessen transfer payments. Depriving or reducing children's access to one parent is thus a source of revenue for the states. These incentives drive family-court discretion and skew the opinions of the vast army of lawyers, psychologists, custody evaluators, and parenting counselors who are used to rationalize the process. They hide their predetermined custody rulings under the slogan "the best interest of the child."

Put another way, forcibly depriving children of access to one parent, usually the father because he usually has a higher income than the mother, is a big source of revenue to the states. The more support orders that are issued, the higher they are, and the more fathers who are threatened with jail and suspension of their driver's and professional licenses for challenging the system, the better chance a state will receive more money from the feds. This result was accurately predicted by Leslie L. Frye, chief of Child Support for the California Department of Social Services. In testifying to the Human Resources Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on March 20, 1997, Frye said the new regulations "encouraged states to recruit middle class families, never dependent on public assistance and never likely to be so, into their programs in order to maximize federal child support incentives."

Of the 40% of American children now growing up in homes without their own father, a few are victims of the stereotypical deadbeat dad. But most are victims of disastrous federal policies that provided incentives to create female-headed households, first by the Democrats' welfare system and then by the Republicans' so-called welfare reform. Many consciences should be burdened with the realization that taxpayers' money provides financial incentives to deprive millions of children of their own fathers. . . . [Read More]

Feminist Fatherphobia & Domestic Violence - . . . the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) . . . is a billion-dollar-a-year extension of one of the major ways that Bill Clinton bought the support of the radical feminists. Passage of VAWA was a major priority of feminist organizations and of the American Bar Association (ABA) for whose members it is a cash cow. More than 300 courts have implemented specialized docket processes to address VAWA-type cases, more than a million women have obtained protection orders from the courts, and more than 660 new state laws pertaining to domestic violence have been passed, all of which produce profitable work for lawyers.

An ABA document called "Tool for Attorneys" provides lawyers with a list of suggestive questions to encourage their clients to make domestic-violence charges. Knowing that a woman can get a restraining order against the father of her children in an ex parte proceeding without any evidence, and that she will never be punished for lying, domestic-violence accusations are a major tactic for securing sole child custody. . . . It is a shocker to discover that acts don't have to be violent to be punished under the definition of domestic violence. Name-calling, put-downs, shouting, negative looks or gestures, ignoring opinions, or constant criticizing can all be legally labeled domestic violence. The ABA report states: "Domestic violence does not necessarily involve physical violence." The feminists' mantra is, "You don't have to be beaten to be abused." VAWA advocates assert that domestic violence is a crime, yet family courts adjudicate domestic violence as a civil (not a criminal) matter. This enables courts to deny the accused all Bill of Rights and due process protections which are granted to the most heinous of criminals.

Specifically, the accused is not innocent until proven guilty but is presumed guilty, and he doesn't have to be convicted "beyond a reasonable doubt." Due process rights, such as trial by jury and the right of free counsel to poor defendants, are regularly denied, and false accusations are not covered by perjury law. VAWA provides funding for legal representation for accusers but not for defendants. . . . The ease and the speed with which women can get restraining orders without fear of punishment for lying indicates that the dynamic driving domestic-violence accusations is child custody rather than violence. Restraining orders don't prevent violence, but they do have the immediate effect of separating fathers from their children and imprisoning fathers for acts that are perfectly legal if done by anyone else (such as attending a public event at which his child is performing). . . .

VAWA money is used by anti-male feminists to train judges, prosecutors and the police in the feminist myths that domestic violence is a contagious epidemic, and that men are naturally batterers and women are naturally victims. The feminists lobby state legislators to pass must-arrest and must-prosecute laws even when the police don't observe any crime and can't produce a witness to testify about an alleged crime. Assault and battery are crimes in every state and should be prosecuted. But persons so accused should be entitled to their constitutional rights. After all, is this America? . . . [Read More]
Additional Report Topics: ABA Joins Feminists' War On Fathers and Biden Wants More Funding for Feminists

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