The Marriage Movement Is ‘Very Dismissive of Non-Custodial Fathers’
I’m quoted on the marriage movement and federal marriage programs in Mary Meehan’s recent article Marriage as social medicine (Lexington Herald-Leader, 9/25/07). According to the article:
“[Sacks] said the pro-marriage movement has become ‘kind of a mania’ and is ‘very dismissive of non-custodial fathers.’ It makes the assumption, he said, ‘that no man will take responsibility unless the government coerces them to do it’ and puts responsible fathers on the defensive.”
One of my criticisms of the marriage movement and its influential thinkers–including David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, and Elizabeth Marquardt (pictured), author of Between Two Worlds–is its view of divorced fathers.
In Fatherless America, Blankenhorn has many good things to say on the importance of fathers and of intact families. In one email exchange with David, I told him that I had been reading his book on a Sunday when my wife and kids had gone to see a movie, and that while reading it I kept looking out the window to see if they had come back yet–the book really made me want to be with my kids.
Yet Blankenhorn errs by placing almost all blame for family breakdown on fathers, who allegedly “abandon” their children. A couple years ago there was a little three-sided debate over this assertion between Blankenhorn, Stephen Baskerville and I at the Family Scholars blog here.
Marquardt does make a substantive effort to be gender-balanced in Between Two Worlds, and she makes a good case that what children need are married parents, though she overstates it a bit. Yet Marquardt is very opposed to shared parenting and has a low regard for the contributions of noncustodial parents after a divorce. To her credit, she acknowledged this issue at the Children’s Rights Council conference last year, explaining that her previous analysis seemed to end at family breakdown, providing no answers for the millions of families which have already broken down.
The Herald-Leader article mostly deals with federal marriage programs. One is the “Bluegrass Healthy Marriage Initiative, one of the federally funded programs, [which opertaes] under a three-year, $1 million grant with the goal of promoting marriage and increasing the amount of money unwed fathers pay in child support.”
I’m all for promoting marriage, but some of these federal programs seem to be more oriented towards fathers-as-wallets than serious attempts to create stable families.
We did a His Side with Glenn Sacks show on this a few years ago called “Bush’s Marriage Initiative: A Step Forward for Families or a State Intrusion?” The show featured a debate between Stephen Baskerville, a critic of the Initiative, and Rozario Slack of First Things First, one of the most prominent advocates of the proposals. To learn more and to listen to the show, click here.
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September 26th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Clearly one of Father’s biggest obsticales is the misinformation about fatherlessness. I have always been a great father to all my children and yet with the birth of my youngest son, the courts, with little reasoning, turned me into a visitor without my agreement or desire. In fact this was in complete contradiction to my wishes to be an invovled father.
So in my view fatherlessness is a manifestation of a screwed up court system.
BTW – thier arguement – off the record – was that I was just trying to get out of paying child support.
September 26th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
John Adams said, “FEAR is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men, in whose breasts it predominates, so stupid, and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” He wrote this in his Thoughts on Government, 1776.
Our government seeks to force married couples to remain married with fear. They seek to marginalize parents that have kids out-of-wedlock by pinning a scarlet letter on them. They seek to force parents out of their children’s lives so that they can turn them into mind-numbed robots and future clients of the state.
Oh ya, tyranny is alive and well and living right here among us.
Our government, run by trial lawyers, know that their client base is largely those people that belong to the “Great Duped Society”. These are the people that believe the liberal Democrats and the big-brother Republicans, trust that Ahm-a-nutta-job is telling them the truth, and have become accustomed to the Big Lie that government grants rights. Whenever a person is down on their luck, demoralized, somewhat depressed or just plain helpless, as in our children; the trial lawyers swoop in and take them.
Shakespeare had it right, kill all the lawyers. Frankly, they are a larger threat than any terrorist will ever be to our freedoms.
Blankenhorn and Marquardt are sinister and evil pawns of their employers!
September 26th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
All of us have right to be raised by both our own parents. We are born with this right. We own this right. Any interference in our basic human rights from this government or any other will be met with hatred and spite. The kind of spite that only you evil, wicked, and filled-with-hatred morons attempt to dish-out upon us. It won’t be tolerated any longer. You pond scum, slimmers make my skin crawl.
September 26th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Fathers’ Rights and the Marriage Movement
http://mensnewsdaily.com/secondaries/roundtable/roundtable.htm
September 26th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
The marraige contract has become the new ceremony of the male yolking!!
Go ahead, get married, and get yolked like cattle!!!
http://www.mattweeks.com/strike.htm
September 26th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
a man needs women like a bird needs a boat anchor. wise up.
September 26th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
hmh1497 is correct, governments DO NOT grant rights, but they get their jollies trying to play God and take them away. hmh1497 is also correct in that those oppressed by this process ( ie fathers and men) will get mad and will sooner or later strike back. I have already struck back, no.. not with force, but by learning to use the “REAL LAW” yes the good old U.S. constitution. You see the courts* are vested with authority and processes guaranteed by that moldy old document, ie constitution. citizens can take away that power if it is abused and boy has it been abused!
I have been doing research for several years now and am very close to perfecting these processes. I have had some sucess against the GiSKERS( government sponsored kidnapping and extortion racket). I have, by trial and error, mostly error, figured out how the court system* really works. I have found out how they manage to get away with totally ignoring the constitutional rights of people. hint: The system they operate under is not based on the constitution it is based on commercial law ( a system based on contracts and fictional entities, not real people)
If anyone has questions, email me: powerfulthirsty@yahoo.com
* The only real court in this country, ie one operating as an Article 3 court is the Supreme Court. All other so called courts are infact equity tribunals operating under article 1.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:32 am
A government’s value of any group is proportional to the rights and privileges it gives them. For example, to dissolve a marriage, American government allows only one spouse to decide to divorce, and no reason is required – get in line, fill out a form with about a $25 filing fee, wait awhile, for the woman’s payments are forthcoming. Further, in general a father’s right to children, property, income, and freedom compared to that given to women in American is substantially different. So American government does not value marriage or fathers.
Justice is mostly politics when viewed as groups of people.
September 27th, 2007 at 7:22 am
A conundrum for the time. Where to focus? Reversing anti father laws to benefit those already being punished is indeed worthy. Putting a stop to the disease that starts the ball rolling is what will change a generation. Nothing is wrong with either area of activism. But be clear, one is the symptom, the other is the disease.
Marriage contracts not breakable by unilateral action lacking punitive measures will stop this crime.
September 27th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Where do the players of the marriage movement stand on the push for androgyny? Seems there is little or no motivation for the modern female that BELIEVES herself the equivalent to males both mentally and physically to marry. When the complimentary nature of the male female relationship is replaced with direct competition, the family unit and traditional marriage is simply history.
It’s been years since I have communicated with Blankenhorn et al. It appears little or nothing has change in the last decade other than government funding for the marriage movement.
September 27th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
I think we need a study that determines what percent of fathers “abandon” their children and what percent are driven out by malicious mothers and the family law that panders to them.
Think about it. These a-holes like Blanjenhorn must not be allowed to play this game any longer, and exposing the reality that government is mass-producing fatherless children then blaming it on fathers could be the catlyst that would end the corruption and exploitation of children and fathers by greedy lawyers, hate-filled feminists, and PC politicians.
It would be very interesting to see what the percentages were when asking different parties for the same cases:
1. Government caseworkers involved
2. Mothers
3. Fathers
My guesses for claiming “abandonment” are, 90% (government), 80% (mothers), and 10% (fathers). If the study is solid, it could bring an end to the family destruction racket, as it would expose the corruption. At a minimum, it could be the catalyst to force some questions to get some honest answers for a change.
In my case, the state would call it “abandonment”, the mother would call it whatever she has been telling the children to alienate them from me, and anybody who spoke with me about it for a few minutes would clearly see outrage at having been driven away, even six years after the corrupt court got all the money it could get then got rid of me.
I sure hope Dr Baskerville at least starts to blow the lid off of this phony garbage spewed by government sleaze like Blankenhorn in his new book.