Honorable men being cheated, Celebrating Fathers: Protecting the Right to Provide
The following article was previously published in the Charlestown Gazette on June 8, 2008 and the Washington Times on June 13, 2008
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the modern celebration of Father’s Day. It may sound as a truism that fathers should be respected in their role as providers, laborers, soldiers and the sacrifices they make for their family and country.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the modern celebration of Father’s Day. It may sound as a truism that fathers should be respected in their role as providers, laborers, soldiers and the sacrifices they make for their family and country. Yet, as preoccupied as the fathers’ rights movement is with false allegations of abuse, as a practicing family law attorney, I can tell the No. 1 reason by far that men lose custody of their children in divorce courts is because they are soldiers and laborers.
They have committed the unpardonable sin of being breadwinners. They are punished for their sacrifices that are a concomitant of defending our country and providing for their families. While unions have mired themselves in issues barely related to the labor movement, they are completely silent on the blatant discrimination their members face when they walk in an American family court simply for being laborers.
It is indeed a great irony, that this reason that fathers lose custody of their children in our nation’s courts, their status as laborers, was the very impetus of the first Father’s Day.
The first modern Father’s Day celebration in the United States was Sunday, July 5, 1908, in Fairmont at a memorial service at the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church. Grace Golden Clayton, the founder of the first Father’s Day in the United States, was inspired by the mining disaster at Monongah on Dec. 6, 1907, at the mines of the Consolidated Coal Co., the worst mining accident in U.S. history. At least 363 men and boys were killed in the explosion, although some say the number is even higher.
The Rev. Everett Francis Briggs (1908-2006), a Catholic priest and advocate for miners, believed the number was closer to 1,000. The Fairmont Times of Sept. 23, 1979, has this quote by Grace Clayton: “It was partly the explosion that got me to thinking how important and loved most fathers are. All those lonely children and those heart-broken wives and mothers, made orphans and widows in a matter of a few minutes. Oh, how sad and frightening to have no father, no husband, to turn to at such an awful time.”
While there has been an explosion of women in the work force since 1908, almost all workplace-related fatalities are suffered by men. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, women now make up 46 percent of the work force but account for only 8 percent of on-the-job fatalities. During March 2008, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq reached 4,000 – women account for only 1 percent of these deaths. Men take on the jobs that make them far more likely to die, get maimed or be seriously injured. Fathers are our soldiers, our construction workers, our industrial workers and our miners.
Men and fathers have become disposable. They were disposable in 1908 in Monongah. They are disposable today in Afghanistan and Iraq. They still die or are seriously injured at coal mines, construction sites and factories. They drive tractor-trailers in ridiculously perilous sleep-deprived conditions and drive taxicabs into dangerous neighborhoods late at night. They are our cannon fodder to die in the battlefield, and our beasts of burden to die on worksites. And at the end of the day, we thank them by taking their children from them in family courts for being the primary breadwinner.
When Mario Cuomo described his father, he said, “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottom of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”
You might believe this man is a hero. But our family courts find him an unsuitable candidate for joint custody because he was not the “primary caretaker.”
The beauty of the first Father’s Day is it proved the ultimate nexus between fatherhood and labor. Only an unjust society punishes the sacrifices of the laborer in family court by the extreme penalty of taking his children from him. Only those who know nothing of parenthood would deprive children of such “simple but eloquent examples” that their laboring fathers represent.
In America today, there are boys and girls who yearn to see their fathers come home from work, maybe with coal on his face, maybe with oil on his hands, or maybe tired from the long haul. Dad is their hero. But it is not a mining disaster, a construction mishap, or an industrial accident that stops dad from coming in the front door at night. It is an order of the court that faulted them for being a laborer.
Del Gallo, of Pittsfield, Mass., practices family law and is spokesman for the fathers’ rights group the Berkshire Fatherhood Coalition, also in Massachusetts.
ABOUT THE CHARLESTOWN GAZETTE: The Charlestown Gazette combines on Saturdays and Sundays with the Charlestown Daily Mail. On Saturday and Sunday mornings the combined Gazette-Mail is published, however it is produced by the Gazette. The Sunday paper has 90,000 to 100,000 subscribers. My column originally appeared Sunday, June 8, 2008.
ABOUT THE WASHINGTON TIMES: The Washington Times is a daily in the Washington, D.C. area with over 100,000 readers.
About Rinaldo Del Gallo Rinaldo Del Gallo, III, Esq. is the spokesperson of the Berkshire Fatherhood Coalition, whose website is BerkshireFatherhood.com. He has been practicing family law attorney and has been a member of the Massachusetts bar since 1996. Mr. Del Gallo has handled a wide variety of family law cases including issues of child custody, child visitation, child support, restraining orders, grandparent visitation, contempt of family court, access to academic records, guardianship, allegations of abuse, criminal allegations related to domestic violence, disputes over the care of a child, and care and protection proceedings before the Department of Social Services. For years, he has hosted bi-monthly free legal seminars for people of any gender having problems in family court. On behalf of non-custodial parents, he has had made numerous media appearances in printed news, radio, and television. He has authored numerous family law related articles and columns. He has performed extensive bro bono work for fathers. Attorney Del Gallo also has extensive experience as a civil rights attorney, working in the areas of free speech rights and ballot access. Mr. Del Gallo is also an intellectual property attorney and a patent lawyer, and has written what is regarded as one of the most famous law reviews in the area of patent law, “Are Methods of Doing Business Finally Out of Business As A Statutory Exception?,†that helped end the so-called “business method exception,†which paved the way for an entire field of software and Internet related patents. Attorney Del Gallo graduated from Northeastern University (Boston) with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, and graduated from George Washington University (Washington) in the top of his three-year class. | More from Rinaldo Del Gallo, III
Stumble It!
June 20th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Sing it LOUD. Sing that song. SHOUT it out in the courts. Every family Court needs to hear these words at EVERY sitting.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:55 am
The courts know they can’t plunder the non-breadwinner thereby receiving kickbacks from the feds. Perhaps a “Men’s Studies” course that told the truth versus those propaganda-laden womens studies courses, would warn and spare a percentage of our younger generation of men.
Perhaps if women had to drill for their own oil, mine their own coal, haul their own goods, fight on the front lines, fight fires, apprehend dangerous criminals, farm for food, repair their own cars, work iron, build roads, build railroads, work high-amp power lines, mill lumber, do all those jobs done primarily by men and from which women benefit, they would demand true equality. My apologies to the .0001% of women actually working these dangerous and often deadly occupations.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
A monumental mistake has been made. Continuity of care is very important in unbroken families, and this fact has led to courts to assume that mothers should have the children to maintain the continuity of the ‘main caretaker’. But with broken families the situation is different. Exclusion of the father creates the most harm, although that harm will probably not register until adolescence. A cross-cultural study by Bacon, Child and Barry shows that societies in which fathers are excluded have much higher rates of crime and violence than those in which fathers are honoured. A study of delinquency in Minnesota by Hathaway and Monachesi shows that single fathers keep the delinquency rate of their children below the average for the whole community, whereas single mothers have children with a 46% occurrence of delinquency (even higher than children who live with neither parent). You can see where our social breakdown is coming from.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Defining fathers as “providers” is one of the biggest reasons why society is the feminist mess that it is.
Consider the typical divorce situation: men are viewed as the “provider” (paycheck)and as such are ordered to pay their ex-wives (via child support)to raise the sons and daughters that the men now are only visitors to by standard feminist court order.
Women, on the other hand, are viewed as the caregiver (parent) and so get full custody in virtually all cases because of that. Correspondingly, they get to raise their sons and daughters while using the courts as a weapon to marginalize their ex-husband.
This situation is a direct result of men being cast as “providers”, and women being cast as “caregivers”, showing the incredibly profound harm that those polarized roles do to men and to their children.
The real revolution will be of men refusing to have less parenting time of their children, whether they were never married, are currently married, or are now divorced.
Subscribing to men being primarily “providers” and women being primarily “caregivers” feeds the feminist court and societal system. That system could not survive if a majority of fathers became the primary caregivers of their own children. That is what must happen.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
It isnt feminism !
Its the vicious bigotry of leading males of the land and their electoral supporters. Male traitors whom earn decent profits and middle class salaries, creating and servicing structures to basterdise children and isolate them from their fathers.
June 21st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Poiut you are correct, the women and the feminazi’s would not be the menace to fathers and men, without the help of corupt wicked old men who want to run a government sponsored kidnapping and extortion racket off the backs of other men.
A civil rights movement for fathers and men needs to get going. Something in the style of Martin Luther King. A peaceful, hopefully* massive protest to the indignities and injustices suffered by men at the hands of this God awful racket. One we make it clear, we will not stand for it anymore and will put a stop to it. Either by lawful and peaceful methods, or . God forbid, if that fails, regretably by force. Change will come!
* Our government is so corrupt, that they arrogantly believe that the rule of law does not apply to them. It certainly does, they do know this, but they constantly try to shake loose the moral and constitutional limits that were intended to make them act as our servants. Very soon I fear, it will take force, ie men with guns will have to remove the evil bastards and that will be a disaster!
June 21st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Any successful future for the rights of fathers must not involve any violence. I realize that almost no one suggests that it should or will, but when even a few seem to be predicting it, the millions of men who disavow such a course get even more fallaciously portrayed by the ideological feminist mainstream media.
There are many other ways to fight. With votes, with meetings, with taking over county level Republican groups, by talking with friends, by writing letters to the editor, and by refusing to be a secondary parent in one’s own life.
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:42 am
That’s right. Violence is completely ineffective. Men need to begin blogging, posting comments, contributing money to men’s rights groups on a regular basis, etc. There are some very basic things that we all need to be doing, but very few men are doing them.
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
A little history lesson is in order here. I don’t want for men to have to resort to the use of MILITARY FORCE, read that military force, not a few nuts with guns. Corrupt governments have and still do get to the point a peaceful approach will not work,look at Ole Saddam, he waw a monster and even the threat of force did not sway him, he had to be removed. It took force and God forbid, I hope, I pray we are not too late to use peaceful means, but look around, the government is getting progressively more and more out of control. To a whole lot of them, the rule of law means nothing.
Now while the rule of law still hold and as of this moment it still does, men need to learn the law,how it works and how to fight back legally. If we do that we might forstall having to end up using force. If we can stop the corrupt bastards before a civil war is necessary, then that save a lot of innocents and a lot of damage to our country, but like it not or agree with it or not, force may end up having to be used to restore our rights, history is just full of such lessons.