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.
