Usher Review

V-Day: Latter-Day Feminist prophets of Baal speak

It does not take a bible scholar to understand that V-day is a “celebration” by and for the benefit of second-wave feminist prophets to instill hate of men and heterosexual marriage in young women.

The true purpose of V-day runs much deeper than child sexual abuse by lesbians in the “Vagina Monologues”. Mass glorification of the female anatomy, the monolithic costumry, and the claim it is to end “violence against women” around the world, are merely eye and ear candy designed to distract us from understanding the real political agenda behind the event.

Forty years ago, women ripped their bras off thinking feminism meant sexual liberation and equal rights. What they bought into was the idea the men and marriage was a bad idea. Many women ended up divorced -- struggling not to slip into the underclass. The family became the property of second-wave feminists in government, and our freedoms and rights went right out the window with it.

In similar fashion, V-Day is also a communist-style mobilization designed to inculcate and enforce the broader cult agenda of second-wave campus feminists. Their front-line anti-family agenda includes inculcation of lesbianism, same-sex marriage, discrimination against men in home and society, and abortion up until the moment of birth.

Raising money to stop violence against women in third-world countries is the supposed reason for this gnashing of female genitalia. But by the time feminist organizations take their cut for throwing the event, we can be fairly certain that not much more than 15% of it ever goes overseas.

The ideological illusion of V-day is that men commit all serious domestic violence, when in fact women are responsible for initiating slightly over half of all serious spousal altercations. Feminists see no difference between normal minor spousal disagreements and murder. Dr. Murray Straus calls this the “clinical fallacy”.

When spousal disagreement is caused by a woman’s drinking or drugging problem, feminists tell her she is a victim and use VAWA to throw her husband out of the family. Many children end up being raised by chemical-abusing mothers who are far more likely to abuse or neglect them. This is clearly not what women in trouble need! A woman with a drinking or drugging problem needs treatment, not a divorce!

The V-day mobilization is designed to terrify those who do not agree with feminist dicta into quiet submission. Ancient Welsh warriors won by going into battle stark naked, smeared from head-to-toe with “woad” (a frightening blue vegetable dye). Today, feminists go into battle dressed as vaginas while screaming “violence” and “rape”.

V-day is largely a campus event. Feminists know that change begins on campus, so they want to make sure they run college campuses with an iron fist.

Roger Williams University, in Rhode Island, is a perfect example. While V-day proponents blanket the campus with agitprop and oversized female anatomy, those who object to it have been placed on probation for staging a parody of what campus feminists did – by donning a six-foot penis, named Testiclese – which was seized.

It is quite obvious that the Provost – who lowered the boom -- is terrified of campus feminists too. He probably should be. It is also quite likely feminists have some dirt about his personal life they are controlling him with.

This brings us to another feminist paradox. The personal is the political – only if the target is a man. When a man fools around, he is a bum. When a woman fools around, it is because the man isn’t good enough in bed.

Federal funds going to feminist campus organizations must be cut off. Campus feminist organizations are not separate entities and do not practice firewalled accounting. Federal funds are used for all sorts of feminist initiatives.

Feminist campus organizations receiving federal funds operate under names such as “Students Against Sexism In Society” (SASS). Their funding gets used for community mobilization, lobbying, and politicking on a variety of radical feminist initiatives, including abortion, same sex marriage, and divorce laws.

Since Congress obviously isn’t going to fund men’s or pro-marriage organizations, Congress or President Bush should simply end feminist pork entirely -- such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). When college campuses have a level playing field, it will be possible for healthy pro-marriage, woman friendly policies to naturally rise to public policy though the normal political process.

Here are a couple of suggestions to college students.

Men: Keep a list of women involved in V-day. These are the last women on earth you want to date, unless of course you want to end up divorced, or with a paternity suit or two, and a slave to the welfare state. Plan a P-day rally for next year, and don't back down about it. If your girlfriend won't join you, find another girlfriend immediately.

Women: If you are involved in V-day, get out before you turn into an animal. If your girlfriends invite you to go, square with them and decline the offer. If the women's studies department is pushing this, do not be afraid to stand up in class and read them this article.

Let endorphin-challenged oxytocin-free feminists stew in their own testosterone this Valentine’s day. Let us teach love, healing, and tolerance; not hate. One billion Valentine’s day cards cannot be wrong. The vast majority of women prefer truffles and lattes to ending up single mothers having to “do it all”. The choice is up to each of us.

David R. Usher is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition

Coretta King hijacked: Republicans are the party of civil rights

Coretta Scott King’s memorial service suffered from what may be the raucous choir of political howlers ever assembled. Only a Martian who landed yesterday could believe that Democrats brought about the greatest civil rights advancements in America.

For starters, Republican Abe Lincoln debated one Stephen Douglas all over the country about emancipation of slaves to win the Presidency. The Emancipation Proclamation, and a war with deep-south Democrats settled it. After the union won, hard core Confederates hustled down to Brazil, founding the city of Americana, to stay on top of things. Today, Brazil does not have a middle class to speak of. Just the very rich and very poor.

Then, there was the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It passed the Senate 73 to 27 vote led by Republicans, with 6 Republicans and 21 Democrats voting against it.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed with Republicans favoring the bill 138 to 34, Democrats supported it with only a 152-96 majority. But this was only after a hysterical 52-day Democrat filibuster, led by Democratic Senator Everett Dirksen, collapsed under mounting public pressure.

In the post 1933 era, Democrats opposed civil rights legislation over 80% of the time, while Republicans opposed it only 4% of the time.

But there is still a missing link in the civil-rights picture. Why is it that blacks have not advanced as we would have expected since 1964?

This is predominantly due to anti-family Democrat policies, such as the Great Society, feminism, and "divorce for the hell of it". The haves and have-nots are defined by family structure, which has substantively been shaped by dovetailed anti-family federal entitlements and state policies stimulating perverse family breakup.

The federal spending is horrifying. Since 1963, an amount greater than the national debt has been spent breaking up families! Our national debt is simply a reflection of a 40-year family structure deficit.

Hitler gained control of families by turning children against their parents. Feminists accomplished it by turning women and children against husbands. Democrats built careers institutionalizing it in the name of the “war on poverty”.

Women who got married and stayed married climbed the social ladder. Those who did not slid down it. This problem is most severe in black families, where 70% of children are born out of wedlock, women live in poverty-lock and men are locked in debtor’s prison to the government for welfare they can’t afford to pay back.

Republicans have taken a long time to figure this out. The figuring is this: Republican economic conservatives can’t get a keep a continuing balanced budget with the Great Society eating at least a third of federal spending. They have finally realized Republican social conservatives are a necessary and important part of the party.

Recently, a torrent of National Review and Town Hall articles have blasted second-wave feminism for waging an illegitimate 40-year war on marriage and men that left half of all American children fatherless. Finally, Republicans are realizing that father-absence did not happen because men ran out on marriage (as Saul Alinksy disciple David Blankenhorn fooled them into believing over a decade ago). Feminism and their Democrat partners are the cause. This is a profound realization suggesting that real pro-marriage and pro-father policies may not be too far down the road.

Heterosexual marriage guarantees equal civil rights between men and women, proper raising of children, a civil society, and a strong economy. Everything else destroys it.

Just count all the Democrat organizations doing everything else. Profoundly, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are the most indignant promoters of policies that break up the black family, leading a pack of organizations married to the welfare state, thus keeping blacks in the chaotic underclass they complain about.

The National Organization for Women, which brought about the divorce revolution in the middle and upper classes, has left more women and children in poverty than any other organization in the history of America.

In March, a large contingent of pro-marriage advocates, including myself, will attend the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, Tennessee, on behalf of Dr. Mark Klein, a strong pro-family candidate from California seeking the 2008 GOP Presidential nomination.

The time is right for a second Republican revolution. There are few voters who have not suffered terribly under fifty years of Democrat policy that has funded half of American families off the face of the earth. We cannot have a balanced budget until the war against the American family is finally ended and peace is declared between all men and women.

David R. Usher is President of the
American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition

How to reform the corrupt legal system

If there is one thing that almost everyone agrees on, it is this: courts are too often corrupt and inflict horrid injustices on litigants before the bench.

Why does this happen?

The legal profession is a de-jure vertical trade monopoly. It is also the only trade that entirely regulates and disciplines itself. Bar Associations are, before anything else, trade organizations that push policies and law that increase business opportunities for lawyers. This is why liberal courts entertain many outrageous cases lacking statutory or clear constitutional foundations, while strangely dismissing others that do.

Bar associations go to great lengths to stifle internal discipline. For example, attorneys are perhaps the only professionals not protected by whistleblower laws. What nobody knows about never happened.

Holding a law license does not guarantee one is a competent, honest attorney. It means that person does what is dictated by the Bar. At the top level, Rules of Court make it a disbar-able offense for an attorney to publicly criticize another attorney or judge – or for judges to criticize each other -- no matter how horrid the offense. If there is one thing Bar Associations enforce with vigor – it is their own anti-whistleblower rules.

Attorneys are not the only individuals bound and gagged. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of legitimate complaints are filed with bar association disciplinary Commissions each year. Few result in anything more than a terse official letter from the Bar informing the complainant that the issue is now a private matter that can not be mentioned to anyone under punishment of some law that probably does not even exist.

It is very rare to see an attorney or judge disciplined or disbarred. In fact, about the only time this occurs is when an attorney does something so momentous and so public that the Bar must take action due to public pressure.

Attorneys must play the corruption game in order to become a judge. After becoming a judge, the former attorney has to play ball to stay in good standing with the Bar. He must cover for mal-practicing attorneys while exerting great pressure on the “honest” attorneys to keep the clients from “going public”.

The breadth of control and corruption in courts today makes the combined practices of Microsoft, Teapot Dome and Tammany Hall pale in comparison -- spanning from the federal class-action gold-mines in Madison County, Illinois to divorce courts across the country.

In fact, it is reasonable to say that the Bar is the “fourth branch” of government, controlling the other three according to its business interests.

When viewed from this understanding, it is easy to see why the ACLU litigates all sorts of things that go against the interests of its supposed constituency. We see why VAWA continues to exist – not to protect women – but to drive as many families into the divorce machine as possible. Endless Congressional issues such as welfare, health care, and retirement benefits never get resolved because the Bar has enough clout to block legitimate Congresspeople from moving forward. This tremendous problem affects everyone. It must be ended as soon as possible in all states.

There is a very simple and sensible way to break this cycle. It starts with the legislative establishment of a “separation of judiciary and law trade” doctrine, and state-level Commissions to regulate and discipline attorneys:

1. State legislatures must assert the settled legislative authority they hold over business trades to include oversight of attorneys. Attorneys are not judges, and therefore are not exempted by the “separation of powers” doctrine. At this level, attorneys are not different from their counterparts in the fields of medicine, insurance, and accounting.

2. State Legislatures should create an Attorney Oversight Commission, perhaps operating under the department of public safety. The Commission should be comprised of 13 retired non-attorney members, two of which are alternate Commissioners, and two non-voting members who retired attorneys. The two attorneys would serve in an advisory capacity as to issues of law, and not have a vote in cases presented to the Commission.

3. The Attorney Oversight Commission will be appointed for life, or upon voluntary resignation, and drawn by lottery. Lottery applicants must hold a four-year bachelor’s degree or better in their field of expertise. Voting applicants may not be from the legal profession, or have immediate family or parents who have held a law license. Applicants should not also hold their degree in social work, psychology, or women’s studies because these fields often work as special advocates in the court system. Commission members will be paid a reasonable sum for their work, plus expenses for alternate housing and travel expenses.

4. Commission members may be removed by the State’s attorney, and replacement drawn from the lottery, upon showing that a Commission member has been convicted of a class 2 (or B) misdemeanor or greater, or where it is demonstrated to the State’s Attorney by physical evidence that a Commissioner no longer meets requirements to sit on the Commission, or has been compromised and connived in any way with anyone to prevent the Commission from performing its duty.

5. Complaints of attorney misbehavior will be heard by the Commission. As cases come in, they should be assigned to two Commission members, who co-manage the case and develop the points, and a preliminary recommendation for presentation and open hearing by the full Commission.

6. All hearings must be fully open to the public, and all findings published on an accessible web site.

7. The Commission must have power of subpoena, enforceable by the State’s Attorney to view private, court, and attorney records, and to subpoena any individual whose testimony is deemed important by the two case managers.

8. The Commission must also have authority to temporarily or permanently disqualify court appointees such as court liaisons, guardian ad litems, psychologists, and other advocates that courts appoint, particularly in family law cases. Special advocates are often the worst offenders – used by corrupt attorneys to do their bidding behind the scenes.

9. The Commission should be funded to allow temporary retainer of retired individuals to research and help discern information in complex cases, at reasonable cost to the State. The kinds of individuals needed will be paralegals (who were never licensed attorneys), accountants, doctors, and any other licensed professionals. To work on a case, retiree specialists must sign an affidavit stating that they have no personal relationship with anyone named in the case, and no other conflict of interest.

10. If a Commission member has any conflict of interest in a case before the Commission, the member shall disqualify him/herself, and an alternate Commissioner appointed.

11. The level of discipline must be methodically defined in statute. I recommend four levels of malpractice definitions, codified in statute based on severity of the infraction. Any offense that would constitute a disbar-able offense will count as a class 4 (or D) infraction in statute. Lesser infractions, based on damage to the complainant or the case, would score 1 though 3 points.

12. After a case is heard, the Commission will vote to determine the outcome. Of the 11 possible votes, a score 10 or 11 or will result in permanent disbarment, plus fines and public censure. A score between 8 or 9 results in disbarment of two and four years, respectively, plus fines and public censure. A score of 7 will result fines and public censure. A score of 6 will result in public censure and refund of fees only.

13. When the vote is 7 or greater, fines will be calculated by multiplying the number of points, times $20,000, plus refund of attorney fees, payable to the victim. A small percentage of the fines will go to the state to cover costs of operating the Commission. The attorney must also refund all fees to the victim.

14. When fines or censures are levied, case decisions will be published on the Commission website. When the vote is 5 or less, the Commission will confidentially retain case information, for tracking possible repeat violators.

15. Case decisions may be vetoed by the Governor, who has 30 days to rescind the finding for cause stated, before the decision is final. Approval of the decision by the Governor shall not be required.

This system will work extremely well. It will no longer be possible for dishonest attorneys to practice long enough to become judges, regardless of local elective or appointive judicial practices.

After implementation, judges will be free to make decisions based on case facts, no longer hiding corrupt courtroom behavior. Over time, the quality of trial judges will rise, as a new fleet of honest attorneys work their way on to the bench. Subsequent appointments to higher court positions will further increase the quality of jurisprudence for all Americans.

David R. Usher is President
of the
American Coalition for Fathers and Children,
Missouri Coalition

Miami Herald: “Predators Among Us” is pure adulterated misandry

A major article in this Sunday’s issue of the Miami Herald, “Predators Among Us”, a sickening example of sexism in America, because female child sexual predation is entirely excluded from the report.

If journalistic hate crimes were a felony, the Miami Herald would be guilty of it.

The Herald claims that “Florida's program for screening, confining and treating sexual offenders who pose the greatest threat to women and children is failing, a six-month investigation by The Miami Herald found” [emphasis added].

What about female child sexual predators in Florida? Or does Florida not have any?

For many years, we pretended that domestic violence was purely a male-on-female issue. We have come out of this dark age – we now know that half of all serious spousal altercations are caused by women. Changes in public policy are changing appropriately – but too slowly.

Professional feminists are always looking for a new ideological crowbar to cause systemic discrimination against men in home, family, and society. Now that the feminist paradigm of family violence has been largely debunked, they have switched using a different ideological buzz-saw: Child sexual abuse.

It has long been thought that child sexual predation by females either did not exist or was extremely rare, and is therefore not a public issue worth mentioning. We now know this is quite false. Here is WorldNetDaily’s short list of teachers who recently were accused or convicted of abusing male students. At least four of them are in Florida. They are definitely not the only ones.

Female child sexual predation by female teachers has recently become a major issue. We have recently seen many cases which perhaps came to light only because of comparatively aggressive systems in place in public schools to trap and handle these issues.

But female child sexual predation in other situations is not yet reported or properly investigated. According to the Washington Times, between 1991 and 2002 the number of female offenders doing time has doubled. Allison Taylor, executive director of the Texas Council on Sex Offender Treatment, attributes this to better reporting.

According to the Tampa Tribune, we now have reason to believe that about 40% of child sexual abuse acts are committed by women. Maria Molett, Executive Director of the Counseling Institute of Texas says that “Female sexual deviancy is just as real and damaging as male sexual deviancy, recalling how one of her clients — an ex-teacher — had convinced herself that the teenage boy she assaulted loved her”.

The real story conveniently ignored by the Miami Herald is this: the state of Florida is systemically behind in reporting, prosecuting and tracking female sexual predators. According to the Florida Department of Corrections, only 2.4% of child sexual predators are women. This is absolutely false. With what we do know, it is not unreasonable to say that perhaps 95% of female child sex offenders in Florida are not even reported and get away with it scot-free.

Governor Jeb Bush lags far behind his counterparts in Texas, where pro-social Republicans are far less likely to go along with radical anti-family agitprop hawked by professional feminists.

This cannot change so long as feminist political correctness drives the Miami Herald and public policy in the State of Florida. The Herald is very much a part of the problem.

Virtually every college campus stages performances of the “Vagina Monologues” each year. The “Vagina Monologues” features a steamy reading rationalizing the notion that child sexual predation by women is a beautiful thing -- fulfilling for the woman and an educational experience for the young boy.

There are few literary works that treat men with more hate and disrespect than the “Vagina Monologues”. Yet, the Miami Herald treats the “Vagina Monologues” as a great work. The Herald even presents a clearly-false illusion that Eve Ensler is “not a polemicist”.

To ignore child sexual abuse by women is to condone it. Beyond ignorance, child sexual predation by women is being driven by college campus feminists and newspapers such as the Miami Herald, who ignore what women do and blame all our social problems on men.

The Miami Herald has perhaps violated the rules of journalistic balance even more severely than PBS did in its documentary “Breaking the Silence”. In that case, PBS did something it has never done before in its 25-year history – commissioned a new documentary out of its own pocket to set the record straight.

The Miami Herald must now set the record straight too. There are many female pedophiles not being reported in Florida and being let out of prison without proper vetting under the Jimmy Ryce Act.

Neither racism or sexism are acceptable. We will not accept anything less than balanced journalism on important issues of sex.

David R. Usher is President of the
American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition

Why the Bush Administration and Congress must reject the Institute For American Values

My last article “Now, Republicans must deliver on core values” provides a strong analysis showing why Republicans failed to deliver on social policy reforms promised in the Contract for America.

Now, we will take a hard look at the orga

nization responsible for fooling the Republican Congress and President Bush into pursuing liberal anti-family social policy for the past decade – the Institute for American Values (IAV), and its offshoots marriagemovement.org, americanvalues.org, familyscholars.org, and watchoutforchildren.org.

In 1995, David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America”, a book that took the nation by storm. The book was a riveting scholarly documentary about the “absent father”, the importance and shortage of “necessary fathers”, the plight of under-parented children, and structural poverty associated with “father-absence”. Curiously, he blamed all these problems on male irresponsibility without citing any basis in fact for arriving at such a conclusion, and offered no answers to any of the problems.

The Liberal Set-Up

David Blankenhorn had busily organized the answers behind the scenes for several years before his book was published. His organization, the IAV, had a long list of liberals and professional feminists that had been influencing a broad spectrum of policy and legislation since approximately 1990. The IAV orchestrated and provided core mentorship and political ideologies for Tommy Thompson’s welfare reforms, PROWA, and later, President Bush’s “Healthy Marriages” Initiative.

Wade Horn, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative and an IAV signatory for years, oddly became Assistant Undersecretary for the HHS Family Support division shortly after the election of George W. Bush. Horn was also a fellow of the Hudson Institute (which was also fooled by the Blankenhorn Lie).

Wade Horn wrote hundreds of fabulous pro-marriage articles published widely in leading conservative publications. But, after appointment, Wade Horn refused to live up to his writings. He refused to do anything to change administrative rules or recommend legislation to ensure that military reservists called into active duty are not over-assessed support or criminalized. His “Fathers Count” bill merely gave millions in federal money to NFI to coax poor fathers into paying child support on the promise that they “might” get to be fathers. “Fathers Count” does not allow NFI spend one nickel to make it possible for poor fathers to be fathers.

Further, Wade Horn failed to take corrective action to resolve a number of very serious anti-family problems at HHS, including systemic participation in paternity fraud, over-reporting of child support debt, and systemic criminalization of poor fathers who are regularly over-assessed child support.

IAV members also worked quietly with Robert Williams, President of PSI, on aggressive child support collection methods. PSI developed the “Williams Model”, which is used by most states to determine child support orders. PSI also holds more state child support enforcement contracts than any other company.

The Williams model is known to be corrupt: the data on which it is based never existed. Lenore Weitzman, whose calculations form the assumptions for the Williams Model, admitted that her research data was “invented” some years ago. The “Weitzman Fallacy was thoroughly debunked in Sanford Braver’s book Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths.

The “Blankenhorn Lie”

There are several books full of scandals involving the items outlined above. This article will focus on the pivotal scandal -- the "Blankenhorn Lie" -- and how this fooled Republicans into adopting anti-family feminist social policy agendae.

David Blankenhorn’s book Fatherless America, published in 1995, set forth an astonishing claim: ”Never before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers …. Today, the principal cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice…the rising rate of paternal abandonment”.

Many have challenged Dave Blankenhorn to back this claim up over the past decade. He has never responded despite hundreds of requests. This is because Dave Blankenhorn lied to America.

The Blankenhorn Lie was the talk of the nation for nearly a year. It sent conservatives rushing down a policy path parallel to the agenda of the National Organization of Women and the Great Society.

Today, the IAV still collectively blames father-absence on male irresponsibility, but the language has been changed to characterize it as a “steady defection of fathers”. They demand more “male accountability”, and fail to recognize the impact of professional feminism on law and social policy that is driving the problem.

After a decade of neo-conservative feminist control of social policy, poverty for single mothers, illegitimacy, and non-marriage are still hovering at near record levels. Other consequences, such as lack of health care, crime, school violence, and domestic violence remain hot voter issues.

From Communism to Marriage Movement

David Blankenhorn was a community organizer for causes inspired by Communist party member Saul Alinsky, who was a mentor for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Blankenhorn writes: Before founding the institute [IAV], I was a Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizer, and before that, a VISTA volunteer. I am a life-long Democrat. I have never, to the best of my memory, described myself as a "conservative," neo or otherwise, or as in favor of a political campaign called "family values," neo or other-wise.

This is an astonishing admission by Mr. Blankenhorn! He admits belief in Communism (of which radical feminism is a subset), and says he is not in favor of advocating real "family values". This explains why he is impossible to measure.

Like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, David Blankenhorn has two or three positions on just about everything, if you can even get him to take a position at all.

How Neo-Conservative feminists fooled Conservatives

Conservatives were fooled into blaming forest fires on Smokey the Bear, charged him for it and locked him up, and now wonder why half the country is in ashes despite record expenditures fighting forest fires.

How did this happen?

The IAV remains mutely indignant about its positions because it is a liberal organization containing many embedded professional feminists. The nice talk about marriage is simply to keep they eye busy while IAV members quietly pursue liberal agenda in the corridors of Congress and Courts.

It pretends to stand for something when talking to the public. In practice, IAV stands for nothing and everything in the name of “diversity”, as admitted by David Blankenhorn in USA Today:

"How do you speak about same-sex marriage in a way that respects the diversity of opinion in our ranks?" asks movement pioneer David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values, a think tank on family issues. "Some of us are for gay marriage, some are against it, and some are morally anguished fence-sitters." …. "As individuals, we are not neutral on this question," says the statement, which has been signed by more than 70 members. "But as a group, our purpose is to work to strengthen marriage through education and community mobilization, not to lobby politically for, or against, a federal marriage amendment or any other proposals related to same-sex marriage."

Republicans cannot expect answers with character from an organization that has none. There is no position more important to restoring a vibrant heterosexual marriage culture than opposing same-sex marriage.

Same sex marriage is a feminist devise intended to put women in a position to take over marriage, and have at least four sources of income to boot. The IAV takes no public position on same-sex marriage, but a number of its major players actually advocate it behind the backs of Republicans.

The IAV website makes many wonderful statements about marriage. But, when one looks at pivotal policy recommendations, IAV takes the same stance that any professional feminist would. For example, David Blankenhorn believes that when mothers move away an hour or more drive from the natural father, it does not “significantly harm” the child. Yet, it is obvious that when a parent has to drive four hours or more (two trips -- one to pick up the child, another to return the child), father-absence will be the result. Most fathers simply cannot do this three times a week (totaling twelve hours or more of driving per week).

Despite Blankenhorn's claim that IAV does not advocate in the political world, watchoutforchildren.org aggressively promotes a professional feminist world-view of family and children.

Here, we find leftist items such as "Maternal Feminism: Lessons for a 21st Century Motherhood Movement (audio presentation)" and "Call to Action", to mobilize mothers "to change the conditions under which we mother and under which our children are living."

The IAV has no web sites that promote pro-family no-fault divorce reforms, better approaches to domestic violence, or ways to unwind entitled illegitimacy -- the three major tools professional feminists abuse to excuse themselves from marital responsibility. Nor does it have any web sites that promote or allow valid men's perspectives on home, family, marriage, and children to be expressed or discovered.

When IAV members do work on policy (most often in the cloistered corridors of government), revenue and family support is predictably at the top of the list. Wade Horn is perhaps the most obvious example. IAV representatives sit on various state commissions operating under the auspices of Family Support. These activities have nothing to do with actively improving marriage or improving child-father socialization.

I recently entered a “debate” in one of the familyscholars.org discussion sections. My look “under the hood” of day-to-day operations demonstrated that IAV is uninterested in solid policy reforms of keystone anti-marriage legal constructs such as no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and violence against women. I laid out various pro-marriage proposals that have been either enacted or are presently underway at the state level.

The “management” at familyscholars.org was quite insulting. They consistently attempted to drag me into a convenient feminist gender-war to avoid discussion of the policy ideas. The IAV blog is a long read, but worth the investment. You will see, in microcosm, how the IAV structure allows professional feminists to set the agenda that IAV pursues behind the scenes. If you peruse this site carefully, you will see that IAV stands for nothing and everything, all at the same time.

Update: Since this article was first published, IAV has begun censoring comments by those not in IAV who oppose feminist liturgy, including myself, while permitting known radical feminists such as "The Countess" and Liz Kates free reign.

Recently, there has been much criticism of professional feminism by leading conservatives, such as Phyllis Schlafly [2], Kate O’Bierne, Jonah Goldberg, Mona Charen, Wendy McElroy, Dr. Stephen Baskerville, and Carey Roberts. This is a keystone conservative revolution: they know that professional feminism is the cause of father-absence, and realize Republicans were snookered by liberal imitators.

Dr Stephen Baskerville sums up how the IAV derailed the conservative marriage movement this way: “This is precisely how extremist movements move from the margins to the mainstream and eventually seize power: not by defeating their opposition head-on but by making an end run around it, by disguising themselves in the values of the mainstream, by claiming to champion traditional values that in reality they are hijacking and perverting. This is precisely what feminism is now doing.”

The IAV refuses to recognize that feminism is the cause of father-absence, because it would require IAV to stand for something sensible and realistic. For example, IAV scholar Maggie Gallagher (who has been paid under the table to write favorably about the Bush Administration), crudely characterizes Kate O’Bierne’s new book “Women Who Make The World Worse” as nothing more than an “unsubtle assault on the ideas of Kate Michelman and her fellow aging, orthodox feminists”.

In all fairness, I must point out that Maggie Gallagher is strongly opposed to same-sex marriage, and has worked with the Alliance Defense Fund in litigation. However, her inconsistent refusal to recognize that second-wave feminism caused the divorce revolution prevents Republicans from looking beyond the immediate issue of same-sex marriage to address the very serious problems associated with entitled no-fault divorce and illegitimacy.

Recovering the Republican Revolution before 2008

It is quite clear that Republicans failed because they bought the Blankenhorn Lie, and looked to the Institute for American Values for answers. It might be painful for conservatives to recognize this fact, but it will be far better than the alternative.

Failure of the conservative social revolution could hurt Republicans badly in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Certainly, Homeland Security and the economy are of general interest to voters. Nothing drives votes like things that cause voters to suffer personally. There are a very large number of voters of all races and both sexes, young and old alike, whose lives have been terribly affected by the Great Society.

Republicans will be held responsible by both liberal and conservative grassroots organizations alike. The feminist divorce revolution caused intractable poverty for millions of women and children, a lack of health care, unsafe streets, parenting deficits calling for free child-care that will never happen, intergenerational illegitimacy, and many other human disasters. Democrats are certain to seize every advantage to turn these core home and hearth issues into campaign victories.

Not everyone at the IAV is liberal. There are some brilliant conservatives who know the ropes. IAV places them on the back-burner, and uses their names to create the illusion that IAV is a credible conservative organization. Since it is unlikely that IAV can be rebuilt with Dave Blankenhorn firmly at the helm, Republicans have little choice but to reject the entire organization.

President Bush would be very wise to reject the Institute for American Values, and secure the advice of the legitimate marriage movement on family and marriage issues. New Republican Congressional leaders should immediately look to the legitimate marriage movement for wise policy answers that have political traction.

A New “Contract For America” containing reforms that stop destroying families and the futures of women and children will unite and solidify the frail relationship between Republican social and economic conservatives, and insulate conservatives from horrendous liberal attacks on “living room issues” slated for 2008.

David R. Usher is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition

Now, Republicans must deliver on core values

Edward Alden is only partly correct in his article “Conservatives call for return to core Republican principles” . His suggestion is not enough to restore the trust and vitality that brought about the Congressional landslide in 1994.

He attributes this astonishing victory to public perception that Democrats were corrupt. Students of politics will recall that Republicans ran on much more than aversion to corruption in 1994.

“Dan Quayle Was Right” sent America into a tizzy when it was published in April, 1993. This article set the core family-values focus for the 1994 Congressional races. The aggregated meaning of this roaring debate was reflected in the “Contract For America”, signed on September 27, 1994.

At the time, Democrat spending was out of control. This was primarily attributable to out-of-control Great Society spending that family-values reform legislation would naturally abate without penalizing or hurting anyone.

Republicans won in 1994 because the combined dynamic of morals, credibility, family values, and fiscal responsibility pumped glitter into the campaign, brought about an intense national debate, and motivated thousands of grassroots organizations to get involved in the election.

Democrats simply could not outshine this political beacon.

The power of this interlocking whole must not be underestimated by students of politics. Republicans ran for years on “cut-and-paste” economic conservative platforms. They failed to win elections because economic policy attracts only some of the voters, bores the dickens out of others, and has carries little traction motivating the grassroots.

Unfortunately the majority of Republican economic conservatives made a serious miscalculation after winning the elections. They decided it was unnecessary to pay attention to the social conservatives that won the races.

This has always been a fatal stumbling block for the Republican party. In fact, it is the one single factor that has always caused them to fail in balancing the budget for the long term.

Example: Instead of making PROWA the marriage-positive plan intended by the original sponsors, economic conservatives simply decided it would be easier to force men to entitle the welfare state at the expense of marriage.

The result: more young Americans are now avoiding marriage entirely, thinking they can avoid the welfare state by “shacking up”. Illegitimacy and divorce are still at near-record levels. Welfare and social spending for problems caused by the feminist divorce and illegitimacy revolution is still at record levels

In 1995, I predicted this fatal error would result in growing angst about the Great Society, out-of-control deficits, and a serious loss of trust. This has come true.

A lot of Republican supporters are unhappy because Republicans failed to deliver on their promise to reform the Great Society. Others feel the war in Iraq may have been mismanaged, or Katrina was bungled.

We cannot blame deficits on the War or Katrina. We would be able to withstand these unanticipated expenditures, without running objectionable deficits, if it were not for the outrageous sums spent to band-aid the human problems caused by the entitled divorce and illegitimacy revolution.

And lately, a reasonable number of voters suspect that Washington has become a strip mall for sale to dirty money. We shall see if this is truly the case or not.

These factors all add up to a monolithic problem for Republicans. Electing new leadership will not restore faith. Nor will it energize the grassroots that wins elections.

The new Republican leadership must not only revivify the vital principles that clearly won the 1994 elections -- this time they must convince us that they will deliver, and do it without backtracking.

Voters can understand and forgive an honest mistake, if one admits it and makes best effort to set it right.

One mistake Republicans must not repeat: this time around, economic conservatives must stick to what they know best – the economy. They should wisely allow the social conservative minority, who knows social issues thoroughly, to drive social legislation.

Republican social conservatives are well-equipped to deliver results. We know that professional feminists are extremely irresponsible and destructive [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6].

We know how to unwind the entitled feminist divorce-and-illegitimacy machine while winning support of voters and key grassroots constituencies. We will not kowtow to feminist interests in pursuing solid pro-marriage reforms that most voters still expect.

To win, the selection of new leadership must not be an internal power battle. Republicans must wisely select leadership based on their knowledge of social issues and ability to deliver what was promised a decade ago.

This may well be the only avenue Republicans can pursue to recover trust in time for the mid-term elections, and over time build enough momentum to prevail in 2008.

Show us a new “Contract For America”, and do it right this time. It could well avert a tragic turn for the worse in political history.

David R. Usher is President of the
American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition

Meet The Legitimate Marriage Movement

Over a span of forty years “Father-absence” has became the greatest consequence of feminism.

Military recruitment is weak. Despite an ebullient economy, too many women and children live in poverty. Men are not bothering to go to college or develop careers. Illegitimacy and divorce are still at near-record levels.

Men were the first to realize that feminism is the greatest social problem we face. This is what we would expect, since men were the targets.

But now, most women have come to this conclusion too because feminism also hurt them badly.

Only professional feminists thought that women would be better off without a husband. The National Organization for Women and its many counterparts have pushed this since the 1960’s.

Women found out that a couple cannot split up and support two households, and two lawyers, without sustaining a painful decline in their standard of living. Without husbands, women do not “have it all”. They have to “do it all” on less money.

Professional feminists thought they could become the “husbands” of the majority of women. This has been achieved in-principle. But it is a disaster in practice. Feminists are not the optimal providers for, and protectors of women and children.

Every social indicator measuring the overall well-being of women and children has declined measurably over the past forty years. It is perfectly reasonable to hold professional feminists responsible for this because every one of the major consequences we face can be traced back to feminist thinking, advocacy, and disruption of civil society.

It takes more than feminists to raise a child and support a household. This is because men are, in fact, a necessary and irreplaceable component of family, civil society, and the economy.

Kate O’Bierne succinctly describes how feminists accomplished this: “They [the feminists] put us at war with the men in our lives, the fathers, husbands, and sons who love and support us.. Because men don't like arguing with women and naively assumed that if they gave feminists what they wanted they would be left alone, the allegedly fierce patriarchy collapsed in the face of the feminist assault The moral intimidation feminists inflict on men means that other women have to take on the modern, destructive women's movement. In the pages of my book you will meet some of the smart, admirable women who take on the feminists. The feminist message is crippling to our daughters, but we mothers of sons in particular have to defend our offspring. We are not raising unindicted co-conspirators in the gender wars!.” [Review]

Most grassroots women today are “third-wave feminists”. They align with “first-wave” feminists who accomplished the truly-significant equalitarian advancements prior to 1960. Third-wave feminists have little in common with second-wave “professional” feminists [1960-1995], who among many things advocate abortion, women’s supremacy, lesbianism, and the end of marriage and religion.

A bitter battle is underway between these two factions for control of the word “feminism”. Third-wave feminists cannot possibly succeed. Professional feminists are heavily funded, politically vicious, deeply entrenched in perches of power, and are hand-training aggressive political replacements in every college in America.

Even if equalitarian feminists could gain control at the wheel, what would they do? The goals of the women’s equal rights movement are long accomplished. The word feminism does not bear an equalitarian meaning in the first place.

Women must realize that feminist revisionists have gone to extraordinary lengths to rewrite the history of women’s rights. They pretend that the “feminist political movement” has been around since 1837 when utopian socialist Charles Fourier first coined the word “féminisme”.

Early women’s-rights advocates substantially attained equality for women as “suffragettes”, not “feminists”. The vote naturally delivered equality over time.

In those days, “feminism” was a word connected predominantly with female traits – the connotation of political activism was still nascent. Even as late as 1958, the word “feminism” did not connote the arrogant political movement, now known as “second wave” feminism, that we suffer from today [p. 207].

Second-wave feminists adopted the most acid ideas and political techniques from the discredited movements of Marxism, Communism, Freudianism, and Bolshevism. This ideological aggregate was hidden behind the veil of the suffrage movement and dubbed “feminism”.

Today there are at approximately twenty-nine subtypes of feminism. Twenty-seven of them generally advocate for female supremacy, abject socialism, or irresponsibility. This metastacized cancer cannot be surgically removed from feminism any more than one could excise racism from the Ku Klux Klan to make it an equalitarian movement.

Why wrestle with feminists over a dying, one-sided word? Equal rights are what most modern women want, just like their honored counterparts in the early women’s rights movement, who didn’t even practice feminism as we know it.

Recovering feminists now have something they can invest in with great confidence – “The Marriage Movement”.

Marriage empowers us all. It erases all physical, economic, and social disparities that exist between men and women; establishing a clear path for mutual advancement, which feminism has largely destroyed over the past forty years.

Recovering feminists are only one of the large interest groups who will find themselves moving forward by being organized within the Marriage Movement.

Black interest groups, whose constituents have been hurt the longest and the most severely by the Great Society, also have the most to gain of any interest group. 70% of black children are now born out of wedlock into the aggressive forty-year-old feminist socialist establishment that has destroyed marriage and the futures of the vast majority of black citizens.

Religious organizations now have a way to put the word into practice in ways that no one can object to. Our approach is in-line with the teachings of every major world religion. We will succeed where Promise Keepers failed. We know better than to blame father-absence on men, when it is feminism that caused the problem in both church and society.

This nascent grassroots movement will become a very powerful political movement. The Marriage Movement will grow and have the strength to finally end the dictatorship feminists established over family law, family values, education, and social policy.

What is in this for us? Every respected study indicates we will all live longer, healthier, happier and successful lives, and so will our children.

The Men’s Marriage Movement is walking out on the gender war to plant crops on safe and fertile soil, away from the searing flames of feminism. All equalitarian women, blacks, and all other affected racial minorities must necessarily be equal partners in this Movement if they wish to improve their situation too.

The Marriage Movement has plenty of work to do. We can accomplish our goals comparatively easily without having feminists in our face every step of the way.

Let us multiply our political power and lessen feminist disparities together, by following a path feminists cannot interfere with. Feminists simply cannot tackle The Marriage Movement because sexism, chicanery, hate or derived anger will be unable to get a toehold on this high road.

Our ideas are fresh, equalitarian, forthright, factually honest, and of the highest politically quality. Those who oppose us will look very bad in the eyes of the public.

The Marriage Movement is comprised of individuals working to rebuild marital responsibility. It is best for all when spouses are encouraged work responsibly through the normal problems and processes of marriage and aging.

We must call for an end the irresponsibility of “no-fault”, irresponsible divorce, and federal programs that entitle everything except marital responsibility. The two-year blues, the four-year boredom, the seven-year itch, the fifteen-year career crisis, menopause, and retirement are normal stress-points of marriage, not responsible reasons for divorce.

States should fund programs assisting the responsible spouse (upon request), to help get a troubled spouse into treatment when problems such as abuse of drugs or alcohol is causing serious marital disruption. The monies spent on these efforts will substantially reduce social spending needs on many other social programs, reduce traffic fatalities, and provide a net positive fiscal tab to the state.

The Marriage Movement will return us to a culture living as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

David R. Usher is President of the
American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition