Baskerville: ‘Many divorcing fathers innocently expect sympathy from feminists…They are soon disabused’
Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D. examines one of the greatest and most destructive civil rights abuses in America today--our family law system.
In the Taken Into Custody excerpt below, Baskerville discusses feminism's greatest betrayal--the change from '70s feminism, which talked about men and children being more closely together, to modern feminism, which has fought tooth and nail against shared parenting. Feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women have consistently promoted legislation that puts up barriers separating fathers from their children.
Baskerville writes:
Family law and feminism are natural allies. Family law inserts the coercive power of the state directly into the private lives of individuals and families. Feminism’s central idea is that “the personal is political” and therefore subject to state scrutiny and control…
It is logical that the first targets...should be fathers, the living embodiments, after all, of the hated “patriarchy.” … Fathers today are marked off as official villains and demonized in the mass media by their own government; their children are removed; their property is confiscated; their constitutional protections are stripped away; and they are rounded up in pre-dawn raids and incarcerated without charge or trial. As citizens in Eastern bloc countries once did, it is now fathers who live in fear of the “knock on the door”...
Many fathers embarking on their ordeal with the custody regime innocently expect sympathy from feminists. They are soon disabused.
“I rather naively thought that this issue would bring feminists to my aid. After all, what I was asking was that this somewhat overlooked dimension of their revolution be attended to,” writes columnist John Waters. “But what I found was that, far from getting support from feminists, the only significant resistance was coming from feminists and the political leaders who live in fear of them.”
Among organized feminism, idealistic principles were long ago replaced by the self-interested pursuit of power. Women's groups have joined lawyers and judges as the main opponents of divorce and custody reform and promote measures to institutionalize gender bias.
Cathy Young observes the irony: “Feminists who resent any suggestion that a mother belongs with her children often insist, when it comes to child custody, that children belong with the mother”…
It is hardly new in the history of revolutions that, when forced to choose, most revolutionaries readily take power over principles. In the world of child custody, both genders are equal, but one gender is more equal than the other.
To learn more or to purchase Taken Into Custody, click here.
Baskerville, author of many articles on fatherhood and family issues and a frequent media commentator, is assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College and an Earhart Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society.
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