BlogWonks

August 4, 2007

Why gay marriage matters for Fathers Rights

R. Tarpaeian

August 4, 2007

 

By now even the most obtuse Fathers Rights advocate must see at least the broad outlines of the feminist War on Fatherhood. The normalization of homosexuality, now complete in Massachusetts with the legislature’s refusal to allow the citizens to vote on the matter, is one more theater of operations in this ongoing war.

What is happening right under our noses is the transformation of ‘family,’ the fundamental building block not only of society, but of civilization itself throughout recorded history.

Freedom of expression does not necessarily imply moral relativism

I lived in San Francisco in the 1970s. I read “Tales of the City” in daily installments in the San Francisco Chronicle. I had a bisexual roommate. “Live and let live” is as American as apple pie. It is un-American to oppose freedom of expression. Most people, myself included, would agree that this extends to behavior between consenting adults.

However, this freedom of expression works both ways. It also extends to those who may disapprove of, and even wish to condemn, behavior of others that they find morally objectionable. Furthermore, every society establishes shared values and moral beliefs in both an unwritten moral code of conduct (its mores), its religions, as well as in the law. A society with no moral compass whatsoever is not a society… it is anarchy. We are a people, not just beasts in the wilderness. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says,

“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.”

It is normal, appropriate, and necessary for a people to establish ‘norms’ of behavior. In a healthy society some such norms evolve over time. Others must remain constant for the continued viability of the community. Adherence to some behavioral norms requires more than socially regulating mechanisms like shame and stigma. To protect children from sexualization by adults, for example, laws with severe criminal penalties are enacted.

We are presently witnessing an acute challenge to several established norms. What is at play is a challenge to deep-rooted beliefs. The discussion must be open to all points of view so that we can collectively decide where we’re going. In Massachusetts this is presently not the case as one side of the gay marriage debate, using the power and authority of its allies in government, the legal system and the media, has created a climate of fear and intimidation for their opponents.

Biology removed from the definition of ‘family’

Gay marriage proponents use as one of their friendly slogans: “Love makes a family.” Well, actually, no it doesn’t.  To be perfectly frank, a penis and a vagina make a family. If you find that crude, take it up with Mother Nature.  It is she who optimized the process for the procreation of life on planet Earth two billion years ago with the invention of sexual reproduction. 

Let’s remove this debate from the intellectual ghetto of religious doctrine and bring it into the realm of rational thinking. The one inarguable constant of life is the instinct for self-preservation—survival—to ensure that genetic information can be passed on to a new generation. Let the philosophers argue about the reason ‘Why.’  Kurt Vonnegut called it the “universal will to become.”  That satisfies me.

Homosexuality is by definition abnormal behavior.  (Normal: That which functions according to its design.). It is contrary to Nature’s Prime Directive: the biological imperative of survival and procreation, achieved via the sexual attraction between male and female. The notion that there could be an inheritable genetic instruction to not reproduce is a logical absurdity.

When and how did it become proscribed speech (soon to be criminalized?) to suggest that sexual attraction between men and women is normal and, in fact, necessary behavior deserving of unique social constructs and requisite legal privileges and protections?

Feminist deconstruction of society

I can answer this question. It didn’t happen overnight. Most thinking people not blinded by political correctness recognize that the legalization of abortion-on-demand by the Supreme Court in 1973 marked the beginning of an assault on moral reason. The propaganda power of language cannot be overstated. Feminists created the right climate for Roe v. Wade by coining ‘choice’ as the euphemism for the murder of the fetus.

But this is old news. Here’s the rest of the story. Feminists intent on transforming a patriarchal society into a matriarchy recognized several strategic objectives that had to be met.

First: Abortion-on-demand; next: Get ‘dad’ out of ‘family’

The first was ownership of the means of reproduction, if you will pardon my punning on an historical slogan from another self-terminating political movement.

The next thing required was to define ‘father’ out of the family. The new nuclear family unit would be mother and dependant children. The presence of a biological father would be optional, no different than any other partners mom might choose, of either sex, temporary or made permanent through a civil or religious union. 

Biologically speaking, the father is the weakest link in the nuclear family. The dismantling of the patriarchy could not be possible without the removal of the patriarch from the individual family.

Hence the War on Fatherhood.

Men superfluous at best—dangerous at worst

In order to gain acceptance of the idea that men are superfluous to the new family, fathers and fatherhood had to be first discredited, then marginalized, and finally demonized. Since the heady days of women burning their bras in the streets in the 70s we have witnessed an unrelenting attack on masculinity, men, and fatherhood. There is practically no part of the culture immune to the trashing of the male sex.

Boys are medicated in staggering numbers to address what are now considered undesirable traits. Can you say “ADHD”?  That’s “Attention Deficit, Hyperactive Disorder.” Yes indeed, boys are different than girls. And by Goddess, we’re going to do whatever it takes to fix them!

Male hatred deeply-rooted in academia

In academia, feminists took the behavioral sciences by storm, from whence stems a never-ending torrent of ‘studies’ revealing the flaws of the male sex. Such studies are peer reviewed in an incestuous and corrupted academic environment where the results are re-digested by other scholars in the sisterhood and eventually regurgitated by a media that panders to women’s issues.

Prior to the feminist revolution there was one arena where men were already expected to take it in the shorts: divorce. Since the latter part of the 19^th century divorced women took the children and received alimony from the father. The patriarchy—specifically, male judges and lawmakers—saw to it that women were protected after family breakup. And for good reason, as men were the bread-winners and most women were home-makers without the means to earn a decent paycheck.

Then, divorce was an emotional and economic upheaval for all concerned. Few would disagree that the hardships suffered by women were generally greater. But following the feminist revolution and the advent of so-called “feminist jurisprudence,” for men only, hardship transmogrified into a process of criminalization.

Men criminalized via ‘feminist jurisprudence’

Where are all the social science studies raising alarms about the growing number of incarcerated men convicted of “gender crimes”?  Fathers jailed for failing to make usurious so-called ‘child support’ payments, or for trying to contact their own children in violation of the ‘no-contact’ provisions of their ex-wife’s ‘abuse-protection’ order? Thanks to blatantly unconstitutional laws and the willing ignorance of other men who have yet to be affected, noncustodial fathers in particular suffer both civil and human rights violations without due process of law or the presumption of innocence.

In fact, the economic subjugation of noncustodial fathers under the so-called “child support” regime is so extreme that to find a valid comparison we would have to go back to before the Emancipation Proclamation. The comparison with slavery is not far off the mark.

Countless fathers have been emotionally and psychologically broken as a result of losing that most precious of all things in life: their little children. The story of the unknown number of fathers who have chosen to take their own lives remains untold, as it plays against the feminist stereotype of women as victims of male aggression. The prevalence of murder-suicide in divorce-related homicides points more to a sense of desperation than to acts of hatred or revenge—of men with nothing left to lose, and nothing left to live for.

Gay family specialists often employed to evaluate fathers in child custody

The connection of the homosexual rights movement in Massachusetts with the War on Fatherhood is not merely anecdotal. It was under the Weld administration that the state’s undeclared War on Fatherhood took flight. The Republican governor appointed his gay college roommate, Mitchell Adams, to head the Child Support Enforcement division of the Depart of Revenue (DOR/CSE). Adams launched the DOR’s “deadbeat dad” poster PR campaign, as well as similar anti-father initiatives. Installing a man incapable of having intimate relations with a woman as the state’s chief persecutor of noncustodial fathers takes ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ into the realm of the perverse.

In my decade-and-a-half experience in the Fathers Rights movement, I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the words “My GAL is gay.”  The Guardian ad litem (GAL) is the specialist appointed by family court judges to make recommendations regarding custody of minor children in contested custody cases. Operationally, they provide the judge with the path of least resistance to the preordained final custody determination: establishing mom as the custodial parent and dad as the visitor parent (if he’s lucky) with the burden of financing the new family unit… which, as mentioned above, is now mother and dependant children.

Some homosexual GALs make no effort to hide their sexual orientation, naming their partners on their own web sites.  Having the parenting skills of fathers evaluated by people who lack the ability for intimate relations with the opposite sex takes this from the merely perverse into the realm of the diabolical.

Cheryl Jacques heads committee to investigate GAL process

It gets worse. In 2000, the Massachusetts Senate commissioned an investigation to look into the many complaints of the GAL system. Former state Senator Cheryl Jacques was appointed by then Senate President Thomas Birmingham to head the committee. Jacques had earned a reputation as one of the most rabid anti-father, pro-feminist legislators in the Statehouse. She later went on to greater notoriety as the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization that championed the gay marriage cause in state and federal courts.

Many noncustodial fathers submitted written testimony to the committee in the belief that it would address the bias in the GAL system. The conclusions of the committee’s report[1], which was released in March the following year, were just the opposite of what those gullible men expected. Nothing in the report or its recommendations mentioned even the allegations of the anti-father biases rife in the system. Instead, the old victim-feminist canards of how the GAL process actually favored ‘abusive’ men and ‘re-victimized’ battered women were given fresh fodder. New training was recommended to prevent those canny ‘batterers,’ who were supposedly hoodwinking naïve GALs and judges, from gaining access to their children.  Etcetera, etcetera.

War on Fatherhood apparent upon encountering divorce system

If you don’t believe that the operational definition of ‘family’ had already been transformed before the advent of gay marriage, take a visit to your local courthouse or government agency office. Just go and see for yourself. Look at the signs and pictures on the walls of the Social Security office. Listen to the conversations in the courthouse halls, or better yet, if you have the stomach, go inside a courtroom and witness the spectacle of judges sending men to jail on the say-so of their ex-wives.

When I fell into what I refer to as THE THING, borrowing the wordsmithing from Aldous Huxley’s “Ape and Essence,” I was shocked on every level of my being. My brain throbbed with one nagging thought: “What becomes of a society that declares war on fatherhood?”

Now, some 15 years on, the answer is clear.

After assault on fatherhood, gay adoption and marriage inevitable

With the legalization of abortion-on-demand, where—even in an intact marriage!—it is considered an outrage to even suggest that a woman considering an abortion should consult her husband[2], followed by the growing acceptance of the idea that men are superfluous to the raising of children—and in fact questioning if men are necessary at all is acceptable fodder for best-seller books and TV talk-show circuits[3]—the normalization of gay marriage, manifested mainly as lesbian couples[4], is clearly… inevitable.

A car with only two wheels can’t go very far. A car with only one is doomed to become a rusting hulk. Over the past thirty-plus years we have seen the wheels fall off one by one.

With the normalization of homosexuality and the imminent criminalization of advocating otherwise, the bottom has fallen out. We are now in free-fall. What’s bad is good, and what’s good is grounds for blacklisting, sacking, and soon, prison.

Mass. State Senator Therese Murray provided perhaps the most incredible example of the upending of moral values. During the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 2004 to address the citizen’s petition to ban gay marriage, she stated that 40 percent of the children adopted in Massachusetts are awarded to homosexual couples. Perhaps the only thing more astounding than this revelation is that it was presented as an argument in favor of gay marriage.

Pedophilia next on list to be ‘normalized’ by psychologists

Gay marriage proponents are fond of alluding to the prohibition against mixed-race marriages in our racist past as analogous to present opposition to homosexual marriage. I suggest that rather than looking to the past for comparisons, we look to the future.

If you are of a certain age and a recent convert to the gay marriage cause, ponder this: Before you were won over you probably believed that homosexuality was deviant behavior that should not be encouraged by law and/or social policy.

What is your opinion now, today, about pedophilia?  Do you believe it is deviant behavior? 

How will you respond in a few years time when the all-out push to normalize pedophilia by behavioral experts in the psychological community begins[5]? Will you be the reactionary, elder generational, dying-breed conservative who adheres to an outdated morality—or a progressive advocate of these persecuted practitioners of the (next) ‘love that dare not speak its name’?

Twin threats from within and without

The fertility rate of the 27 nations in the European Union is now well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman[6]. The west is confronted with a rival Islamic civilization that adheres to strict patriarchal values. Their families have lots of children. Without the Muslim immigrants in several European countries such as England and France the fertility rates would be even lower.  Islamic jihadists such as al-Qaeda make no bones about their ultimate objective to topple the west and reestablish the Caliphate. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.

As we approach the 2008 presidential primaries we need to think long and hard about what it will mean if the next president of the U.S. is a Wellesley-educated feminist.  And perhaps more importantly, what happens to a civilization that fails to defend fatherhood, and walks meekly into a feminist ‘utopia’.

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R. Tarpaeian can be reached at rtarpaeian@gmail.com

©2007 IndependentNewsNet.com

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[1] Massachusetts. Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight. Guarding Our Children: A Review of Massachusetts’ Guardian Ad Litem Program within the Probate and Family Court. March, 2001.

[2] During the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court in January, 2006, Sen. Diane Feinstein waxed indignant over Alito’s dissenting opinion on Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As the odd-man-out in the 3^rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision he disagreed with the majority opinion regarding the ‘husband notification’ provision, where it held that a wife should not be burdened with a legal obligation to inform her husband if she intends to have an abortion. [The three-judge panel unanimously upheld four other abortion restrictions in the Pennsylvania law including parental notification for a minor seeking an abortion.] The following year Planned Parenthood took the case to the Supreme Court to appeal against the remaining provisions that were upheld by the appellate court. In 1992, the Supreme Court affirmed that fathers had no legitimate role in decisions to continue the lives of their own unborn offspring. At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Alito did not defend his previous position.

[3] Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?  Dowd is a syndicated New York Times columnist. When her book was released and became a New York Times best-seller, she was the toast of the town on many television news programs. There are several other recent books with the exact same theme.

[4]Of the ~6,000 same-sex marriages from May to Dec. 2004 following the Massachusetts SJC Goodridge decision, lesbian marriages outnumbered male same-sex marriages 65% to 35%. Belge, Kathy, Lesbian Life, “Gay Marriages in Massachusetts: One Year Later, May 2005”. http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/wedding/a/MassOneYear.htm.

Prior to Goodridge, 32% of lesbian same-sex couple had children, whereas 18% of same-sex male couples had children. “Same-Sex Couples and Their Children in Massachusetts: A View from Census 2000,” By The Numbers, Feb. 2004, Journal of IGLLS, The Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, http://www.iglss.org/media/files/Numbers2_04.pdf.

[5] In 1999, the American Psychological Association published in its member journal, the APA Bulletin, “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples,” by Bruce Rind, which claimed child sexual abuse could be harmless and beneficial. The resulting public outcry forced the APA to reaffirm its position that pedophilia is a disorder, and always harmful to children.

[6] “Suddenly, the old world looks younger.” The Economist June 16-22, 2007: 29-32.

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