Inside the left's war against the family...and specifically fathers

Eric Svane of the terrifically popular blog No Pasaran has done yeoman's service in exploring this topic. Here is a synopsis of his latest on the subject:

Witch Hunts in Contemporary America:
Is the United States Turning Into a Fascist Country?

"Destroy the family, and you destroy society"
—Lenin

Like many conservatives, Erik Svane has been more of the optimistic type, thinking that lovers of liberty were winning the battle of ideas against the statists, or at least doing a pretty good job of holding their own.

He found it therefore "highly distressing" to discover a book that not only says that Americans and lovers of liberty are losing the war but that they have hardly been aware of the main battle in the first place, which has swept by right under their (under our) noses.

And that while conservatives have (rightly) been fighting absurdities such as date rape and sexual harassment as well as gay marriage, a far more insidious and destructive force has blossomed — and that, with the help and active involvement of the state and federal governments, no less, abetted by a considerable bureaucracy.

Erik is talking about Stephen Baskerville's Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family), a book which covers the divorce industry and "a bureaucratic culture that threatens both fathers and mothers, including intact families. Some have suggested the rise of 'a new class of professionals — social workers, therapists, foster care providers, family court lawyers — who have a vested interest in taking over parental functions...

I can tell that you don’t live in a community where the words “date rape” and “sexual harrassment” are terms of control over the ungentlemanly behavior of men.

Certainly rapes occur, groping and other sexual assaults occur, women are frightened by the aggressive behavior of the men around them and troubled by men’s lack of sensitivity about women’s needs for safety.

Once that is said, colleges and many employers arbitrarily use the terms “date rape” and “sexual harrassment” to subject men to an endless guilt-inducing narrative with the purpose of reducing men to drones whose sexuality is perpetually available to their female companions but invisible and inaudible otherwise.

This may seem like a topic that is only important in the murky depths of political philosophy or gender studies, but then you may not have seen the dozens of professionals of my acquaintance who lost their employment over their “thought crimes” or the hundreds of my students who were privately humiliated, publicly shamed or ostracized by their institutions for crimes of thought or language.

Rapes occur, but most of the “date rape” caselog is comprised of drunken misunderstandings in which no actual penetrative sex occurred.

Unwanted sexual contacts occur in the workplace, but most of the “sexual harrassment” caselog is comprised of female efforts to control the verbal or graphic expression of male sexuality.

In reading the article here, you probably should remember that anything that protects females from men (often reasonable and required for a civilized life) is likely to give women power (which is subject to misuse). Any category that is overly broad, like “date rape” and “sexual harrassment” is likely to be used to bring severe punishment on minor offenses.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but you have to live in the educational and employment cultures of liberal America to see how our decent impulses to protect the vulnerable are sometimes turned to tools for neurosis, paranoia and thirst for power.

We all agree that crimes and assaults are bad things. We all agree that bad things (like rapes) should never occur and that we should do all we can to prevent them.

The thesis of the article is that one of the bad things that sometimes occurs is a political and social assault on men.

One of the tools in the assault is the odd and destructive use of the words “date rape” and “sexual harrassment”.

Another of the tools is the confusion between the dire crimes that are included in the category and the mild offenses and thought crimes that are most frequently punished.

To be blunt: I think that you have been unwittingly enlisted by those who intend crimes against men. They enlisted you by playing on your legitimate and laudable concern to do all you can to prevent crimes against women.

Any critic of institutional discrimination against men will almost always be opposed on the grounds that women shouldn’t have to suffer. Indeed they should not. But neither should men.

Do not, even in kindness, confuse stopping crimes against women with committing crimes against men.

The destruction, emasculization, and demoralization of the American male begins in government schools. Little boys are surrounded by teachers who are graduates of our modern colleges of education. These teachers have been so pickled in the brine of gender and race dialectics that they are little more than teacher versions of Nurse Ratchet. They eat little boys for lunch.

The high number of boys on Ritalin, diagnosed as “learning disabled”, in special education, as drop outs, and their declining numbers in college are all evidence of the War Against Boys.

Any parent who would allow their boy to attend a government school is completely clueless or totally addicted to the free babysitting.

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