Replies

This article stinks of ignorance and self-pity.

Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City, was denied the time he sought to spend with his own children.

There are a LOT of factors that get considered in family law courtrooms. Without knowing many of the necessary factors in his case, its impossible to have an informed opinion of what happened. That said, Giuliana is an adulterer. Regardless of the leadership he showed post 9/11, the fact that he was an adulterer, that he was the primary cause of the dissolution of his marriage, and that he's a man are all factors that are going to weigh in favor of the mother.

This is how American divorce courts treat fathers, purely out of anti-fatherhood sexism.

Could you be any more general, or biased?

However, he is by every credible account a good father, and that must be the pre-eminent consideration in his child custody proceedings.

Actually, you're wrong. There are MANY factors that get considered, not just the quality of the parent involved. Even the "good father" standard you speak of is incredibly complicated. Take, for example, the mayor of New York. How much time per week do you honestly believe he will have to "father" his children?

He should not, just as millions of other faultless fathers should not, have been reduced to being merely a visitor in the lives of his own children.

Faultless? Are you kidding? You yourself just referred to his adultery. He made his OWN choices when he dipped his stick in the wrong oil.

The whole concept of child-custody proceedings as a winner-take-all situation...

I suggest you read up on the issue before you make yourself sound even more ignorant. In case you haven't heard, child custody is almost NEVER EVER a winner-take-all. Joint 50/50 custody is common, so is primary with major visitations.

What on Earth does "traditional" mean, so used? That fathers being reduced to every-other-weekend visitors in the lives of their own children is now something "traditional"?

Traditional means (1) mothers are more important in the full-time upbringing of minor children that fathers and that (2) men are traditionally the bread winner and more involved in their careers than are women.

There are a LOT of factors that get considered in family law courtrooms. Without knowing many of the necessary factors in his case, its impossible to... yada yada.. are all factors that are going to weigh in favor of the mother.

It's always something though, isn't it? I mean, your argument is reminiscent of the early days of the civil rights movement, when you would find these companies whose management staffs were as white as a fencepost, and they would stand there with a straight face and tell you that they always evaluated each applicant on the merits.

This system is estranging children from their male parents, on a wholesale basis, all across the country, on a scale never seen before in any civilization, and everyone knows it.

Some people support it, because it sounds "traditional" to them to leave children with their mothers. Some people support it because their minds are arranged in such a way that they cannot conceive of a male not being the villain in the piece, no matter what the piece is. In a way, that's traditional as well.

While you worry about case-by-case, we are in the totality producing a society where boys increasingly grow up understanding that adult human males have no role in human families, that they can expect themselves to some day be driven from their homes and defiled in front of their children, and that this future is inevitable for them because even if it hasn't happened to their own father yet, it's happened to half of their friends' fathers.

Kids are not stupid. They see this stuff. They know that Mommy was not an angel, and that Daddy tried really hard to see them, but that forces they do not understand are keeping Daddy away. What they get out of it is that this is going to happen to them, because this is what happens to all the "Daddies" they know.

You cannot do this to a society on this scale without producing a generation of boys who see marriage and family as a losing proposition, and the government as the reason why. If these processes were even halfway fair, such that boys saw that some reasonable percentage of the time, it was not the father the government made go away, they might think something different was going on. But it's patently obvious to them, as it is to all but apologists for the Divorce Industry, that this system is completely biased against fathers and treats them as animals to be sent into the distance to work and send money.

No society has ever tried something like this before. The notion of using governmental force to remove human parents from their childrens' lives is anethema. It violates even rudimentary senses of human dignity. And yet we do this every day in this country to men, as if they were animals. If there were some king in the Middle Ages who had rounded up half the adult men and made them live apart from their children, he would probably be known today as Edward the Horrible. He would be condemned as the cruelest man who ever lived.

We do this right here, right now. And we're proud of it. Something has seriously gone off the tracks, and I for one do not want to hear about case-by-case justification for what is obviously a systemic defect that produces a result that only be called horrific and inhuman.