As bassmaner says in #9, these policies are ruinous. You can't just keep sticking it to people and expect them to roll over for it. There will be consequences to these policies, and they will eventually unhinge the whole society. |
Posted on 12/25/2003 5:04:53 AM PST by RogerFGay
The Anti-Father Police State
December 23, 2003
by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
Columnist Cathy Young is known for her even-handed attempts to cut through the pretensions of both the left and right. She has also shown considerable courage by delving into what for many journalists is a no-go zone: divorce and fathers' rights.
So it is a little awkward to find myself cast as one of her combatants, with my own views and others' whom I typify characterized as "extreme." In the December issue of Reason magazine, Young sorts out, with her customary balance, a debate between proponents of Clinton-Bush family engineering schemes and those of us who take a more laissez-faire attitude toward government intervention in family life.
Actually, it is not my positions that are extreme but my "rhetoric" – specifically, the words I use to describe how government is systematically destroying families and fathers. "Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible," wrote George Orwell. "Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism." If my language seems direct, it may be because euphemism currently obfuscates the most indefensible politics of our time.
That a writer as informed and astute as Young has difficulty grasping the larger trend at work here validates Orwell's observation about the power of language. Clichés about "divorce" and "custody" do not begin to convey the civil liberties disaster taking place. We are facing questions of who has primary authority over children, their parents or the state, and whether the state's penal apparatus can seize control over both the children and the private lives of citizens who have done nothing wrong. Rephrased, the question is, Is there any private sphere of life that remains off-limits to state intervention? Bryce Christensen of Southern Utah University (and not a fathers' rights activist, extreme or otherwise) has characterized fatherhood policies as creating a "police state."
Developments in only the last few days amount to government admissions of Christensen's charge. Under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, judge has just freed some 100 prisoners who had been incarcerated without due process for allegedly failing to pay child support. The fathers were sentenced with no notice given of their hearings and no opportunity to obtain legal representation. Fathers relate that hearings typically last between 30 seconds and two minutes, during which they are sentenced to months in prison. ACLU lawyer Malia Brink says courts across Pennsylvania routinely jail such men for civil contempt without proper notice or in time for them to get lawyers. Lawrence County was apparently jailing fathers with no hearings at all. Nothing indicates that Pennsylvania is unusual. After a decade of hysteria over "deadbeat dads," one hundred such prisoners in each of the America's 3,500 counties is by no means unlikely.
Also last week, a federal appeals court finally ruled unconstitutional the Elizabeth Morgan Act, a textbook bill of attainder whereby Congress legislatively separated father and child and "branded" as "a criminal child abuser" a father against whom no evidence was ever presented. "Congress violated the constitutional prohibition against bills of attainder by singling out plaintiff for legislative punishment," the court said. The very fact that a bill of attainder was used at all indicates something truly extreme is taking place. Bills of attainder are rare, draconian measures used for one purpose: to convict politically those who cannot be convicted with evidence.
So do these decisions demonstrate that justice eventually prevails? Hardly. In both cases, the damage is done. Foretich's daughter has been irreparably robbed of her childhood and estranged from her father. Moreover, millions of fathers continue to be permanently separated from their children and presumed guilty, even when no evidence exists against them.
The Pennsylvania men will fare worse. For many, the incarceration has already cost them their jobs and thus their ability to pay future child support. As a result, they will be returned to the penal system, from which they are unlikely ever to escape. Permanently insolvent, they are farmed out to trash companies and similar concerns, where they work 14–16 hour days. Most of their earnings are confiscated for child support, the costs of their incarceration, and mandatory drug testing.
This gulag recalls the description of the Soviet forced-labor system, described by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in their classic study of totalitarianism: "Not infrequently the secret police hired out its prisoners to local agencies for the purpose of carrying out some local project…. Elaborate contracts were drawn up…specifying all the details and setting the rates at which the secret police is to be paid. At the conclusion of their task, the prisoners, or more correctly the slaves, were returned to the custody of the secret police."
New repressive measures against fathers are enacted almost daily. Last week, Staten Island joined a nationwide trend when it opened a new "integrated domestic violence court." The purpose of these courts, says Chief Judge Judith Kaye, is not to dispense justice as such but to "make batterers and abusers take responsibility for their actions." In other words, to declare men guilty.
Anyone who doubts this need only look to Canada, where domestic violence courts are already empowered to seize the property, including the homes, of men accused of domestic violence, even though they are not necessarily convicted or even formally charged. Moreover, they may do so "ex parte," without the men being present to defend themselves. "This bill is classic police-state legislation," writes Robert Martin, of the University of Western Ontario. Walter Fox, a Toronto lawyer, describes these courts as "pre-fascist," and editor Dave Brown writes in the Ottawa Citizen, "Domestic violence courts…are designed to get around the protections of the Criminal Code. The burden of proof is reduced or removed, and there's no presumption of innocence."
Special courts to try special crimes that can only be committed by certain people are a familiar device totalitarian regimes adopted to replace established standards of justice with ideological justice. New courts created during the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror and were consciously imitated in the Soviet Union. In Hitler's dreaded Volksgerichte or "people’s courts," write Friedrich and Brzezinski, "only expediency in terms of National Socialist standards served as a basis for judgment."
Even more astounding, legislation announced in Britain will require the police to consider fathers guilty of domestic violence, even after they have been acquitted in court. Fathers found "not guilty" are to be kept away from their children and treated as if they are guilty. As Melanie Phillips writes in the Daily Mail, "This measure will destroy the very concept of innocence itself."
These are only the most recent developments. Young herself has written eloquently on the practice of extracting coerced confessions from fathers like Massachusetts minister Harry Stewart. In Warren County, Pennsylvania, fathers like Robert Pessia are told they will be jailed unless they sign confessions stating, "I have physically and emotionally battered my partner." The father must then describe the violence, even if he insists he committed none. The documents require him to state, "I am responsible for the violence I used. My behavior was not provoked." Again, the words of Friedrich and Brzezinski are apposite: "Confessions are the key to this psychic coercion. The inmate is subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda and ever-repeated demands that he ‘confess his sins,’ that he ‘admit his shame.’"
G.K. Chesterton argued that the most enduring check on government tyranny is the family. Ideological correctness notwithstanding, little imagination is required to comprehend that the household member most likely to defend the family against the state is the father. Yet as Margaret Mead once pointed out, the father is also the family's weakest link. The easiest and surest way to destroy the family, therefore, is to remove the father. Is it extreme to wonder if government is quietly engaged in a search-and-destroy operation against the principal obstacle to the expansion of its power?
Originally published at LewRockwell.com
Dr. Baskerville teaches political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics. Visit his MND archive here. Visit his website here.
As bassmaner says in #9, these policies are ruinous. You can't just keep sticking it to people and expect them to roll over for it. There will be consequences to these policies, and they will eventually unhinge the whole society. |
Not to mention lifting the time limit to obtain a DNA when some long lost kid "turns up".
In other words, infidelity and promiscuity SHALL have consequences.
But, but, but...that's morality! What about separation of church and state? /sarcasm
Not nearly as painful as a vengeful woman using your own kids and the full power of the government against you.
...which explains the Nanny/Butch-government's war on the family.
sometimes a guy just wants to crawl into a hole...but no freakin' way.
...nods...
By now, just about everyone either knows someone, or has a relative, that this has happened to. This thread is so different from what a comparable one would have been like ten years ago that I see tremendous progress.
What's happening here with the laws is a death spiral. If you map out the forces operating on it, you can quickly see that the only thing it can do is get worse. So the issue isn't how you turn that around, it's what you can do to warn younger men in time to keep them from getting caught up in it. I see a lot of progress there; all these articles we see about "why won't young men commit?" are evidence to me that the message is sinking in: "marriage and family" is not a safe thing to do with your life anymore. Men have zero rights, are guilty until proven innocent, and won't even get due process at that. So just stay away from it. Let the government have its fun with whomever they can suck into it, but men with brains should stay out of the target environment.
When these pills come out, that's going to be one more way to stay out of the target environment.
Yeah, we'll become extinct or the foreigners will take over. So what? A society that estranges fathers from their children on a wholesale basis collapses. If that comes as a surprise to anybody, it's because they either didn't really think of men as being human, or because they weren't thinking at all.
We agree totally on that. There are still plenty who, even knowing men that this has happened to, think that it will be different with them. A few weeks ago, one guy on another thread argued that men avoiding marriage was a "false trend" and wasn't really happening. It didn't sound like he could graduate from the School of the Bleeding-Obvious. The business of government is to grow. That means that BOTH parties have a vested interest in advancing the destruction of the family though demonizing fathers. When the pill for men hits the market, it will have an enormous impact on western society, particularly in the US. I wonder what lengths the government will go to in trying to stop it. At some point they would have to reccognize that this would cut into their ability to control tens of millions of men in the future.
...when the state comes for their sons.
Oh now, don't go getting emotional on us. Nobody said anything about ending the human race. The human race will be fine. The particular culture that chose badly will be wiped from the Earth. That's happened to a lot of cultures that went bad. It's nothing to get excited about; this is how Nature works.
It's no accident that every significant civilization on the planet, regardless of race, religion, or any other thing, practices lifelong pair-bonding. Ours used to. Now we don't. Now we get to find out why the only cultures left standing were the ones that practiced lifelong pair-bonding. Something happens to the other cultures. They go away for some reason. Just think... we'll get to see how it happens.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
There are several cheap and effective male contraceptives in clinical trials right now. I shudder to think what is going to happen to the birth rate in this country (and throughout the West) when these pills become available.