Sex, Equality, And Kidding Ourselves (Should Men put their foot down and say enough is enough??)

FredonEverything.com ^ | 4/17/02 | Fred Reed

[Lorianne]

What I'm proposing is the presently novel idea that women start taking responsibility for their own morality independent of men

Well I''m glad we cleared that up then. It sounded different in some of your other posts. I believe in individual responsibility. Would you agree that men should "start taking responsibility for their own morality" as well?

[Lorianne]

http://www.zetetics.com/mac/articles/contagious.html

[Lorianne]

I've given lots of suggestions. Top of the list is when discussing "fatherlessness" we don't shy away from discussing the obligations of fathers to their children. Seems like common sense doesn't it?

Also, I've made it a point in my personal life (and I try to exhort others to do the same) to NEVER EVER mention children, babies... anything at all to do with pro-creation and its consequences ... without mentioning men/fathers etc. To me our entire culture negates the rol of men in children's lives by simple ommision of mentioning them.

Apparently some men here have a problem with mentioning men/fathers in a discussion (ostensibly) about the well-being of boys. Odd isn't it?

[Harrison Bergeron]

"That is free speech countering free speech, as far as I know both mine and Sommers "rights" under the First Ammendment are still protected."

Shouting someone down in an academic environment is your idea of "free speech?" Wow, talk about nailing yourself as a leftist hypocrite. Being thrown out of a government sponsored venue by government employees for airing politikally inkorrekt views is a repeat of the kind of "rights" we saw in Germany circa 1938. "Free speech for me but not for thee."

The only other thing you seem to know is deflection of the truth. My personal answer? Let the feminist indoctrination camps continue to sink into their tarpit of incompetence. The minorities and lower middle class that have suffered under their failed leadership will eventually insist on a whole new system. Private school and home school for my son. Meanwhile, I exercise my right to free speech and point to the problem for others to see. Believe it or not, most conservatives are only just getting the news about anti-male sexism in government and corporate institutions.

[Harrison Bergeron]

"Apparently some men here have a problem with mentioning men/fathers in a discussion (ostensibly) about the well-being of boys. Odd isn't it?"

Been there...

done that.

[Nick Danger]

WHO is actually doing the "feminizing" and "child abuse" (according to you) in our schools? Is it the teachers? Who exactly is doing the grunt work executing this "radical femininst" agenda you claim is out to undermine boys? And what are your suggestions for stopping the "child abuse"?

It is the teachers, and the principals, and I realize that sounds preposterous to someone who does not connect the phenomenon to Marxist-Gramscian tactics. Here's how this works:

Marxists masquerading as 'womens advocates' wandered the halls of Congress drumming up support for Federal help for girls, who were suffering enormously in our male-dominated school systems. This was poppycock, but many of the lobbyists were credentialed academics and they claimed to have scientific research backing up these claims. So they in fact walked away with Title IX and the Women's Equity in Education Act, and some other bells and whistles. Senator Biden was a complete toady for these people and spearheaded many of their programs. These laws all created bureaucracies with substantial funding, which the feminist Marxists had basically designed, and which they were ready to populate and run when the laws passed... which they were.

So now we have things like this, which are federally-funded teacher training programs. Much of the material from places like this is required reading now in our schools of education. This is what teachers are told is so, and the teachers are given very specific steps to take in order to fix what's wrong. Basically this is a federally-funded social engineering project that has been thoroughly hijacked by lesbian Marxists and their male sycophants.

In examing that web site, take a look at how these people position themselves, versus what they are actually doing.

Here is what they say about themselves:

Educational Equity Concepts, Inc. is a national not-for-profit organization that promotes bias-free learning through innovative programs and materials. Founded in 1982, our mission is to decrease discrimination based on gender, race/ethnicity, disability, and level of family income.

Now look at the pictures. See any boys? Nope, all the children these people care about are girls. Here's what they do:

• We create practical hands-on materials and programs for early childhood and elementary classrooms and after-school settings.
  
• We offer workshops and training institutes for educators, school administrators, and parents.
  
• We design and implement research projects to strengthen education programs and further public understanding of the need for equal opportunity starting in early childhood.
• We publish resources for women and girls with disabilities.
  

Isn't that nice? They help people with disabilities. But only if they are female.

Here is another such outfit. That one is even more ideological. If you are a fair-minded person, those people will make you puke. If you truly wonder where a "radical feminist agenda" comes from in our schools, that place is the Mother Ship.

Finally, here is a link to a page that is actually on a federal government web site, this one at the Department of Education. It is a list of "resources" that are available -- and paid for by your tax dollars -- to support Gender Equity in Education. Here is a list of the section headings

• Women in Mathematics, Science, and Technology
• Family Activities and Parent Strategies
  • Expect the Best From a Girl. That's What You'll Get.
  • Raising Confident Competent Daughters: Strategies for Parents
• Women with Disabilities
• Women of Color in Education
• Research/Gender Equity in Education
  • The Chilly Classroom Climate: A Guide to Improve the Education of Women.
  • The Educational Progress of Women: findings from The Condition of Education (1995)
  • Empowering America's Families: Documenting the Success of Vocational Equity Programs for Women and Girls
  • Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. There is a huge, enormously well-funded federal education bureaucracy that controls teacher education in this country, and it is populated almost entirely by people with the feminist-Marxist view of the world. You might think I'm grinding an ax and so I am only listing the "girls only" programs and leaving out all the corresponding "boy-friendly" stuff, but have a look for yourself. There is no boy-friendly stuff. "Gender Equity in Education" is all girls, all the time. This is the indoctrination that upcoming teachers receive in schools It's been going on for over a decade now. There are boys in high school now that have never had a teacher who wasn't indoctinated on the way in to view him as a privileged member of the oppressor class who needs to have his sails trimmed.

[Lorianne]

Shouting someone down in an academic environment is your idea of "free speech?" No, it is not. Please quote me where I said that or retract it.

Your continued dishonest tactic of trying to link me to an event that I did not attend by projecting what I "would have done" had I been there is blantant slander.

Your repeated (third try now) attempt to project your opinion of what I condone on don't condone is also slanderous. YOU brought up the Sommers incident in the context of implying I condoned what happened. When I wouldn't bite, you continued on trying to pin on me opinions and attitudes which I do not hold. This is a blatantly dishonest personal attack. (It shows your lack of debate ability that you have to resort to it).

News flash: I do not have to defend opionions I don't hold, actions I never took, or comments I never made.

If you would like to know what I think of the Sommers incident you can ask me. I would be happy to share it. So far, you haven't asked me, you've only projected your opinion of what my beliefs are, a bankrupt debating tactic and one which only shows a lack of integrity on your part.

[Lorianne]

First sentence of the article you posted: Eighty-five percent of prisoners, 78% of high school dropouts, 82% of teenage girls who become pregnant, the majority of drug and alcohol abusers—all come from single-mother-headed households.

The very first sentense sets the bias right off the bat. It is the parent who is (most often) present and accounted for who is to blame for the ills of society. The author could have, but didn't, refer to the parent who is (most often) absent from these troubled children's lives. Instead he choose to set the blame right off the bat on the parent who is simply .... there.

Does he want the mother to leave, abandon the children? Does he prefer "no-parent" households to "single-mother" households? What is he proposing exactly?

[Harrison Bergeron]

Lorianne: "Please quote me where I said that or retract it.

Lorianne: "That is free speech countering free speech,"

[Lorianne]

Marxists masquerading as 'womens advocates' wandered the halls of Congress drumming up support for Federal help for girls, who were suffering enormously in our male-dominated school systems.

In an age when everyone and his dog constitute a "special interest" group or PAC on Captial hill ..... I have to ask ... so what? Who are you going to ban from lobbying Congress for special "perks"?

Look, I can't defend every stupid or shortsighted law or every worthless pork project that gets passed due to pressure from PACS. But this is the way our system works. Don't blame "marxists" feminists, blame our system and change it.

I don't like or agree with probably 85% of laws that get passed (or at least the ones I know about). So what ... poor me. What am I going to do about it? Deny particular people I don't like their First Ammendment rights?

I'll have to investigate your other claims later. I think there WAS discrimination in the schools at one time and due to the dilligence of people acting on their own beliefs (as is their right under our Constitution) things were changed. Maybe the pendulum swung too far, I don't know. I haven't seen all the horrors that you (and others) speak of through my experience volunteering at my kid's school. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I'm highly skeptical about how extensive the War Against Boys thing is. A lot of it is overblown hyperbole no different than what the proposer accuse the feminists of perpetrating on behalf of girls. Hypocrisy loses one a lot of credibility. There is ample cause for skepticism.

I could point to specific examples of how the rhetoric about very real problems such as Ritalin has been politicised into a false battle over victims and perpetrators. While our kids need real help we've used them as pawns in a gender debate that helps none of them. But that is a separate subject.

[Jim Noble]

>>Does he want the mother to leave, abandon the children? Does he prefer "no-parent" households to "single-mother" households? What is he proposing exactly?<<

I don't know.

But I propose making single-mother custody illegal. A felony.

Short, simple, and effective for curing these particular ills.

Yes, I'm serious.

[Lorianne]

My words in context:

"I don't agree with a lot of the things she's [Sommers] said and I believe she indulges in the exact same tactics she decries in others to her discredit .... and I give my criticism freely. I also agree with her about some things though I consider her style ineffectual and often dishonest by ommission. That is free speech countering free speech, as far as I know both mine and Sommers "rights" under the First Ammendment are still protected." ___ Lorianne

Free speech countering free speech is referring to my own right to criticism of Sommers ideas, which I am just as free to make as she is free to speak. NOWHERE did I say I have a right to prevent her from speaking, nowhere.

If you wish to imply that I wish to prevent Sommers from speaking, please qoute me saying that.

[RLK]

Would you agree that men should "start taking responsibility for their own morality" as well?

-------------------

I've been saying that for 30 years. Men don't like to hear it when I say it about men. Witness the camplains on this thread when I criticized playboy philosophy. Women explode in anger when I say it about women.

[Lorianne]

Well at least you proposed something! I can't accuse you of not offering solutions. Good luck in your crusade.

[Nick Danger]

Human Events
8 April 2002
Vol 58, No 13, p 14

The Real Responsibility of Men
By Stephen Baskerville

In addressing a recent conservative conference, Oliver North argued that "the biggest problem I see in this country today isn't winning the war against terrorism - the biggest problem ... is men not being responsible for the children they create."

This is an astonishing statement from a man who speaks with enormous authority on military matters. If Col. North feels this strongly about the importance of fatherhood, then we should try to understand why. And he is undoubtedly correct, though perhaps not precisely in the sense he may intend.

Societal Consequences

The problem of fatherless children is indeed serious. Some 25-million American children - about 40% - live in households without their fathers. Moreover, every major social pathology is strongly linked to father absence, including violent crime, drug abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, and suicide.

In attributing this to irresponsible men, however, we must be careful. President Clinton used to claim that fathers, hounded by his administration, "have chosen to abandon their children." Yet in research described by FrontPageMagazine as "the most important work of conservative social science in a decade," Arizona State University psychologist Sanford Braver demonstrated that very few fathers voluntarily abandon their children. Braver found that mothers, usually without legal grounds, file two-thirds of divorces. Other studies put the proportions at 85-90%. Mothers, not fathers, are leaving marriages in droves.

Moreover, what some see as irresponsible fathers is in reality an abuse of government power. The moment a mother files for divorce, the government seizes effective control of the children. With no evidence of wrongdoing, the father's contact with them is from that point criminalized. The forcibly divorced father can then be evicted and plundered by a powerful machine of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and enforcement agencies, who all have a vested interest in encouraging divorce and separating children from their fathers. Windfall child-support awards subsidize divorce and fatherless homes and encourage more mothers to divorce.

Some now predict two-thirds of marriages will end in divorce. About 80% of the 1.5-million divorces yearly are unilateral, and about three-fifths involve children, more than a million annually. It would seem then that at least 700,000 parents are involuntarily divorced every year, whereupon control of their children, finances, and private lives is taken over by the government.

Conservative silence on the depredations of the divorce industry is ironic, for they vindicate every prophecy concerning judicial activism, bureaucratic tyranny, and family destruction.

Bureaucratic regulators raise business costs. But many more fathers are reduced to servitude by bureaucratic courts and bureaucratic police who set the very child-support guidelines they adjudicate and enforce and which they have an interest in making as onerous as possible. Crushing burdens that may consume a man's entire salary create instant "deadbeats" and generate demand for an ever-larger bureaucracy with ever-more intrusive powers.

Criminalizing Fathers

Private behavior is criminalized through sexual-harassment laws. But many more fathers are criminalized and many children lose their fathers through protective orders issued without any evidence of wrongdoing. These orders cannot protect anyone, because they criminalize not violence (which is already criminal) but a father's contact with his own children. Ironically, the children are then subject to the physical and sexual violence that is much more common in single-parent homes than intact families.

Were policymakers sincere in their sympathy for children, they would curtail the power of the divorce industry to rip apart their homes in the first place. Even the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has recognized that the most effective antipoverty plan is an intact family. That this would benefit vastly more children than futile crackdowns on allegedly irresponsible fathers is precisely why the iron triangle of family courts, enforcement bureaucracies, and organized feminism won't permit it to happen. Rather than standing up to these dangerous interests, it is easier for some conservatives to attack fathers.

Family Cohesion

In a larger sense, therefore, Col. North is profoundly correct and his comparison with terrorism especially apt. It is highly irresponsible of men to leave our nation's children unprotected against abuse and exploitation by government officials.

A popular joke holds that within the family Mom makes the minor decisions, such as how to raise the children, while Dad concerns himself with important questions, like how to achieve world peace. This joke is now grimly writ large in public policy. Male policymakers allow their attention to be monopolized by a terrorist attack, while consigning family issues to what they perceive as the sphere of women, where special interests hijack the agenda and perpetrate a reign of government terror against parents and children. President Bush tells Americans that in the war on terrorism, "We defend ... the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear." Yet that is precisely the freedom that is under attack at home.

[Lorianne]

But I propose making single-mother custody illegal. A felony.

I'm intriqued by your proposal. Where would the children go then? Orphanages? To the father?

Also, how would the law work Constitutionally to allow the government to take a child from a biological parent (assuming orphanages)? Would we need a Constitutional ammendment? Just curious.

[Harrison Bergeron]

My bad. The context was wrong.

Your insults toward Sommers and her academic thesis combined with your ignorance of her opposition's shenanigans paints you as a neo-con dupe or a leftist feminist ideologue. Frankly, there's little practical difference between the two these days.

[Nick Danger]

so what?

Oh, OK. I thought you had asked where the radical feminist agenda in education was coming from, so I told you. I didn't realize you weren't really asking a question; you were just seeking to dismiss someone's assertion with ridicule. Sorry for the interruption.

[Lorianne]

Yeah for Ollie North!

I agree with the premis of this article. The custody laws need to be changed. I support parenthood being MANDATORY for people who have created children. I support presumptive joint physical custody.

We need to overhaul our custody laws and practices. Also for never married parents as well as divorced parents, parenting one's own children should be olbigatory, not optional, not negotiable. The sooner we start talking about parental OBLIGATIONS (and not parental "rights") the better off we'll all be.