Posted on 05/26/2002 2:17:07 PM PDT by RogerFGay
I think a couple of gay guys were having fun with you.
And you blame anybody who dares try to remedy this?
No. Show me where I said social/legal problems or inequities should not be addressed. I said they should not be addressed by reducing the presumption of obligation of parents to kids. Big difference.
Of course your choice of words, "many of the 'father's rights' groups" is a red herring in itself, ignoring that there are groups airing their grievances strictly w/r/t custody and visitation issues.
Some groups are focused on remedying inequites present currently in custody and visitation issues. But I know of no so-called "fathers rights" group which supports/promotes judicial presumption of joint physical custody. Why is that I wonder?
A "missing reference" in a statement of fact is a long way from callous disregard for one's offspring. We go through this every time you post to the divorce/custody/support threads. You assign nefarious motives and shirking of responsibility to any and every opinion/initiative/cause taken up by men. One is required to parse every word, then you call "foul" for said parsing. One of your most frequent complaints is against complainers. Yet when confronted with the fact that someone is going to the mat and doing something... you become..... a complainer!
These people are doing something about injustice against fathers. For the majority of them, it certainly is about access to their children. If this doesn't address your anti-male opinion that their agenda doesn't help all children is your problem, not theirs. These are a specific segment of the non-custodial parent population looking out for their rights so they can actually be parents, not indentured slaves. It was the government that separated custody and visitation issues from financial support as a way of growing the feminist agenda in law enforcement and social welfare bureaucracies. Don't go blaming the people who have to respond by attacking the issues separately.
I think you're looking for the "deadbeat dad" bashfest over at DU. The subject was divorce made way too attractive to women as the solution to any and every piddling marital problem because the court will automatically grant them custody of the kids and 60% or 70% of dad's take home pay. That women petition for something like 80% of all divorces backs up this claim. Men can pay their support, yet be denied access to their children. Some of the most ardent father's rights converts are men who've been imprisoned or forced to surrender their driver's licenses for "non-support" after they've suffered a long illness or lost their job.
And, why don't so-called "father's rights" organizations champion RPJPC (if the presumption is that father's are not allowed adequate hands-on parenting of their children)?
New figures show that a quarter of all women will never be proposed to as men opt for no-strings-attached casual relationships.
Today 29 per cent of men are likely never to marry and the trend is rising.
And recent Family Court rulings which force men to pay for child support for children that are not their own have only reinforced widespread perceptions of anti-male bias by the court.
There are now more than two million Australian men and women in the lonely hearts club - those 45 years and under who have never married. On current trends the club is likely to double over the next 15 years.
Men are opting for relationships where there is no commitment, no offspring and most of all no danger of long-term financial loss from divorce.
And statistics also show that if a woman wants to marry the worst thing she can do is get a university degree, which pushes out the marriage age and lengthens the odds of never marrying.
University degrees produce the most old maids (almost twice as many women with university degrees are not married at 45 compared with women with no qualifications at all).
Women with diplomas fare almost as badly, ahead of women with basic certificates and those with no qualifications at all.
Women with trade certificates appear to have the best prospects of getting married. Just 5 per cent of tradeswomen aged 45 are not married.
"I think it is wonderful that men are starting to wake up," family law reform campaigner Sylvia Smith said last week. "Why would a young man with a lucrative career risk losing 70 to 80 per cent of his assets by getting married?
"Property settlements are meant to be 50/50 but in the vast majority of cases the result is more like 80/20 towards women."
The Full Bench of the Family Court recently ruled that it had no power to force the Child Support Agency to refund $4290 in overpayments to a Victorian man who discovered by DNA tests that he was not the father of his wife's child.
In another case currently before the Family Court, also in Victoria, a man is seeking repayment of about $40,000 in child support payments after he also discovered that two of the three children he had been supporting for 8-1/2 years turned out through DNA testing not to be his.
The Child Support Agency insists it has no power to refund the money, and Children and Youth Affairs Minister Larry Anthony says he is seeking advice on the matter.
The Family Law Act of 1975 ushered in not only the era of no-fault divorce and high dissolution rates (currently running 46 per cent), but a corresponding trend of an increasing reluctance to marry.
Since 1975 there has been a five-fold growth in the number of men who have never married.
In 1975, 4 per cent or about one in 25 women had never married by the time they reached 45 years of age.
According to the 1996 Census (the 2001 Census figures are due to be released soon), more than one in four women had never married by the age of 45, and this figure is continuing to rise.
Between 1986 and 1996 there was a rise in the number of women living in de facto relationships from 7 per cent to 12 per cent in the 25- to 29-year age group.
However, the proportion of married women fell by 15 per cent so that the proportion of women in 1996 who were coupled in any type of live-in union fell from 67 per cent to 57 per cent. The number of people getting married is also falling, despite the increasing population. In 2000 there was a decrease of 900 marriages compared with the previous year.
Men and women are also delaying getting married, with the average age of men getting married now 30, and women almost 28.
In 1971 an extraordinary 62 per cent of women aged between 20 and 24 were married. By 1997 this figure had fallen to 13 per cent.
Ok, let's assume your statment is accurate. Then why aren't father advocates clamouring for changing the divorce laws to a presumption of dual custody?
Well, lets see... who are these men having relationships with? Other men? No? Then women must be "opting" for the same things.
This article reeks of men "punishing" women for having the audacity to get a college degree by not marrying them. And yet the article implies these men are in relationships (presumably with women though it doesn't say) and doesn't imply the women are there involuntarily. So all this "punishment" is actually people making mutual choices not to marry.
.... like a woman would be eager to marry a man with an attitude like this article presents.
Your continued statements that they are not reflect only your own ignorance. A quick click to the ACFC site would remedy that.
On the other hand, your continued statements that what they seek instead is "loosening social/legal requirements on men to support and otherwise be involved" is really more at vicious slander, since by your previous ignorance we already know that you in fact know nothing of their programs, and so anything you say about them is just nonsense made up by you.
I would think that the more disturbing twist to this article, at least for you and those like you, is that your heretofore successful efforts to demonize men are increasingly falling on deaf ears.
I suspect that all of the gains to be made from painting the male population as a collection of child-abusing, daughter-raping, deadbeats has already been gained, and that further efforts in this direction will only serve to identify those who seek not justice or the best interests of children, but rather the legal and financial destruction of men for its own sake. It is becoming clear now that the public is coming to reject that form of hateful ugliness, and it's frankly about time.
One of the fun things about discussing these things with women is an apparent inability in so many of you to generalize from the specific. The article discusses a large-scale social trend. It provides supporting evidence from the country's census bureau and other sources. It is not about the mating success of the author.
I can see how it might look that way to someone who views life as a contest between men and women as competitors, but that sort of view seems to be restricted to a shrinking segment of still-bitter feminists. It is becoming common now to hear once-verboten laments from 40-something women who bought into the "have it all" ideology in their youth, only to find themselves on a lonely, childless, middle-management treadmill twenty years later.
The feminists are still out there encouraging girls to view boys as their enemies and competitors, but I get the sense that that particular bad idea has about run its course. Feminist ideals aren't abstract rainbows in the future anymore; they are a real society that has some serious problems raising and educating its children, and in even having enough to replenish the species. The down side that no one knew back then is here now, staring us in the face.
We need some adjustments, and we all know it. Men my age, at least, can read that article from Australia and not really be surprised by it. It is a perfectly rational response by young men to a marriage-and-divorce system that quite simply makes the price of marriage too high for its male participants. As prices rise, fewer people buy. To me this is just common sense; I would expect no other response from young men.
Assertions that women are gleefully participating in these no-commitment relationships, and that they are perfectly thrilled to be free of marriage and children, has an odd 1970's ring to it that I just don't believe anymore. It's that boastful "fish-and-bicycle" nonsense that would have us believe that what women want most in this world is to leave the entire male sex behind, and to enter the wonderful world of all-lesbian cloning, or whatever the Hell they had in mind when they started selling those T-shirts twenty years ago.
I think the article is sad. I don't think the men prefer things that way. I think they just can't, as sane human beings, justify taking such a huge risk with their futures. I'm sure that what they'd really prefer is for the fish-and-bicycle crowd to get out of the way, and to leave them alone, and to leave the women of their generation alone as well. And I'll bet the women agree with them.
"The women you know" is not a scientific sample. The people who have done scientific samples tell us that adultery isn't even a factor in a majority of divorces, and where it does occur it's split about evenly between the sexes.
This society's inability to maintain stable families, and its increasing difficulty with raising and educating its children, are serious problems. They deserve better than silly blame-throwing and smug canards.
The premis of your article was that women are willing to be emotionally blackmailed by this withholding of marriage proposals. Nowhere was it even attempted to butress that premis with facts.
In fact, the article was contradictory by imply that being college educated was a handicap to marriage (for women) but that men didn't want to marry women who they might end up having to support either (one would assume less educated women). He seemed to be saying men don't want a woman who can support herself because she might up and leave because she's not financially dependent ... but men don't want a woman who can't support herself as well because she might up and leave and sue for a greate amount of support. Choose your poison.
If anything THIS author (of the article you presented) was playing the classic schoolyard "girls are poison" game .... damned if you do, damned if you don't ... male vs. female game. And he was anti-marriage no matter the parameters since he didn't bother to set any.
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.