Absent fathers have rights too

In the aftermath of last week’s riots, there has been a torrent of evidence and opinion about the detrimental affect of absent fathers, followed by outraged indignation at anything that might constitute criticism of single mothers.

It is a fact that one in three children whose parents split up loses contact with their fathers but in many cases, that is because of a family justice system that still favours the mother as the “better” parent. Mum gets to stay in the family home while Dad is forced to move out, maybe staying with friends or renting but invariably unable to afford to create a second home for the children, because he’s having to pay their mother maintenance.

Mum gets a new boyfriend who moves in to the family home, he doesn’t like the contact with the ex and gradually the visits become more difficult and a bargaining tool where the children are the currency. Hardly surprising then that for many men, the gradual disintegration before their eyes of what they once loved becomes too much to bear and they walk away. Yes, of course that is simplistic and many people manage to make sensible shared parenting arrangements that work just as there are many women and children abandoned men. And yes, there have been some long overdue reforms to the Family Justice system but there are still far too many men who are “Mac Dads” , with nowhere else to go on the odd Saturdays they are allowed to see their children apart from a burger bar – hardly conducive to maintaining and nurturing a relationship. Grandparents and other family members have been excluded post separation through an adversarial system that forces families to take sides and children are goods for barter and all reinforced by the lazy journalism in which women “ struggle “ to bring up children and men rarely get any credit.

I am absolutely committed to equality between men and women in every field, be it employment rights, pay, healthcare and access to opportunity but the feminist agenda has inflicted some terrible and pernicious damage on society – and men in particular. Women of my generation campaigned for equality and naively believed we could have it all. We now know that not to be true and have, to a certain extent, allowed what Shaun Bailey called the “nationalisation of child care” to happen right under our noses because it was more acceptable than facing the consequences which in our hearts we know to be true; if your kids are being cared for by someone else for 12 hours a day – who has the most influence on them? And so the compensation of gifts and toys and rubbish food and late nights and no discipline seep in to our homes.

For the father that abandons his partner and children, there will also be mothers who breed from serially dysfunctional relationships with different men but while we may tut in private, rarely does anyone raise the question whether the children would be better with their birth father and he given the social and financial support to make a home for them. We talk about parenting skills but little about how to manage parenting when a relationship breaks down.

The disaster that was the Child Support Agency and cock-up of CAFCASS were ill thought out and extremely damaging, based on a notion of threat and retribution against men – who were in the main those who most affected.

Not all men are potential rapists, nor are they potential paedophiles, abusers or violently inclined towards women. But it is hardly surprising that few want to become primary school teachers or social workers when they are treated as pariahs by the women around them. The insidious notion that men are to blame (bankers, politicians, greedy capitalists – mainly men ) more than women for the breakdown in law and order we saw last week is completely wrong and if we have achieved anything out of the past decades of feminism, then we should have the confidence to believe in our own sons, and have the balls to stop demonising men just because we can get away with it in the name of equality.

Article sourced from Iaindale.com …. original article can be found here

Misandry in the Media: RADAR Expands its Focus

Misandry, simply defined, is the pathological hatred of men and boys. It is the analog to misogyny, but with the bigotry and rage targeted at males.

Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, two scholars in the field of religious studies at McGill University in Montreal, popularized the word "misandry" in a series of books on the topic: Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2001); Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men (2006); Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man (2010).

Nathanson and Young describe misandry as "a form of prejudice and discrimination that has become institutionalized in North American society, 'a collectively shared and culturally propagated worldview, not a personal emotion such as dislike or anger'"1.

As one would expect from the Nathanson and Young definition, misandry is propagated by the media. A vivid example of this occurred late last year on CNN, the self-proclaimed "Worldwide Leader in News." Interviewing the former Lorena Bobbitt (now using the name Lorena Gallo), who in in 1993 cut off her husband John's penis with a kitchen knife, CNN national correspondent Alina Cho displayed both a shocking disregard for John Bobbitt's ordeal and an appalling camaraderie with a woman who justified sexually mutilating her husband by telling the police, "He always have orgasm [sic], and he doesn't wait for me to have orgasm. He's selfish."2


ALINA CHO, national correspondent, CNN:

Her name is Lorena Gallo, but back then on news programs and the subject of late-night comedians, she was Lorena Bobbitt. She's remembered as the wife who employed a – shall we say, dramatic – response to an abusive relationship with her then husband John Wayne-Bobbitt. But in the nearly two decades since then she started a new life. She's been in a long-term relationship, thirteen years strong. She has a five year-old daughter. And while she works as a part-time hairdresser and real estate agent, she says her true passion is counseling domestic violence victims through her organization.

(...)

CHO:

I have to ask you this. As you well know, there was a time when joking about the Bobbitts was a national pastime. I wonder after all of these years – are you finally able to laugh about it?

LORENA BOBBITT (nee GALLO):

I finally am. And it took a lot of time, it took a lot of years, and definitely a lot of – I went to psychologists, and thanks to the doctors, the therapies I'm here, and I'll be able to now basically start all over again and start a new relationship and have a family and basically I can laugh now3.


More recently, early this year, Brad Womack, returning to the reality show The Bachelor for a second season, was slapped by contestant Chantal O'Brian on the season premiere show. Before slapping him, she told him: "I watched your season and I have something for you. It's not from me; it's from every woman in America"4. Remarkably, Mr. Womack later stated that while the slap was "very real and very hard," he "deserved it," presumably for his behavior in the previous season. He explained the slap this way: "I think Chantal was trying to make a statement about my past behavior, and make a strong first impression, which she did."5

In the grand scheme of things, a slap to the face, even a hard one, is fairly trivial, but that the The Bachelor producers, Ms. O'Brian, and even Mr. Womack (male guilt?) believe it is acceptable behavior for a reality show contestant speaks volumes about the pervasive disregard for men's rights that currently exists in modern America.

During Super Bowl XLV, Pepsi Max ran an ad in which a black woman repeatedly abuses her black husband. This is supposed to be funny. In the final scene, the woman throws a can of Pepsi Max at his head but misses, hitting a white woman instead. Amazingly, Eric Deggans, media critic for the St. Petersburg Times, blogged that the ad was a "toxic package" of "sexism, weird racial overtones and violence against women"6 (emphasis added). No mention is made of the ad's depiction of intentional violence against men.

On June 13, 2011, in a segment entitled "Girls Rule, Boys Drool," New York City's popular NPR host Brian Lehrer interviewed Dan Abrams, legal analyst for Good Morning America and ABC News, to discuss his new book, Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else7. Only on the KKK News Network could one imagine the reverse thesis being advanced, that men, on the whole, are better than women.

Saving the most appalling example for last, we turn to CBS's The Talk, the poor woman's version of ABC's The View. The Talk features a panel of women who discuss current events, including Sharon Osbourne, wife of ageless rockstar Ozzy Osbourne. In his younger, more intoxicated years, he was known for biting the head off a bat and peeing on a monument at the Alamo. But the offensiveness of his antics pales in comparison to Sharon Osbourne's behavior during a recent episode of The Talk.

Last month, on July 11, 2011, a 48-year old Californian woman, Catherine Kieu Becker, cut off her husband's penis, and, unlike Lorena Bobbitt, who threw her husband's penis into a field, threw it the garbage disposal unit and turned the unit on. Osbourne, and most of her co-hosts, found the story hilarious. Osbourne mimicked with her finger what she envisioned the penis looked like as it went down the garbage disposal, and called Becker's act "quite fabulous," adding: "Just imagine that thing whizzing around the disposal, it's like, hysterical." She also made sure everyone knew that she lights candles by Lorena Bobbitt's picture.

To her credit, co-host Sara Gilbert, the executive producer of The Talk, pointed out the obvious double standard: "Not to be a total buzz kill, but it is a little bit sexist. If somebody cut a woman's breast off, nobody would be sitting laughing." Ms. Obourne's disagreed, however. "It's different," she explained, because one is floppy and the other sticks up. Well, there you have it. Severed penises are comedy gold.

RADAR has had some modest success in reforming America's approach to the problem of domestic violence. In fact, the perceived growing power of RADAR was a partial motivating factor for the 2009 hit piece published in Slate.com's Double X entitled: "Men's Rights Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective". In the article, the author, Kathryn Joyce, incorrectly labels RADAR as a men's rights group and laments the effectiveness RADAR and other groups have had in advancing their views.

Truth be told, however, RADAR and other groups with similar concerns have, with a few exceptions here and there, actually been quite ineffective in stemming the tide of unjust and harmful domestic violence policies. In reflecting on our efforts to reform the nation's approach to solving domestic violence, RADAR has concluded that one major reason judges, prosecutors, and legislators have been unreceptive to our message is the pervasive effect that misandry in the media has on shaping their fundamental biases.

In support of her view that RADAR is frightening, Joyce simply states, incredulously, that RADAR believes "that false allegations are rampant, that a feminist-run court system fraudulently separates innocent fathers from children, that battered women's shelters are running a racket that funnels federal dollars to feminists, that domestic-violence laws give cover to cagey mail-order brides seeking Green Cards, and finally, that men are victims of an unrecognized epidemic of violence at the hands of abusive wives." Joyce finds it so obvious that no right-thinking person could believe such things that she doesn't even bother to try to refute any of them.

Joyce's faith in the justice of the current system takes on a religious quality. It is this kind of blind faith that RADAR must shatter before any meaningful reform will happen.

Going forward, RADAR will focus less on particular laws and more on the nation's anti-male culture. RADAR plans to focus on the prevalence of misandry and the impact of misandry on the nation's approach to domestic violence. RADAR will highlight the media's role in spreading misandry, with media broadly defined to include not just the print, radio, film and television industries but also the messages disseminated by the nations churches and education, including judicial training that often amounts to nothing more than misandristic indoctrination.

Thank you for your continued support. With your help, we can change the culture. Let's do it.







1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanson_and_Young


2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Lorena_Bobbitt#Arrest_and_trial


3 http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-hadro/2010/12/29/cnn-reporter-gushes-lorena-bobbitt-are-you-finally-able-laugh-about-it#ixzz1Bv6duFBd


4 http://thestir.cafemom.com/entertainment/114581/bachelor_slap_condoned_by_gloria


5 http://www.examiner.com/tv-in-cincinnati/bachelor-brad-womack-says-slap-was-not-criminal-battery


6 http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/media/content/super-bowl-fail-halftime-show-and-ads-misfire-big-night-video


7 http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2011/jun/13/girls-rule-boys-drool/




Date of RADAR Release: August 28, 2011

R.A.D.A.R. – Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting – is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of men and women working to improve the effectiveness of our nation's approach to solving domestic violence. http://mediaradar.org

Labor Greens -Shared Parenting Rollback- creating a fatherless society

August 24, 2011 | Category: Family Law changes, Family Law Event, Family Law Reform, Insitutional Discrimination against Fathers, Political Parties
Tags: anti-family legislation, Dads4Kids, Fatherhood Foundation, Rachel Siewert, Senate Legal & Constitutional Affairs Committee, Warwick Marsh


Media Release: Labor Greens ‘Shared Parenting Rollback’ creating a fatherless society

Monday 22 August 2011 at 6.30 pm, the Labor Green’s controlled Senate Legal & Constitutional Affairs Committee released their report on the ‘Shared Parenting Rollback’ Bill 2011 www.aph.gov.au/senate . The Green’s member, Rachel Siewert said, “ The Greens have consistently opposed the equal shared parenting responsibility legislation ” brought into law in 2006.

Warwick Marsh, Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation, said, “ The Senate report and the Green’s comments show what is driving this shocking new anti-child and anti-father legislation. Never before have major changes to Family Law been enacted on any other than bipartisan agreement between the major parties. This proposed legislation is opposed by the Opposition, and rightly so, because it removes the very wise friendly-parent provision, redefines family violence to mean anything anybody wants it to be, and removes any possible penalties for perjury and false accusation in the Family Law Court.


This new legislation, even with new amendments proposed by the Senate Committee, is nothing more than radical feminist ideologically-based anti-family legislation that will ensure the destruction of more families, the suicide of more separated fathers and an increase in the heartbreak of more fatherless children.

Mr Marsh continued, “ The Labor Greens government has embarked on an outright war against fatherhood and marriage. This Bill will soon be law and on Wednesday 24 August 2011, this same Labor Green’s alliance will be promoting homosexual marriage in the House of Reps: which a notable member of parliament pointed out this week is an oxymoron. Marriage is what it is – the union of a man and a woman. To accept anything less, in law, is to rob children of their biological birthright, exactly what the new ‘Shared Parenting Rollback’ Family Law Amendment Bill 2011 will do for many more Australian children.


A 2009 Galaxy Poll revealed that 86% of Australians, including those in Labor Party heartland, believe that children should be reared by their biological mum and dad wherever possible.”

Dads4Kids calls on all Australian to make a stand and reject the Labor Green’s attack on fatherhood, marriage and children.

We ask Australians everywhere to write to their local Member of Parliament and request them to reject the Family Law Amendment Bill 2011.

For further information:

Warwick Marsh

0418 225 212



Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation

PO Box 542

Unanderra NSW 2526

www.fatherhood.org.au