Father's Rights Before Gay Rights

February 27, 2004

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by Mark Charalambous

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The evidence is incontrovertible. The greatest predictor of social pathology in children is fatherlessness. Suicide. Teen pregnancy. Drug abuse. Crime. School dropouts. All the social pathologies of youth correlate higher with father absence than any other factor, including poverty.

In 1999, more than a quarter of all children lived without their father—17 million children—according to the Dept. of Health and Human Services. This is now a low-end estimate.

The highest rates of such pathologies occur in the African-American community. The single-mother family has unfortunately been the paradigm for black families in the U.S. for decades. We’ve all heard the statistics. One in three black men between 20 and 29 has some kind of involvement with the criminal justice system. No wonder responsible black leaders oppose gay marriage. They understand the staggering human and social cost of raising children without fathers. Society simply cannot afford this social experiment any longer.

Since the explosion of divorce and out-of-wedlock births and the feminization of family courts, rates of child pathologies in the other communities, including whites, are following suit.

And now, to add insult to injury, our judges are bending over backwards, usurping the democratic process, to further empower women who want nothing from men other than their issue and their paychecks. These are the same people, Margaret Marshall and her friends in the legal community, who have time and time again ruled against fathers who fight against overwhelming legal odds to maintain a meaningful relationship with their children.

The hue and cry about civil rights for lesbians and gays is particularly galling for Massachusetts’ fathers. Our civil and human rights have been ruthlessly violated by these same judges for decades. Whether it is affirming the “right” of a custodial mother to move with the child to the other side of the country, or overturning a lower court decision that actually brought a measure of rationality to the state’s notorious “abuse prevention” law (Ch. 209A), Margaret Marshall is always found on the same side of the issue: for the woman—regardless—and against fathers and their inalienable right to the custody, care and protection of their children.

Marshall epitomizes the feminization of the courts. Her gay marriage fatwa is the logical capstone to her transparent agenda: the remaking of society along feminist lines. Just check the N.O.W. web site. The redefinition of family requires the dismantling of the father-child relationship, which in turn requires the demonization of men. Fathers, the last impediment, must be redefined out of “family.” Operationally from the state’s point of view, “family” has already been redefined as “mother and children,” ever since “I’m a single mom” transmogrified from a social stigma to an entitlement. Gay marriage and same-sex “families” further erode the special nature of the biological family, and will make it even easier to discard dad.

The aimlessly spinning moral compass of Marshall and the liberal intelligentsia views same-sex families as an equivalent alternative to the biological nuclear family. Marshall can find no rational distinction between same-sex partners and normal couples. What’s more, she finds any contrary notions contemptuous. All that argues against her point of view are public opinion, common sense, natural law, decades of research showing that children need mothers and fathers, several thousand years of civilization, all the major religions that we know of … oh yes, and two billion years of the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Our children have suffered enough from these pious social engineers who seek to impose their heightened sense of moral relativism through judicial fiat. The legislature must permit the people to vote on the definition of marriage, and then the “gang of four” must be removed from the bench.