CONTINUED FROM PART I

No Man Is An Island: How I Came To Be Involved In The Men's Movement - PART II

August 21, 2004

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by David E. Reiser, MD.

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“The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.”
–Franz Kafka, The Trial

The primary goal of the Men’s Movement, in spite of its name, is not the advocacy of causes pertaining solely to men. It is a rapidly growing protest movement comprised of men and women from all walks of life who have joined together to oppose the present-day attacks being mounted against the institution of the family. The Men’s Movement is concerned about the family’s sovereignty and its ability to survive in any recognizable form into the future. With a current divorce rate in the United States inching past fifty percent and still climbing, it’s hard to argue with the appropriateness of this concern.

Anyone seeking to preserve the family and restore it health, therefore, quickly realizes that the key question is—what factors are driving the divorce rate this high? Predictably, different people have laid the blame on different elements including pornography, television, feminism, immorality, promiscuity, Hollywood, rock music, drugs, and homosexuality. Which element gets targeted seems to depend primarily upon the religious, moral, and political convictions of the person pointing the finger more than it does on empirical evidence. The fact is, moreover, that none of these elements is actually the major explanation for our spiraling divorce rates. That distinction belongs to government, by which I mean government at both the state and federal levels. Government is by far the most powerful driving force behind the divorce epidemic.

Today the government’s power to know the most intimate details of every citizen’s life is unprecedented. Over the last fifty years, in fact, it has become ever more intrusive into all aspects of our daily lives and not just our family lives. Comparing our present government to the totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 is tempting but probably unfair, given that the present situation is so much worse. It’s true that Big Brother had a TV monitor and microphone in every citizen’s home to watch everything that citizen did and to hear everything he said. But in terms of the technology employed, the conditions depicted in Orwell’s novel are actually the good old days (and the protagonist was able to find a small cul de sac where the camera could not penetrate). Today, the rapid evolution of the PC and the Internet has provided government with much more than TV monitors. Its power at this time is virtually unlimited—so much so that one may reasonably ask whether citizens still actually have anything that can justifiably be called private lives.

It is true that many issues which are central to the Men’s Movement are ones in which there is rampant discrimination against men. A major focus of the Movement, therefore, does involve protesting the laws, policies, judicial biases, politics, and stereotypes that encourage discrimination against men. Still, fundamentally, the Men’s Movement views the people who stand to profit the most from the spoils of our present divorce system as the root of the problem. While the courts discriminate against men in the extreme in a divorce, and the overwhelming percentage of victims is fathers, the Movement views this as inevitable simply because men are the easiest target to scapegoat at the present time. Discriminating against men is the best way to secure maximum profits at a minimum risk.

Men at this time in history are vilified so often, and in so many contexts, that discriminating against them in divorce court is hardly likely to raise any eyebrows. Who really cares, after all, about the constitutional rights of “wife-beaters,” “deadbeat fathers,” and “stalkers?” As a rule, the motivation of those who profit from divorce is neither ideological nor gender-derived—it’s purely economic. As Vito Corleone said to his hot-headed heir-apparent, Sonny, in The Godfather, “It’s just business, Sonny. It’s nothing personal.” Unfortunately, the commodity involved is our next generation, our own children. Given that they will inherit responsibility for this county in the near future, the profits from this business may strike some as risky business indeed.

It’s important to understand that the Men’s Movement does not view the destruction of the family as primarily resulting from people who are out to get men. Without an explicit grasp of this point, there may be a tendency to view the Men’s Movement as anti-women, or at least as an angry response to some of the tenets of feminism (which are indeed ant-male). In truth, the Men’s Movement is in not hostile to women. In fact, in its championing of the family, it aligns itself far more with the vast majority of women’s own deepest convictions. There is a lot of invective on the Net, some of it provocative, ungrounded, and cruel. Feminist groups are hardly the only culprits here, but they have not been notably restrained, either. When spokespeople for feminism brashly spew out nonsense such as “Men are obsolete; all we need is a test-tube and some DNA,” some men will react.

This is especially true because some men have actually had their children taken from them in court by women who were not so very different in their attitudes. To such men, a remark such as this one, which is a paraphrase of several statements by Germaine Greer, the impact goes beyond taunting. It will be experienced as sadism. One can understand the temptation at times, therefore, to respond in suit. Nevertheless, it is important that people in this Movement don’t succumb.

I say this not simply because it is a matter of retaining our own civility (which it is), but also because the Men’s Movement is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to feminism. Frequently, such an assumption is made. The present wave of feminism arose out of the dubious premise that half of the human race is tyrannically oppressing the other half; therefore, that half needs to rise up and conquer its oppressor. When feminists asserted this beginning in the late 1960’s, and began referring to themselves as “the Women’s Liberation Movement,” and eventually as simply, “the Women’s Movement,” few people objected. That isn’t surprising given the zeitgeist of the times. The Freedom Movement was active in the South and the Anti-War Movement was front-and-center everywhere. It was an age of rhetorical excess, and who thought to notice or care?

What got lost, however, was clarity and common sense. Prior to the late 1960’s feminism had clearly identified itself as a suffrage movement, which of course was accurate. I think it dealt itself a serious blow when it slipped into viewing itself as a freedom movement, for it was inevitable after that that the membership would regress into a stance of being at war with men. This kind of futile and irrational polarizing now sees its ultimate expression in extremists who seek to destroy the family itself and view this as an ideologically driven “struggle for liberation.” It’s actually a Sunday Fun Run with the lemmings. To destroy the family unit is tantamount to committing slow species-wide suicide. It’s disturbing, in fact, how far this kind of atavism has actually managed to come. The Men’s Movement was not born in knee-jerk reaction to such muddle-headed “ideology” and it needs to distance itself from it.

In Darwinian terms, such a notion is preposterous. The perpetuation of the species is based on a cooperative and ordinarily affectionate union between men and women, not on a feudal tyranny. The absurdity of feminism’s theoretical foundations explains in part why it finds itself so intellectually bankrupt now, only thirty years after achieving its greatest prominence. A “freedom” movement that is based on blaming half the human race for the supposed problems of the other half can hardly be expected to inspire productive thinking for very long. The Men’s Movement advocates for social reforms that would restore everyone’s functioning to sanity. At least this is how both contemporary science and most of the human race view a loving and nurturing family in which the next generation is to be brought up.

Probably there will always be men and women who cannot sustain a bond of trust and love. This seems obvious and it is obviously sad, most of all for the children of such people who can easily be crushed by a parental divorce. For this reason, there will in all likelihood always be the need for a mechanism whereby people can end a marriage. Society needs to respond by offering empathy and help, not by turning up its nose. On the other hand, that is a long way from promoting a political ideology which asserts, as a central premise, that that every woman on earth is being “raped” against her will by every man, who is without exception an imperialist oppressor intent of colonizing her.

The Men’s Movement fundamentally, therefore, stands in opposition to those individuals, professions, and business interests that depend on spiraling divorce rates for their economic growth. It does object as well to any number of the tenets of feminism, but feminism is not the Movement’s main long-term concern since (as I’ve tried to demonstrate), it views feminism as a seriously flawed belief system that is now dying from its own obsolescence.

What the Men’s Movement is all about is taking on the vested interests in this society that want current divorce trends to continue. Obviously, this is a formidable task. Many individuals, professions, corporations, and branches of government potentially stand to gain from the tragedy of divorce. Collectively, innumerable cogs and gears have now come together in a vast interlocking cartel whose purpose is to perpetuate a high frequency of divorce and drive it even higher. People sometimes refer to it as “the Divorce Industry.” Whatever term one uses, it is a multibillion dollar conglomerate. It’s big bucks. Very big.

Here are a few of the professions that profit from the spoils of divorce: the judiciary; attorneys (both civil and criminal, since criminal charges related to domestic violence and violation of restraining orders are so commonplace; the appellate courts; all of the court-employees; law enforcement—police and sheriffs (someone has to arrest fathers and haul them into jail); correctional institutions; probation departments; state and federal revenue departments (not just the bureaucrats who collect state and federal taxes, but also personnel specifically assigned to collecting child support money (often called child support enforcement personnel); child welfare departments; child protection agencies; social services departments; victim’s assistance advocates; the psychiatric treatment industry, including thousands of counseling centers created solely to provide therapeutic “classes” for men convicted of domestic violence; mental health counselors; alcohol and drug counselors; domestic violence counselors; psychologists; pediatricians; consulting psychiatrists; psychiatric social workers; statisticians (whose figures determine the formulae for determining dollar amounts to be provided in child support cases); grant writers; women’s resource centers; women’s safe houses; construction companies (to build the jails); caterers (somebody has to feed the men sent to jail).

This list could be expanded ad infinitum. And as so often happens when wrongdoing is institutionalized and bureaucratized over a period of years, it is hard to single out any one component of the whole as being the most egregious. Individually, many of the people who earn their living from the spoils of divorce may, in fact, be well-intentioned. When one views the collective effort as an integrated whole, however, it is clear that it is responsible for a catastrophe.

And while it is hard to single any component out as “the very worst of all,” I would point without hesitation, if I had to pick just one element, to the legal profession. At its center we find the family court system. The family courts, in my view, are hopelessly corrupt. They cannot be reformed or helped to evolve in a better direction. Those who now practice in this area—the judges and lawyers alike—are too tainted; they cannot possibly be relied upon to lead any revamped system in the future. They’ve all got to go.

As Baskerville points out, the family courts—for all of their tremendous power—are little-studied institutions. Unlike other courts, they are usually closed to the public and generally seal the records of their proceedings. They keep few statistics and generally make sure that detailed information about how they operate is hard to obtain.

Ironically, some of their most outrageous abrogations of the Constitution derive from what may have begun with the best of intentions. The family courts lean heavily for their justification on a quasi-legal construct whose sentiments are comprehensible and, from one perspective, even commendable. That is, the family courts see as their mandate the imperative to act in “the best interests of the child.” This same argument has long been advanced in cases where a child is judged to be in danger—for example, a boy with leukemia whose fundamentalist parents are refusing a stem cell transplant; or a child who is being neglected, starved, or beaten. Such situations obviously exist and no responsible thinker advocates that as a society we abandon our obligations to those who cannot protect themselves.

On the other hand, the family courts have co-opted this imperative and used it without justification in most instances. They have used it, in fact, to function de facto as a power unrestrained by any Constitutional safeguards at all.

The family court system is the only legal institution in the United States that can impose its will and invoke the powers necessary to carry its will out on citizens who have done nothing wrong. No proof of any transgression by any litigant is required in child custody decisions. The result is that the family courts can garnish a man’s wages, put him in jail, take away his professional licensure, seize his children, prevent him from immigrating, and strip him of his liberties and Constitutional protections—all simply because they elect to do so. Nor is this a potential power that the courts wisely refrain from wielding except in rare situations. They do this and worse to thousands of men day-in and day-out, month after month, and year after year.

This is the kind of threat to our democracy and freedom that the Men’s Movement stands in opposition to. So, too, does it stand in strong opposition to the courts’ favored method of imposing its will—the unrestrained and unconstitutional use of restraining orders.

They are used to exclude fathers from any contact with their children for months, for years, and even for life, and yet they are issued routinely during divorce proceedings, usually without any evidence of wrongdoing.

Again citing Baskerville, he quotes someone with considerable seniority and stature in the legal system, Elaine Epstein, the former president of the Massachusetts Women's Bar Association, who has written that restraining orders are doled out "like candy…Restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply," and "the facts have become irrelevant…In virtually all cases, no notice, meaningful hearing, or impartial weighing of evidence is to be had."

Municipal Court Judge Richard Russell told his colleagues during a training seminar on restraining orders:

Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you're violating as you grant a restraining order. Throw him out on the street, give him the clothes on his back, and tell him, see ya around. . . . We don't have to worry about the rights.

Once restraining orders have been instituted, any real or imagined infraction can then be claimed as grounds for violating those restraints. This is done by divorcing women working with certain lawyers who make such dirty tricks their standard stock and trade. Judges in these cases almost invariably find against the man and thus the denial of his civil liberties is now complete.

First, a man caught up in this nightmare gets subjected to a hearing that decides the matter of imposing restraining orders on him. This is convened in the absence of any charge whatsoever against him, without a trial, and without due process. Then, he is charged with violating the restraints on some flimsy or non-existent pretext. This then leads to his being forced into a jail cell where he is compelled to remain for some period before being eligible to post bond. Finally, he was convicted of a criminal offense, losing innumerable rights and liberties as a citizen for the remainder of his life.

There was once a time when I wouldn’t have believed that such a thing was even remotely possible in America. Then it happened to me.

No one, including some judge in a courtroom, has the right to separate me from my son, or any child from any parent, without compelling evidence of wrongdoing. No one! Yet this is what happened to me. I may have initially joined the Men’s Movement because it did happen to me, but I stay because the injustices this Movement is trying to stop are in my view a threat to the freedom of every citizen in this Republic. My friend’s off-hand remark notwithstanding, what is going on today is not trivial and what this Movement stands for is not “a bunch of crap.”

The United States, even if some branches of government ignore the fact, remains a government for and by the people. In my view, and in the view of the Men’s Movement, this has to be made clear. It is not optional. In my opinion, and in the opinion of the men’s Movement no judge, no parent, absolutely no one has the right to take a child away from a parent who has done nothing wrong.

Finally, I speak personally and not for the Men’s Movement when I state that I choose to stop short of violence—which I refuse to partake in, in any way, shape, or form. This is my own choice. Short of this, however, I intend to continue my protest against the United States Government, the State of Colorado, and our corrupt legal system everywhere until these practices are abolished and justice is restored.

Once I was a father. I would not have hesitated for an instant to sacrifice my life to ensure my son’s well being had it ever become necessary. Now I am no longer a father. I do, however, have my ideals and my deep love for my country. I hope that my convictions will never be tested to an extreme point, but I will not back down. Nor will I will be intimidated, or slink docilely back into my cage now that my own crisis has passed.

It seems to me that no democracy will ever be any stronger than the strength of the commitment of its citizens to defend it. No man is an island. I am committed. If anyone thinks I’m kidding, I’d suggest to you that his conclusions amount to “a lot of crap.”

Although I focus on the situation in the United States here, the trends that the Men’s Movement is attempting to fight are actually global (as is the Men’s Movement). The situation is almost identical to the one that has developed in the United States throughout the Western World and the Men’s Movement. is highly active in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, and Germany, to name a just a few.

The subject of the government’s usurpation of individual liberty is obviously multifaceted and vast, well beyond the scope of this essay. Briefly, I believe that it is the result of three converging trends: 1) the rapid expansion of the personal computer and the Internet; 2) the emergence of Middle Eastern terrorism as a major global reality since September 11; and 3) the bureaucratization of governmental control over its citizenry. The rapid evolution of the personal computer and the Internet pose a serious threat to individual privacy that is self-evident. The contribution of terrorism to the accelerating erosion of personal liberties is well-illustrated by the hastily passed Patriot Act. It has pretty much eliminated in one fell swoop every Constitutional protection of individual liberty to emerge after the War for Independence. It was passed in a near-panic by legislators who often hadn’t read the bill, and then acquiesced to by a terror-stricken general public without a peep.

When one considers the big picture, the extent to which individual liberties have been eroded away is apparent. Today our government is in the final stages of fingerprinting many completely innocent citizens at its borders. Like most people, I do appreciate the critical importance of heightened security; but the mass fingerprinting of people may not be a sound approach. How many terrorists is it likely to detect or discourage from entering the country? This illustrates how easily activities that are conceivably justified on security grounds can be co-opted and used to augment the government’s ability to spy on its own citizens. Many branches of government now perform assays on our urine to see what substances we have recently ingested and do so without cause, violating basic rights to privacy with brazen impunity. The days of urine assays are, it is true, coming to an end. Urine samples will be replaced by hair samples. A single hair follicle can be analyzed for every substance someone has ingested in the preceding six months. The government possesses (and probably routinely uses) sophisticated forms of computer spyware to extract and upload limitless amounts of information from the hard drives of any individual’s computer.

Nor should Bill Gates and Osama bin Laden be blamed exclusively for our current plight. The fact is that over the last forty or so years, the federal and state legislatures have steadily passed laws giving Constitutional protections away. One might ask how this could happen without provoking major public furor, but ironically few people seem aware of what is occurring.

There are many possible reasons for public indifference and lack of awareness. I suspect that it arises from a trend that is decidedly low-tech. In direct contradiction to the dramatic plot twists of a Tom Clancy novel, the government’s usurpation of power over its citizens has been strictly dullsville. Civil liberties are sacrificed not because some madman with a Persian cat has stolen a nuclear sub, but because congress has passed yet another obscure law expanding the power of another minor bureaucracy that no one has ever even heard of. Thus, the slow process of legislating away civil liberties is now highly compartmentalized and bureaucratized.

How alarming is it to learn, for example, that various offices within the Federal Department of Health and Human Services keep expanding in scope and manpower? Such divisions usually have obscure titles and are responsible for the oversight of governmental operations that seem irrelevant. It’s only when we begin to understand that thousands of these agencies, with their gray titles and gray missions, are collectively responsible for just about every social program in the United States. Ultimately they oversee areas as diverse as child welfare, child protection, women’s services (including safe houses), domestic violence centers, birth control clinics, alcoholism, addiction, foster care placements, termination of parental custody, vocational training, and hundreds more. Government has gained power microscopically, growing the way an ant colony grows. Who can keep track of each ant lugging its stems and pebbles and crumbs? Who would care to? Except at the end of the day the colony has created an anthill as large as a city block.