MND Roundtable Discussion on
Fathers' Rights and the Marriage Movement

I must admit to being a little perplexed as to why anyone would perceive a conflict between those who advocate for marriage and those who advocate for fathers. It is difficult, after all, to see how you can have marriages (with children anyway) without fathers.

What I do detect is a division between those who want to bemoan and lament the decline of marriage and fatherhood, on the one hand, and those who wish to do something to reverse it. It is tempting to suggest this corresponds to another distinction between professional busybodies who claim to know what is best for other people's children and who wish to preach to fathers and others about how they should be raising their children, on the one hand, and parents themselves (primarily but not exclusively fathers), who simply wish to be left in peace to raise their own children and let others raise theirs.

This is not quite right, however. For a significant group of advocates, who are not fathers, wish to restore marriage by rolling back the laws that, as Maggie Gallagher has pointed out, abolished it, so that marriage is again an enforceable contract. These are not busybodies but citizens who, like fathers but for slightly different reasons, have a stake in restoring the right to contract a binding marriage. It is not surprising that these advocates are making common cause with fathers and other parents whose children have been removed by the government.

The more vocal approach we hear to restoring marriage today is what might be called the lamenting-bemoaning-preaching-and-therapy approach. The quieter method is changing the laws. At first glance, the lamenting and therapy might seem to be the more benign. It professes to persuade the heart rather than coerce the body. To the extent that it is employed by private practitioners or churches, it is a worthy effort. But some of these practitioners, no less than the legal reformers, have begun enlisting the government. This makes their efforts dangerous.

My business is politics, and at the risk of sounding pedantic, I might point out, as Locke once did, that government is the institution to whom we entrust a monopoly of power to coerce: that is, to incarcerate and kill.

As a society, we long ago debated and decided (when we adopted the Constitution, to be precise) that coercively enforcing contracts is a legitimate role of government. All but the most anarchistic of libertarians endorse this principle as essential to a functioning society.

Only recently did some among us decide, more or less on their own, that government will stop enforcing contracts. Even more recently, others have decided that, as a substitute for enforcing contracts, government should sponsor family therapy. It is not clear that we as a society ever debated or agreed to this.

The result is that government no longer maintains public order by enforcing contracts. Now government regulates private life by assuming control of children while trying to save their parents' marriages. But government still performs its inescapably coercive role; it still incarcerates and kills. Only now it incarcerates and, on occasion, kills the parents whose children it has seized and whose marriages it cannot save.

This is why we need a fathers' rights movement.

Stephen Baskerville