ROUND FOUR

MND Roundtable Discussion on
Fathers' Rights and the Marriage Movement

Whether the marriage movement turns out to be a branch of the divorce industry remains something to be decided by those pushing it. But I reiterate that the decisive factor is likely to be the role of government. If people claiming to save marriage are willing to accept government money while holding their tongues about government incentives for divorce and mouthing the patent untruth that government machinery has no role in enforcing involuntary divorce, then I think my fears are vindicated.

Likewise, I dearly hope that divorce is an impossibility for Rebecca O'Neill, but the British or Canadian or American government may have other ideas. I have known many other people over the years who thought divorce was an impossibility for them. They discovered otherwise only when the police showed up at their door with an order summarily evicting them from their home, barring them from any contact with their children, confiscating their home and property and two-thirds of their income, gagging them from speaking to the press, controlling their movements, demanding access to their personal papers, and on and on. This is all on pain of incarceration, which for some comes to pass without trial, followed by beatings and death. ("What 'fundamental rights' have been wiped out?"?)

Granted, almost all these people are men, though women are not immune. Perhaps Ms. O'Neill means that divorce is an impossibility in the sight of God and her church. The Catholic Church, which alone makes marriage a sacrament, is indeed to be commended to the extent that it has taken a stronger stand against divorce than other churches. Unfortunately, that is saying very little, and the Catholic Church has found ways to make many divorces something less than impossible. But once again, it would appear that the role of the state is decisive. That one's marriage is indissoluble in the eyes of God may or may not provide consolation when the police are standing between you and your children, ready to arrest you for trying to give them a kiss or read them a bedtime story, or as you watch from afar, in the words of Jed Abraham, while "they grow up with the kinds of psycho-social problems that children who live with their fathers rarely have."

Tom Sylvester claims the divorce industry is not involved because "it's a spouse . . . who goes to court to file for divorce." This is like saying the German state was not involved in the holocaust because its victims were often turned in by their neighbors. The act of going to court is the act of bringing in the power of the police and jails.

Even stranger is the claim (from a self-described marriage advocate, no less) that "spouses are obviously leaving marriages for a reason." This is not obvious in the least, since the whole point of no-fault divorce is that one does not need any reason, and it is well-documented that most spouses filing for divorce have no legally recognized reason at all. This shows an astounding lack of understanding of how incentives work in public policy. If the self-described advocates for marriage are working on the assumption that marriages only dissolve for good reasons, then it would appear that the foxes have indeed become the advocates for henhood.

But since Mr. Sylvester's argument, by his own admission, consists mostly in analyzing the mental state of his opponents, there is not a lot more to be said. This, by the way, is becoming a pattern at the Institute for American Values, which seems to regard personal attacks as a substitute for substantive debate. I have now been psychoanalyzed for my political views in three different publications by IAV writers, who seem to relegate political disagreement to the status of a psychological abnormality. (Prior to Mr. Sylvester's hatchet job on me in the National Review Online, I had my mental condition appraised by his boss David Blankenhorn in response to a Washington Post op-ed column.) Given that the political abuse of psychotherapy is a major part of what fathers are complaining about ("batterers'" programs where subjects are forced to sign confessions, eerily reminiscent of the world of psychiatric prisons the modern world has seen before), this indeed makes the political personal.

By contrast, it has been a pleasure to debate with Rebecca O'Neill, whose willingness to raise and confront difficult issues vindicates the reputation for excellent scholarship enjoyed by Civitas on at least three continents.

Stephen Baskerville