ROUND FOUR

MND Roundtable Discussion on
Fathers' Rights and the Marriage Movement

Fathers, family, and marriage. How strange it is that these are subjects embroiled in political controversy. Nothing like it has happened since the Russians debated family policy in the 1920s. How did we reach such a bizarre state? Who is right and who is wrong?

David Blankenhorn, head of the Institute for American Values where Tom Sylvester is an affiliate scholar and one of Tom's co-bloggers at MarriageMovement.org, recently wrote that the public tends to agree more with fathers' rights positions than his own. This is not surprising. His ideas are built on the last quarter century of anti-father propaganda and policy. The underlying policies have already effected tens of millions of people. Multiply by their average number of social contacts (plus one) and you have an estimate of the number of people who understand the effects from real-life experience. This is one of the reasons that fathers' rights advocacy has vast public support even though fathers' rights advocates are ignored by the majority of journalists.

The Marriage Movement involves many of the same people who promoted the destructive policies that we have today. It is really the same political movement with a new spin, regrouping and pushing government further into family. Ministers of the movement now preach that family is defined by the current marriage license, which further delegitimizes fathers who are left behind, sanctifies family break-up, and ignores the well-being of children. As an answer to divorce, their "pro-marriage" stance is like preaching seat-belt safety while continuing to force traffic across a collapsed bridge.

In basic political terms, the controversy is about human rights verses en masse government control. In round 3, I explained how fundamental rights are being violated. In round 1, I explained how and why the problem was created. In round 2, I explained that "fathers' rights" is a misnomer. Fathers are instinctively defending family rights.

Classic liberals and constitutional law recognized fundamental rights. (They did not invent them.) We should continue to recognize and respect fundamental rights rather than engaging in foolish experiments. As John Stuart Mill put it:"It would be absurd to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it; as if experience had as yet done nothing towards showing that one mode of existence, or of conduct, is preferable to another."

It was interesting to see how easily Stephen Baskerville (round 3) derived a logical proposal for protecting the sanctity of family by applying classic liberal philosophy. In my work on child support, which I admit lends itself well to mathematical reasoning, I discovered that specific formulae can be similarly derived, as opposed to merely being decreed as is the current generation of child support formulae. Although a part of my mathematical solution is new, the fact that sound solutions to complex and divisive human problems can be derived from respect for individuals and for objective reality is not new at all. It is the bedrock of civilization.

It is fair to say that many family researchers and advocates know too little about fathers' rights issues. They know too little about the credible research related to fathers' issues that compliments the serious pro-marriage view. Some are not yet aware that the many "anecdotal" cases of injustice being reported confirm the systemic problems that careful study and analysis of reforms have revealed. Perhaps most unfortunately, some (younger people mostly) do not understand the political history of the anti-family, anti-marriage (anti-west) movement that began its attack quite logically on fathers and gained support from mothers through psychological, spiritual, economic, and political manipulation. Too many marriage advocates today are in denial. They still think the "fathers' rights problem" is something that is happening to someone else and have not yet recognized that they are struggling with the broader consequences. Fathers' rights advocates have much more experience in the family wars. Serious marriage and family advocates would do best by paying more attention to them. This discussion was a start.

Roger F. Gay