For some, Father's Day is a sad and bitter occasion

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/...0-f80199dcf1e8

For some, Father's Day is a sad and bitter occasion
David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, June 15, 2008
For some tens of thousands of fathers, in this Canadian province alone,
"Father's Day" is an especially bitter occasion. These are the men separated
from their children by court order, many never to see them again. Each knows
that his children have been subjected to vicious propaganda against him,
that in many cases a child's own mother -- a woman the father once trusted
enough to marry -- has turned the child's heart against him. (I know of many
cases.)

It could be worse: for the father may have been replaced in his own
household by a new man, or even a new woman. Someone who will never care for
his children as he did, however badly he may have expressed it; who will at
least be lacking the biological compulsion to look out for one's own flesh
and blood.

In a further twist, whether or not mom has found a new squeeze, the
ostracized dad may be making court-ordered spousal support payments
sufficiently onerous to put him on a cot in some closet -- hounded by
process servers, and under the threat of jail if his payments fall behind.
(I know this experience at first hand.)

There is no cure for it. The legal papers make clear -- go to lengths to
make clear -- that he will be hounded until the day he dies. Male suicide
rates, not only in this province but across North America, are at their
highest level since the depth of the Depression in the 1930s. They are four
times higher than the female suicide rate, and while no government has the
guts to gather statistics on this, it is an easy guess that family court
disasters lie behind a large proportion of them.
The legacy of feminism has been to make us acutely aware of women's
sensibilities, no matter how frivolous; and obtusely indifferent to men's,
no matter how grave. Men are consistently demonized in the feminist
propaganda, women consistently presented as victims, in defiance of the
facts of human nature, which show the capacity for evil to be
well-distributed. Under the pressure of feminist lobbying, our entire family
law system has been skewed so that the man almost invariably pays, the woman
almost invariably collects, regardless of the circumstances. Only in the
most extraordinary cases is the man granted custody of the children, or even
equal access.

The keystone of the feminist order is "domestic violence." Men are so
universally presented as having "anger management issues," that even in the
extreme case, where a woman has murdered her husband, the court will invite
feminist "experts" to argue that the man must have deserved it. And the man
in this scene is unable to defend his own posthumous reputation, for dead
men tell no tales.

The statistics show domestic violence to be well-distributed between the
sexes, although there are knots and wrinkles before we get to that result.
For instance, men are actually more likely to physically bully and abuse
women than vice versa (on the average, women are physically smaller). On the
other hand, women are more likely to physically bully and abuse children and
the elderly (who are smaller and weaker than they).

And there can be no justice, no approximation to justice, unless each charge
is considered on its merits, free of malicious, "politically correct"
ideology.

I hold no brief for men, or women. They are absolutely necessary to each
other, and on their mutual sympathy the future of every society depends.
Very few men or women are saints. By no means is any father, who has fallen
afoul of, say, Ontario's Kafkaesque "Family Responsibility Office" entirely
innocent. At the very least he exercised poor judgment in his selection of a
mate.

But men are not exceptionally evil, nor women neither. Some of each are
monsters, in their several ways.

All are subject to temptations, and our skewed family law has the effect of
putting so many temptations in the way of women, that many fail to resist.
Not because they are women, but because of skewed law, many women employ the
dirty tactic of laying false charges that, under our present order, will
immediately get them custody and whatever else they may

want -- with little risk of punishment, even if they are caught lying. This
simply stands to reason.

Indeed, the removal of common sense from family law -- and its replacement,
over the last two generations, with various feminist mantras -- has made
this problem almost impossible to fix. For the debate is now inevitably
over, "How much feminism is the right amount?"

Whereas, there is no "right amount" of feminism, if feminism has become a
hateful ideology declaring that the interests of one class (women) take
priority over the interests of another (men).

To those fathers who had the wisdom to marry good women, and who wake this
morning to the joy reflected in the face of each beloved child: You have
your reward, and it is very beautiful. Join us now in praying for all the
others.

David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.