FIFTY MILLION FOR MORE FATHERHOOD PROPAGANDA SHOULD BE RESCINDED

Feds turn eye to healthy marriages

By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

Congress approved a $750 million, five-year plan aimed at building healthier marriages Wednesday as part of its deficit reduction bill.

The measure now goes to President Bush. It includes $100 million a year for marriage-related programs and $50 million a year for fatherhood programs. This is the first time Congress has earmarked money for marriage programs, says Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution's Center on Children and Families.

Federal grants to local groups will fund programs such as communication and relationship skills training or community-wide activities for high schoolers. Bush has backed marriage-strengthening efforts, citing research that children from two-parent families are better off emotionally, socially and economically.

"Ultimately, the outcome we're interested in is not more marriages but more healthy and stable marriages," says Wade Horn, an assistant secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Researcher and marriage author Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., says marriage-education programs are successful in "weeding out" couples who shouldn't marry but can't solve all the problems low-income couples face.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-01-marriage-funding_x.htm?POE=click-refer

This $50 million for so-called ‘fatherhood programs’ should be rescinded immediately. It does nothing but fuel anger against women based upon phony statistics trying to blame men’s bad behavior on their mothers. For instance, current fathers’ rights propaganda claims African-American mothers are responsible for so many African-American men being in jail, not the society who dragged their ancestors over here in chains a couple of hundred years ago. Society gets a free pass while somebody's mother gets blamed.

Additional it feeds an increased sense of entitlement by all men to children, which contributes to much of the nonsense that goes on today vis-à-vis custody fights, abductions to obtain custody, never-married men trying to interfere in infant adoptions, etc.,

Its real practical result is the giving of free legal advice to men on ways to circumvent state laws (not to mention the laws of God, evolution or nature, which intends the mother/child bond to be the primary bond) and thus enables men to work the system to get custody of children for themselves. Under cover of advising men on their ‘rights’ this money funds groups which encourage such activities as men racing down to the courthouse as soon as they get a child’s birth certificate and filing for custody before a mother is even aware this is going on. She hasn’t even fully recovered from the delivery or stopped bleeding yet and she’s already being dragged into court by some jerk off screaming about his rights. Even though in many cases, he hasn’t invested a thing in bringing that child forth other then a quick drop sperm donation. Yet he’s fully aware of his rights…all that funded by the $50 milllion dollars or so that the federal government has been spending on fatherhood propaganda.

Additionally, it encourages abductions of children, many of them infants. As a number of states have laws that if a mother has not beaten a path to court almost immediately after birth, to establish some sort of legal custody through the state, it’s basically a free-for-all for either a father or his parents to file court papers themselves. Thus many visitations turn into a child abduction, as men are advised that their ‘rights’ entitle them to not return a child until custody is legally established. This could take months, even years, if they get a wily enough attorney and has led to over 300,000 parental abduction annually; many of them just these sorts of short-term abductions by fathers, which turn into permanent abductions, if these men or their families gets rewarded with custody. AND many do get rewarded in just this manner. Meanwhile the mother/child bond is tossed right out the window, their rights worth nothing obviously.

All this is courtesy of this $50 million dollar investment.

It’s ridiculous to be allowing our money to be spent in this fashion.

Last, but not least, as we saw in the F4J fiasco, the potential for this anger which is being fueled by this sort of fatherhood propaganda, both here and abroad, can lead to deadly results. No. I don’t know if it was just talk or the beginnings of a serious plan for F4J to try and kidnap Tony Blair’s 5 year old son. But I do know that the two most deadly American terrorists Tim McVeigh and the Unabomber BOTH framed the reasons for their attacks as related to children. McVeigh with the kids killed in Waco, the Unabomber with boys being mistreated because they should be out playing, instead of learning in schools.

Thus we need to be careful when we use money to encourage men to think they are more entitled then they should be, particularly at women’s expense…

Unfortunately this is ONE instance in life, where men are not in charge, nor should they be. They are secondary players, not the stars of the show; not the Captain but the crew and they need to accept that role. God, evolution, or nature has designed women in their role as mothers to be the main event vis-à-vis children, not men. If men don’t like it, take it up with one of them.

This constant drumbeat of propaganda that emanates daily throughout our society encourages men to think they are being wronged if they lose custody, when, in fact, it’s totally fair for mothers to have custody in most cases, barring a mother being unfit. There is absolutely nothing biased about deciding that most young children belong in the custody of their mothers. It's entirely nature and right.

Actually the entire concept of gender neutral custody is, at it’s evil heart, totally unfair to mothers and children. They are the ones who are being discriminated against in an attempt to give men rights. It basically gives the person who contributes, invests and risks nothing to bring children into this world, the exact same legal rights as a child’s mother. It’s very concept is unfair to women in their role as mothers and should not be allowed to be introduced into a court unless a mother is proven to be unfit. AND I’m talking about unfit here. Not if she smokes cigarettes or dresses in red or some other such nonsense that mothers have been losing custody for…

That money should be rescinded and these phony fatherhood programs terminated as they are nothing but propaganda which is fueling a hate movement against women in their role as mothers.