Eye Opener...Interesting Article

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http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/u-v/usher/2004/usher110604.htm

Who's Who in the Counterfeit Marriage Movement

November 6, 2004

by David R. Usher

A watershed report titled "Families First" was issued by the National
Commission on America's Urban Families, chaired by then-Missouri-Governor
John Ashcroft, in the closing days of the H.W. Bush administration. (1) The
report contained the brilliant family-values language Republicans applied in
the "Contract for America", which ultimately gave Republicans control of
Congress in 1992. Dave Blankenhorn served on the Commission and did much of
the report preparation in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Dave Blankenhorn's book "Fatherless America" was published in 1995, to an
astonished America and horrified husbands. After shaking the nation awake to
the widespread problem of father-absence (read: divorce and illegitimacy),
Blankenhorn made an incredible claim: "Never before in this country have so
many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers" .... "Today, the
principal cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice.... the rising rate of
paternal abandonment" .... "For the first time in history, millions of men
today are voluntarily abdicating their fatherhood." (2)

Most men were shocked. Most everyone who can read this piece witnessed the
feminist cultural and legal war on marriage, husbandry, and family.

I attempted to initiate a debate on the cause of father-absence with a fax to
the Institute for American Values on the day "Fatherless America" hit the
bookstores. My request was simple: "Please provide a citation of authorities
for your position that men caused the father-absence problem". Blankenhorn
never responded.

A decade later, Blankenhorn has not provided any citation, despite requests
from hundreds of men's activists organized over the years to pursue the
issue. My favorite Blankenhorn response was blurted out in a restaurant in
San Diego shortly after a lecture. A few men's advocates who were brushed off
at the lecture followed him to the restaurant. Blankenhorn's response: "Leave
me alone!"

Blankenhorn's latest evasion to Dr. Stephen Baskerville request for a citation
was met with Kerry-esque four-facing. Dave tried to suggest that we were
merely taking him out of context.

But Blankenhorn 'splains himself anyway. His teaser about "Fatherless
America", located on the IAV website cries out the same neanderthal
conclusion – premised by classic feminist anthropological theory at that:
"Because men do not volunteer for fatherhood as much as they are conscripted
into it by the surrounding culture, only an authoritative cultural story of
fatherhood can fuse biological and social paternity into a coherent male
identity." ... "I see the Good Family Man as the principal casualty of today's
weakening fatherhood scripts."

Mr. Blankenhorn, understand this: Feminism has spent forty years throwing good
husbands out of the family. The problem is one of discrimination, not a lack
of conscription. In fact, when fathers can have a stake in family and the
ownership society, and are held in high esteem because they do so, most of
them do so with gusto. But feminism has made this a dangerous upstream swim.
When men are raised as feminists, believing that all other men are
irresponsible wife-abusing loose-zippered louts, they don't trust other men.
When you don't trust other men, you are helpless when feminists decide to
clean your whistle. After watching your father, and half the fathers of your
friends get thrown out of their families for no reason whatsoever, and
charged at least 1/3 of their pretax income for the luxury of being thrown
overboard the ship of society, you might have doubts about what it means to
be a man in America today. And if you dare to try it, your chances of being
tossed overboard are one in two, no matter how good a husband you are.

Dave Blankenhorn is the lead counterfeiter in the Marriage Movement. He is the
Godfatherlessness. And he retains this position because he is
quintessentially adept at making feminist policy and policy sound really
conservative. In our play (as Blankenhorn loves to paint things) he is the
"Godfatherlessness", because he is the man generating all those federal
dollars funding much of the Marriage Movement propping up more
fatherlessness. This is no accident: feminists have studied Marxist political
subterfuge harder than anybody except perhaps Marx himself.

He is accompanied to the trough by plenty of other liberal
Godfatherlessnesses, to name a few:

Tom Sylvester is a former NFI and ACF worker. His vitriolic attacks on Steve
Baskerville and other credible marriage reformers suggest he is in the wrong
movement – and is most likely a feminist plant He voted for Kerry and doesn't
understand why so many Bushies cited "Moral Values" supporting the
President's opposition to gay marriage. He doesn't understand that the only
difference between "civil unions" and "marriage" is what you call it. In
fact, Sylvester admits his lack of values – degrading the work of those
protecting marriage to the status of "hype": "All this hype about "moral
values" makes the name "Institute for American Values" either more relevant,
or more misleading."

Speaking of NFI: Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Family Support in the Bush
Administration and former President of the National Fatherhood Initiative is
another Trojan Marriage Movement political foil. After writing elegantly for
years about the problem of father absence, he introduced a bill in Congress
designed solely to coax poor fathers into getting jobs and paying child
support on the theory that they might get to be fathers. The funding bill
gave millions to NFI for this purpose. He was very upset with me and other
leaders of the shared parenting movement who refused to endorse his
legislation because it would not allow even a nickel to be spent helping men
get access to be the fathers that feminists won't let them be. He also
refused my request for federal legislation to protect military reservists
called into active duty to guarantee a modification of child support to match
military pay.

Elizabeth Marquardt is another Blankenhornian mainstay in the marriage
movement. She voted for Kerry and Gore. Her take proves that the Institute
for American Values knows that Dave Blankenhorn lied when he blamed
father-absence on men: "I understand why father's are angry that moms so
often get custody, especially when two-thirds of divorces involving young
children are initiated by the mother. But mandating joint physical custody is
one of the worst things we can do for children of divorce." Here is what she
means: the marriage movement isn't about to do anything to increase shared
parenting in divorce. Marriage is still "not necessary", and its too bad that
men don't like it.

Elizabeth admits her roots openly ... "marriage education is a liberal idea.
Like drug or sex education, marriage education teaches couples communication
and behavioral techniques that promote healthy marriages".. What she forgot
to say is that liberals are also blocking real reform of divorce laws, which
is the root cause of the father absence problem they are supposedly funded to
address. The idea that a little marriage education can reverse an entire
upbringing in feminism (an "attitude" in street parlance) is a weak premise,
at best. The maturity level necessary for marriage is something one either
has or does not have.

This is not to say that encouraging people to marry could not be useful.
However, if not accompanied by reform of divorce revolution, the Trojan
Marriage Movement is only pushing good men into marriages half of which will
be served up on the platter of liberal radical feminism. Certainly, youth
drug education programs would be a downhill battle if liberals were also
selling drugs on every streetcorner. So goes the marriage movement.

Sara Butler, a wide-eyed trainee in the Trojan Marriage Movement, believes we
can solve the problem by making it harder to get married. Go figure. Folks
have been getting married on a moment's notice for centuries. It was not
until the feminist movement inflicted the divorce revolution that marriage
fell apart. She believes civil unions are a "winner".

Sara adamantly rejects the notion that feminist culture discrminates against
men in the family. In response to Cathy Young's article "You'd be Wrong", she
writes: "...I definitely don't like Ms. Young's argument here. Throughout the
piece, she focuses on how fathers are discriminated against by the legal
system..", and goes on to change the subject to more comfortable illusions.
She does not take a position on gay marriage, but rather finds queer
relationships a rather fascinating thing to behold.

This brings us back to "culture". Dave Blankenhorn waxes deeply on culture,
but points the finger at everything except "the culture". Read our lips Dave:
"It's the feminist culture, stupid".

There are many other Trojan conservatives in the Marriage Movement – a large
book full of them in fact. Dave Blankenhorn, the Institute for American
Values, Americanvalues.org, and FamilyScholars.org are a few of the ranking
perches from which liberals anesthetize core conservatives by singing
nostalgic lullabies in their ears. We know who these implants are -- because
they always denigrate positive reforms of family law suggested by the
true-blue shared parenting advocates now entering the marriage movement.

The real marriage movement has much to offer this nation. It is inevitable
that liberals in the Marriage Movement will be pushed aside – hopefully
before public outrage over social problems propels liberals back into the
White House.

The first step is for Conservatives to realize that allowing liberals to run
the marriage movement only guarantees that we will spend a lot of money
pumping more humans into the divorce system. Federal expenditures for social
problems caused by the divorce revolution are now larger than the federal
deficit itself. (3) Abatement of this humongous expense would permit
aggressive Reagonomics while we continue to fight an aggressive war on
terrorism – all on a nearly balanced budget.

The second step is for Wall Street to recognize the costs of husband-absence
that it gets tagged with. Corporate America has a tremendous stake in real
pro-marriage reforms. When marriage is important, employee productivity is
higher. The vast array of social problems that lead to corporate taxes will
abate substantially. When marriage is important, government will not try to
move the living room into the board room. When marriage is important, health
care for single mothers will no longer be an issue, and Corporate America
will not become the imputed "big daddy". When marriage is important, the most
crucial social security reform will be accomplished: Married retirees need
less money to stay out of poverty than do their single counterparts.

Wall Street must oppose both civil unions and gay marriage: If any two Murphy
Browns can marry each other (under whatever arrangement you want to call it),
there will be a lot of socially-disenfranchised men dropping out of society
and the workplace in record numbers – only adding to the known problems of
crime and violence. When a man has no place in home or society, he is quite
unlikely to be interested in working to support that society.

Christian Conservatives have a tremendous stake. When marriage is important,
abortion is not necessary. When marriage is important, the concept of gay
marriage falls apart.

The evidence that the Trojan Marriage Movement has failed is self-evident.
Eight years after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996
[H.R. 3734], we have not seen reduced divorce (4), illegitimacy (5), or
improved marriage rates (6). There is no evidence that the Marriage Movement
has accomplished much of anything.

George Bush has four years to straighten this mess out so that liberals cannot
capitalize on it in 2008. This brings us to the third step.

The third and most important step is for someone to have a serious tactical
and strategic chat with El Hefe. Once the President understands that the
Marriage Movement is riddled with liberals undercutting the Marriage
Movement, and that this is undercutting all his other major initiatives, he
will make major changes in staffing and funding priorities.

It is my promise to deliver pro-marriage policy directly to the President's
desk that are truly compassionate, beneficial to all, and politically and
morally sound; policies that will quietly and productively unwind the divorce
revolution in a profound manner. It is indeed unfortunate that policy can't
find its way to the President's desk the customary way. But there really
isn't anybody I can find in the present marriage movement that isn't
effectively working for the National Organization of Women.

I have the policy framework drafted. I am not stupid enough to put it on the
internet where the Godfatherlessnesses can steal the words and do a Kerry
dance with them. When that day comes, a new and effective policy initiative
consistent with the directives called for in "Families First", will finally
be on President Bush's desk. Let the second Republican revolution begin.

David R. Usher

1 Governor John Ashcroft and Honorable Annette Straus, Co-Chairs; National
Commission on America's Urban Families; "Families First" (GPO, January 1993
[ISBN 0-16-041600-0] ).
2 David A. Blankenhorn, "Fatherless America" (Basic Books, 1995) pp 22-23.
3 Robert Rector, "Welfare: Broadening the Reform" (Heritage Foundation, 2000)
p 287. Total cost of welfare is since 1960 is estimated to be $7.9 trillion.
This does not include related fallout costs of husband-absence such as
illegitimacy, crime, drug abuse, personal bankruptcy, child abuse, suicide,
and educational and disciplinary problems.
4 U.S. Census Bureau, "Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002", p 59.
5 National Center for Health Statistics, "Health, 2003", Table 9, p. 107.
6 U.S. Census Bureau, "Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002", p 8.

Also see FamilyScholars.org, MarriageMovement.org, and AmericanValues.org.
David R. Usher is a Legislative Analyst for the American Coalition for Fathers
and Children, Missouri Coalition.

"Children learn what they live"

[Brent]

Elizabeth Marquardt said: "I understand why father's are angry that moms so
often get custody, especially when two-thirds of divorces involving young
children are initiated by the mother. But mandating joint physical custody is
one of the worst things we can do for children of divorce."

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.  

If fathers got custody two-thirds of the time after filing for divorce, would Elizabeth Marquardt say  "I understand why mother's are angry that dads so often get custody, especially when two-thirds of divorces involving young children are initiated by the father. But mandating joint physical custody is one of the worst things we can do for children of divorce.".

Somehow I doubt it.