Of Elephants and Fathers

Some years ago, officials in Africa were faced with a growing elephant problem. The population of African elephants, once endangered, had grown larger than their National Park could sustain. So a plan was devised to relocate some of the elephants to another African game reserve. Being enormous creatures and not easily transported, the juvenile and female elephants were airlifted out, but the much larger fathers were left behind.

However, a problem surfaced at the elephants’ new home. Marauding bands of aggressive juvenile male elephants chased down endangered rhinoceros, knocked them over – stomping and goring them to death. Other animals in the park were terrorized as well.

Seeing their error of having built a society without fathers, the rangers immediately constructed larger and stronger harnesses, and flew in the father elephants left behind. Within weeks of the father elephants’ return, the bizarre and violent behavior of the juvenile elephants stopped completely.

In the United States, the number of boys raised in fatherless homes has steadily risen to 40%. However, fatherless homes produce 63% of youth suicides, 85% of children that exhibit behavioral disorders and 71% of all high school dropouts. Moreover, boys growing up in fatherless homes are twice as likely to be incarcerated as boys raised in two-parent homes.

These social ills rationalize almost all domestic government spending.

“All our major social ills – poverty, violent crime, substance abuse, truancy and more – are more closely linked to family breakdown and single-parent homes than to any other factor,” writes Dr. Stephen Baskerville, a Political Science professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

“Until the epidemic of children raised in fatherless homes is corrected,” Dr. Baskerville adds, “the problems associated with fatherlessness will continue to devastate communities, perhaps even bring our society to its demise.”

Resolution?

The dilemma confronting the elephants was easily resolved – undo the decisions that separated the father elephants from their offspring. (But why are human fathers separated from their children?) There is no evidence that abandonment is a significant contributor to fatherless children. The most common form of human father-removal is divorce – specifically no-fault divorce, which is codified into law and unlikely to be rescinded in this country anytime soon.

Or ever.

According to the well-known cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. Politically incorrect, this fact is undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness – as motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is a social construct. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage the father is easily discarded.

To quote Dr. Baskerville again, “The consequences of failing to link men to their offspring are apparent the world over. From our inner cities and Native American reservations to the north of England, the banlieues of Paris, and much of Africa, fatherlessness—not poverty or race—is the leading predictor of virtually every social pathology among the young. Without fathers, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos. A poor black child from an intact home is more likely to succeed than a rich white one from a single-mother home.”

Tersely stated, marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers. And without fathers, we are left with a faltering civilization.

So why divorce?

In the United States today, 70% of divorces are unilaterally initiated by the mother, and in the majority of divorce settlements, family court perfunctorily awards custody of children to the mother. While some people advocate that divorce-on-demand is a ‘civil liberty,’ in practice divorce has become our society’s most authoritarian institution, due to the role of family court, which emerged in the early 1960s along with the divorce revolution. The existence of family court and its web of associations depends upon one overriding principle: removing one parent from the family – which is usually the father.

Parenthood is politically unique. It is the one relationship in which people may exercise coercive authority over others. It is the one exception to the state’s monopoly. Without parental and especially paternal authority, legitimized by the bonds of marriage, government’s reach is unrivaled. This is already evident in those communities where marriage and fathers have disappeared and government has moved in to replace them with welfare, child-support enforcement and tax-subsidized healthcare.

Marriage is paradoxical inasmuch as it must be recognized by the state precisely because it creates a sphere of parental authority from which the state must withdraw. Consequently, while marriage is an agreement freely entered into by both parties, with only a nominal role for the government, divorce – unilateral or otherwise, must be enforced by the state. Otherwise, the involuntary divorced spouse may continue to claim the right to live in the common home, to enjoy the common property, and above all, to parent the common children.

The moment either spouse files for divorce, even if the other spouse is legally unimpeachable, the government steps in to take control over the children. Unauthorized contact by the divorced parent becomes a crime. The excluded parent can be arrested and incarcerated without trial through a variety of means that bypass constitutional due process protections: domestic violence accusations, child abuse accusations, inability to pay attorneys’ fees or so-called ‘child support.’ (So called, because the custodial parent is not held accountable for how this money is spent, and studies indicate that over 50% of this subsidy is not spent on the children, but rather used to maintain the lifestyle of the custodial parent.)

Legal jargon and clichés like “divorce,” “custody battle,” and “child support” have led Americans to acquiesce to this massive intrusion of state power over their freedoms. We don’t say that the government arbitrarily took away someone’s children; we say he “lost custody.” We don’t say a legally innocent citizen was interrogated by government agents over how he lives his private life; we say there was a “custody battle.” We don’t say a citizen was incarcerated without trial or charged for debt he could not possibly pay and did nothing to incur; we say he “didn’t pay his child support.”

Why Do Women Initiate Divorce?

In 2000, two law professors, Margaret Brinig from Notre Dame University and Douglas Allen from Iowa, conducted a study on divorce. The two professors studied 46,000 divorce cases filed in four states—Connecticut, Virginia, Montana and Oregon—to find out why women file for divorce. The results of that study, published in “These Boots Are Made for Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women,” proved to be surprising.

• Domestic Violence Not a Factor: contrary to expectations, divorcing in order to escape domestic violence was not prevalent, according to this landmark study by Brinig and Allen. In Virginia, for example, only 6 percent of the divorce cases showed violence as a cause for the divorce.
• Infidelity Not a Major Factor: the Brinig and Allen study, reviewed in the New York Times by fathers’ rights advocate John Tierney, found that adultery on the part of the husband was also not a major cause of divorces filed by wives against husbands. Infidelity on the part of the wife was not significant either.
• Exploitation Not a Factor: while the wives’ feelings of being ‘too good’ for their less financially or socially successful husbands was cited in 20 percent of the divorce cases studied, Brinig and Allen still found that even this reason—“I’m tired of him living off my back financially”—did not account for a significant majority.
• “Because I’ve Outgrown Him”: women today often decide to divorce their husbands because they have simply outgrown them, according to author Carol Ann Wilson in her book “ABCs of Divorce for Women.” Wilson, a professional counselor for women in financial issues, says that many more women are simply realizing that they have new career and personal growth opportunities. Wilson says that wives who married young especially develop new perspectives over the years, perspectives that outdistance their husbands’ ability to keep pace.
• “Because I Don’t Need Him”: in this age of continuing independence for women in general, divorce often is an escape for women who simply do not want to be in a marriage anymore. Some women don’t feel that they need marriage any longer to feel complete or be successful, according to author and researcher Ashton Applewhite in his book “Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So.”
• “Because I Will Win”: statistically, author Margaret Brinig says, women who filed for divorce most often felt confident they would receive advantageous custody agreements. “The question of custody absolutely swamps all the other variables,” Brinig said. “Our study found that children are the most important asset in a marriage and the partner who expects to get custody is by far the one most likely to file for divorce.” Brinig adds that not only are women certain they will get custody, they divorce specifically in order to “gain full control over the children.”

No fault divorce.

The full implications of the “no-fault” revolution have never been publicly debated. Divorce today seldom involves two people simply parting ways; 80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

The Myth of the Deadbeat Dad

No academic or government study has ever demonstrated that large numbers of fathers are voluntarily abandoning their children. The ‘deadbeat dad’ is a creation of the divorce industry. A father is far less likely to have voluntarily abandoned his biological offspring than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as attorney and author Jed Abraham puts it, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Originally justified to recover welfare costs, child support has become an entitlement for all mothers, regardless of their behavior, and a subsidy on middle-class divorce. It allows the mother–simply by divorcing–to confiscate her husband’s income. It is tax-free to the recipient, and nonpayment means incarceration without trial. The Journal of Socio-Economics notes that child support serves as an “economic incentive for middle-class women to seek divorce.” Economist Robert Willis calculates that one-fifth to one-third of child support payments are used for children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent.

Follow the Money

The Institute for American Values estimates that divorce and unwed childbearing cost taxpayers $112 billion annually, or more than $1 trillion over the last decade. And like any bureaucracy, this one found rationalizations to expand.

The latest Department of Health and Human Services figures show that 83 percent of child support cases do NOT involve welfare. This notwithstanding, programs advertised as relieving families that had lost the father’s wages due to war and economic hardship were dramatically expanded to cover all child support cases, including those not receiving welfare. This vastly expanded the program by bringing in millions of middle-class divorce cases. Non-welfare cases — for which the system was never intended — now account for 83 percent of cases and 92 percent of the money collected.

By padding their roles with millions of middle-class parents, state governments found they could collect a windfall of federal incentive payments. Federal taxpayers now subsidize state government operations through child support. They also subsidize family dissolution, because every fatherless child is an additional source of revenue for state governments.

To collect these funds, states must channel not just delinquent payments but current payments through their criminal enforcement machinery, subjecting law-abiding parents to criminal measures. While officials claim their perennial ‘crackdowns’ on ‘deadbeat dads’ increase collections, the increase is achieved not by collecting arrearages of low-income fathers already in the system but simply by pulling in more middle-class fathers.

These fathers have not abandoned their children. Most were actively involved with them, and many clamor for more time with them. According to Sanford Braver of Arizona State University, in the largest federally-funded study ever undertaken on the subject, Braver confirmed previous studies showing that overwhelmingly it is mothers, not fathers, who are walking away from marriages without legal grounds. These divorcing mothers have virtual certainty of getting the children and a large portion of the father’s income, regardless of any fault on the fathers’ part.

Yet for the state to collect its funding, fathers willing and able to care for their children must be designated as ‘absent.’ Divorce courts are pressured to cut children off from their fathers to conform to the welfare model of ‘custodial’ and ‘noncustodial.’ The perverse incentives further criminalize fathers by impelling states to make child support levels as onerous as possible.

This also creates a windfall for middle-class divorcing women and an incentive to create more fatherless children. “This recent entitlement,” write economist Robert McNeely and legal scholar Cynthia McNeely, “. . . has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving of a child.”

Beyond the expense of the subsidies is the opportunity cost of diverting the criminal justice system from protecting society to criminalizing law-abiding parents, and keeping them from their own children.

“My agency spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs,” says former Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Wade Horn. “The need for each is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages.” Given the social ills attributed to fatherless homes — including crime, truancy and scholastic failure, substance abuse, unwed pregnancy and suicide — it is reasonable to see a huge proportion of domestic spending as among the costs.

Diabolically, the very government programs advertised as addressing these social ills are the ones actually generating them.

Criminalization of Fatherhood

What we are seeing today is nothing less than the criminalization of fatherhood itself: criminal penalties imposed on parents who have committed no illegal act but are made outlaws through the actions of others – in ways they are powerless to avoid. Once the father is stripped of custody, his contact with his own children outside government-approved times and locations becomes a criminal act. His criminalization is further consolidated through forced legal fees and child-support burdens.

A presumption of guilt pervades the courts themselves, where “the burden of proof may be shifted to the defendant” according to a legal analysis by the National Council of State Legislatures. In clear violation of the Constitution, courts have held that “not all child support contempt proceedings classified as criminal are entitled to a jury trial,” and “even indigent obligors are not necessarily entitled to a lawyer.” Thus impoverished parents who lose their children through literally “no fault” of their own, are the only citizens who – when they are fortunate enough to be formally charged and tried at all, before being incarcerated – must prove their innocence without counsel and without a jury of their peers.

By subsidizing the destruction of families, we are subsidizing the progressive impoverishing of our society. It is simply not possible to allow the family to unravel without having our civilization do the same. Yet that is precisely what we are doing.

Men opting Out

Dr. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist and author of “Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why it Matters,” writes: “American men are avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this ‘man-child’ phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. Why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?” Dr. Smith concludes that men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. Rather, they are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives that society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers.

The results speak for themselves.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of the 3,952,841 babies born in the United States in 2012, 1,609,619—or 40.7 percent–were born to unmarried mothers. 2012 thus marked the fifth straight year that 40 percent or more of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried women.

The Lord’s Admonition

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

Ephesians 5:22 – 27