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Saturday, December 20, 2003
Another story about the (I think) really great fathers support group operating out of the Yale Law Scool in New Haven. Roger Gray at Men's News Daily thinks that Australia may be on the cuting edge of advancing the fathers rights agenda. I've gotten that feeling too, but unike Gray, I don't like it a bit. "Unmarried and Separated Fathers of Ireland," an advocacy group, wants unmarried fathers to have the same rights that mothers do, and that married fathers do, with respect to their children. I can hardly think of a worse idea, from children's point of view, than erasing distinctions between married and unmarried fathers. From London: Hundreds of protesters for fathers rights dressed in Father Christmas outfits went on the march yesterday to raise awareness about parenting. The Fathers 4 Justice campaigners marched through central London calling on the government to amend legislation so that fathers can obtain equal rights to see their children. "A disturbing figure released by the Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne shows that one in three children under the age of 18 has little or no contact with his or her father." BENEFITS, PENALTIES: With all the recent discussion, in light of the SSM debate, of the allegedly scores of dollars-and-cents, practical benefits that are tied to marital status, it's worth remembering that, in no small number of areas, including several areas of the U.S. tax code, married couples actually suffer from substantial penalties. What we are now, in this current debate, calling the practical "benefits of marriage," do matter, of course. But not, in my view, a whole lot. People don't get married (or divorced) for these mess-of-pottage reasons, and these issues are not what's actually animating the current debate. New poll data from Florida on marriage and marriage initiatives: The state isn't necessarily traditional: 72 percent of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the idea that the man should make the important decisions and 52 percent said it was fine for unmarried couples to live together. But two-thirds of Floridians -- and 90 percent of welfare recipients -- agreed that the state should start programs to promote healthy marriages and prevent divorce. The study, conducted with state money by the University of Florida this fall, and the first of its kind in the state, is the first step in the launch of a statewide marriage initiative. During the past year, state officials met with teachers, parents, religious and business leaders to discuss the best ways to spend millions of dollars set aside by the federal government to promote marriage. President Bush, Gov. Jeb Bush and other supporters of the plan argue that divorce and single motherhood are economically devastating for families. They want to replicate programs in Oklahoma and other states that use tax money to provide counseling and support for singles and families.Here's another story on this poll. From Morocco: Now, King Mohammed and his advisers appear to have found consensus with a package of [family law] reforms which has something for everyone. Moroccan women's groups for years lobbied for family law, known as the Moudawana, to be drained of its religious content and treat men and women equally. But the country's Islamists vociferously opposed any changes that might distance family law from sharia, the Islamic law. A revised package of reforms, drawn up by a royal commission, has ingeniously side-stepped the most thorny issues. The new law will spell out that decisions on children and family planning should be taken by both spouses together. A woman will no longer have the legal obligation of "obedience" toward her husband. Other reforms, likely to pass smoothly into law with the royal stamp of approval, concern a woman's right to marry without a male relative's approval, polygamy, property rights, and a divorced women's right to keep custody of young children on remarriage. From Pakistan: Pakistan's human rights commission today hailed as a landmark a Supreme Court ruling that a Muslim woman who married for love had been entitled to choose her husband without her parents' consent. The woman's father has been fighting a legal battle to invalidate the 1996 marriage, which flaunted tradition in Pakistan, where it's rare for people to marry without their parents' permission. On Friday, the court rejected the final appeal by the father, Hafiz Abdul Waheed, ruling that his daughter Saima Waheed had been at liberty to wed whom she wanted. “The consent of the Wali (guardian) is not required and an adult and sane Muslim female can enter into a valid nikah (marriage contract) of her own free will," the three judges said in a 26-page ruling.Here's another story on this issue. Friday, December 19, 2003
On Thursday Howard Dean proposed a "new social contract with the families of America." I read this speech, looking for hints of what a President Dean's family policies might look like. Most of the speech struck me as pretty much the usual blah, blah, blah -- more affordable health care, more federal spending on child care programs, "full funding" for Head Start and other pre-school programs, help with college costs and with retirement. Pretty much what one would expect from any Democratic candidate. This paragraph did catch my eye: In 1960, one parent was at home in 70% of all families with children. Today, it's just the opposite. 70% of today's families with children are headed by either two working parents or a single parent who works. And they're working harder and longer.This is the third or fourth time I've seen this exact formulation. Maybe Dean started it. Whoever did should should be ashamed of themselves, because it's atrociously misleading, intended to suggest that hardly any mothers are at home caring for their children. In fact, about half of all pre-school children today are cared for by their mothers. To get the "70 percent working" figure that Dean uses, you have to manipulate statistics egregiously, most importantly by conflating full time and part time employment into one category of "working." Anyone who is paying attention to child care issues today knows that this "70 percent" statistic is used like a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination. And all of this matters because President Dean will be unable to make intelligent policy proposals on child care if he doesn't know (or care) who is actually caring for children. In a happy-talk piece on stepfamilies, Adele Horin writes: It is what happens in families, not the family type or label, that counts. It is the quality of crucial relationships that matters. If these are good enough, children are likely to do well whatever the family type. And if these relationships are awry, children's wellbeing is endangered even if theirs is the traditional family seated at the Christmas feast.This argument -- it's the quality of the relationship, not the family structure, that counts -- is one of the most widely repeated arguments in academic and popular writing on the family. It's also misleading to the point of being ludicrous. We can all agree that relationships matter. But if I am ten years old, and my father lives in another home with a new wife or girlfriend -- if that's my "family type" -- wouldn't Adele Horin recognize that this family structure might impact fairly strongly on the quality of my relationship with my father? And my mother too, for that matter? People who do what Horin does here, rhetorically pitting "structure" against "relationship" as if the two were in a contest, rather than being intimately related to one another, are just repeating a trite cliche that they obviously haven't thought much about. "Public health is losing out to the power of the food-marketing lobby," especially regarding ads aimed at young children, writes Boyd Swinburn in The Age. From Finland: The number-one cause of divorce, for both men and women, was infidelity. Women more frequently initiated divorce proceedings. The poll was sent to 3,000 Finns who had gotten married for the first time in 1995. Half of them were divorced. Of those still married, 90 percent believed their marriage would last at least another ten years. From the WaPo: "The Fatherless Son: For Lee Boyd Malvo, a Twisted Version of a Classic Literary Quest" TO OUR READERS: Many apologies for the uncharacteristic silence on the blog the last couple of days. We had technical trouble with the website that hosts our blog. But don't worry, we're back in action today and happy to share our two cents on just about any family topic. BAD EXPERT ADVICE: A social worker wrote into the Smartmarriages newslist today with this question: My caseload recently has included more people who have decided to divorce and are negotiating the custody/parenting issues. Can you or someone on the list share their ideas and/or direct me to some studies on the relative effects on the children of different arrangements. Two patterns I am wondering about especially as they apply to school-age kids. In regard to the changing houses every week question, a child of divorce expert, Don Gordon, wrote back (this is an excerpt): …The kids generally prefer the frequent contact and adjust to the changes. They adjust to the changes of going to school from home 5 days a week and visits to grandparents, so why do folks think they can't adjust to living with two loving parent in their houses each week? Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I then wrote to share my perspective on this arrangement: "I am not as sanguine as Don Gordon apparently is about the "moving back and forth frequently between two homes" arrangement. He suggests that if children can travel between school and home, or grandparent's house and home, then why should they not be easily able to travel between two parents' homes? In my forthcoming book I argue based on a new national study that home is the core of children's identity development. Home is the place where you begin when you ask "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" Having two homes oriented around two separate poles of mom and dad means the child travels between two wholly differentiated spheres of moral and spiritual meaning. The parents do not communicate or seek accord on these core issues anymore, but the child still looks to both of them at the first and most important role models for how to think and what to believe. The child must seek, alone, to make sense of all the differences that he or she observes in the parents and develop his or own identity and value system much more independently than children of intact families -- who live in one home -- must do. Moreover, there are the simple logistical factors: Ask any adult to live in two apartments, traveling between them every week, and see how well they maintain friendships, get their work done, keep up with important or special items, feel a full part of their secular and religious community at either place, forge strong bonds with the people they live with, and more. Most adults couldn't manage it. How can children? Even the successful children of divorce who come out of these arrangements as relatively healthy, accomplished people say they always felt like "space cadets" as children -- they thought their inability to get with the program was their own fault. And why wouldn't they, when the adults around them say that living in two homes should be as easy as traveling from home to school? Granted, to attempt a close relationship with both parents is worth some trouble compared to losing a parent entirely. But for goodness sakes, have a primary home and a lot of weekends and vacations with the other parent (still hard enough, because the child doesn't get to spend weekends and vacations with his friends). Don't make kids spend three nights here, four nights there, unless they are old enough to say they want that and really mean it." Thursday, December 18, 2003
COMPARING DIVORCED FAMILY MODEL WITH SS FAMILY MODEL: Michael Triplett responds to some of my earlier posts which ask if children of SS couples might be like children of divorced couples in sharing a similar pain at the lack of having both bio parents in the home: As a lawyer who helps same-sex couples with legal issues, I would agree that is likely harder on children to be raised by same-sex couples then it is for children raised in low-conflict,poverty-free traditional families…. Triplett raises thought provoking points, clearly born out from his experience on the ground working with all these types of families. His portrait of a divorced couple sitting across the table from him, fighting it out, versus an intact SS couple coming to him for legal help to solidify their relationship and protect their children, is striking. Of course there is a difference between those couples. I just wonder how much different the experience is for either of their children ten years later. Within a couple years after divorce most couples do not conflict much anymore; they basically keep the peace by staying out of each other’s lives. Meanwhile, a SS couple who creates a child might have a similarly distant or non-existent relationship with the child’s bio parent. Some SS couples, like divorced couples, experiment with keeping the bio parent in the child’s life, with the child even having visitation the way he or she would with a divorced parent. The parallel between the two family forms may not be clear in that first moment of break up (divorce) or union (the SS couple coming together) but they start to look a lot more alike to me as the years go by. Even if I grant you, though, that the history of conflict and dissolution in the divorced family remains potent and therefore makes it unlike the intact SS couple, what about your idea that kids of SS couples should more realistically be compared to adopted kids? (I guess we’re assuming in this analogy that these SS couple kids are not adopted themselves.) Well, I don’t find that very helpful. Adopted children know their bio parents were unfit, a hard enough thing to deal with. But they also know the parents who are raising them lovingly and very intentionally chose them, a beautiful thing. How does that compare with a sperm donor baby who knows that his mom (or two moms), the parent/s raising him from birth, intentionally chose to bring him into the world with no relationship to his father? That the pain he suffers at the absence of his father is a result of an intentional choice made by his own dearly loved mother/s (and not even, in the case of single or divorced parents, the result of human failure of both his parents to sustain a relationship?) Is my point strong enough to suggest that SS couples should never have children except through adoption? Maybe not. But just because my point raises a problem with no easy answers, does that mean it shouldn’t be talked about in the first place? Should we just let these sperm donor babies grow up and tell their story themselves? We don’t have to wait. They’re already showing up on Oprah (episode earlier this year) and organizing on the web to find other “kin” sired by the same “father.” These kids are mostly of single mothers by choice, not lesbian mothers, but will the addition of an extra mother make the kids of SS couples say something much different? More likely they will feel just like other kids do, except they will understandably feel compassion for the homophobia faced by their SS parents, consequently feeling highly protective of their parents and making it even harder for them to share their own feelings about their childhood experience. On top of that, the rest of us insisting they’re just “fine,” without even bothering to consider if that’s true, seems like an extra level of denial and complexity that these kids just don’t need. Sarah Woods writes: Regarding your position on gay adoption it probably would be a good idea to state whether or not you think gay couples in a civil union relationship should be considered as equally fit parents as heterosexual married couples. This becomes relevant in the world of adoption because the more desirable children are, the more completion there is amongst prospective parents. In America today the most desirable children are healthy Caucasian American infants. Agencies, lawyers, etc. must have policies regarding what types of parents are suitable and/or most desirable for infant adoption. Agencies already "discriminate against" parents on the basis of age, income, sexual orientation, physical, and mental health in the adoption screening process. The question is whether or not you think gays and straights should be considered as equals once a commitment is in place. For the kids bouncing around in child care or in an orphanage in a third world country this is less of an issue because there is little competition for them. Jennifer Roback Morse has written one essay on the purposes of human sexuality and another on the issue of marital infertility. Both are thoughtful and well-written; the one on infertility is personal and moving. Continuing this discussion, Michael Triplett writes: But would you tell a married, heterosexual couple not to use a sperm donor or in-vitro fertilization to have a child because the child would only be biologically connected to one of the parents? It's fine to discourage a single woman (or man) but why discourage a same-sex couple when you don't discourage a married, heterosexual couple?For most hetero couples experiencing infertility, the goal of the technology is to bring together his sperm and her eggs. But even regarding those (small number of) cases to which you allude, the answer to your question is this: Because the opposite-sex couple, similar to hetero couples who adopt, is largely (though admittedly not completely) upholding the social norm of a mother and father for every child, whereas the same-sex couple is by definition, and fundamentally, violating that norm. SS COUPLES AND CHILDREN (CONT.): Responding to these comments, Matt Taylor writes: I am sympathetic to [your] position, though perhaps more equivocally than you. I would like to ask you some questions to clarify the general moral framework on which your position is based.Well, now. These are hard questions. On the first, I don't know enough to have an opinion. I haven't studied or thought about it, and I don't know personally a gay or lesbian person who married in order to have children. So I have to plead ignorance. On the second set of questions. A couple in which one of the spouses has a family history of mental illness -- if the couple is prepared to love and care for the child forever, even if the child is ill, I don't think that law or social pressure should act to try to prevent the couple from bearing a child. One of the parents is terminally ill -- I can see good reasons why the couple themselves might decide not to bear a child. Whether society itself should pressure the couple, I'm not sure; one fact to keep in mind is that many studies have shown that losing a parent through death affects a child quite differently from losing a parent through, say, divorce. A woman's religion says she can't marry -- well, I don't think that any such religion exists; but if it did, I suppose I'd want to look pretty hard at it, and her, before advising her to be fruitful and multiply. And finally, a couple in poverty -- I don't think that in general poverty should be a bar to procreation. The issue of parental love is far more important for the child than the issue of material things. A couple of more points. Your question flows from the premise that what really matters is whether or not what might be a problem for the child is chosen or not chosen. But I disagree with that premise. What matters is society upholding the mother-father norm. Relatedly, I also disagree with how you link the idea of "choice" to unwed hetero child bearing. Plenty of 38-year-old single hetero females, with biological clocks ticking and no Mr. Right in sight, go ahead and bear a child largely because, in their view, their condition of being single is not something that they've "chosen," it's just something that has happened to them in life, often despite their deepest wishes and best efforts. In fact, they often use this exact argument -- I have no real choice at this point about marrying or not marrying -- to justify their decision to bear a child. But I disagree with that whole line of reasoning. The key moral issue is not what these women chose or did not choose. It's whether they believe that their desire for a child is more important than the child's right to a mother and a father. Wednesday, December 17, 2003
SS COUPLES AND CHILDREN (CONT.): Matt Taylor raises a fundamental issue. I think his recent exchanges with Elizabeth are fascinating and important, in part because they are a model of respectful, serious debate. For that reason, the last thing I'd want to do is jump in with easy answers, because I agree that there are no easy answers, and that the topic itself is painful. OK, enough throat-clearing, you say. My own view is that committed same-sex couples who want children should consider adoption -- there are so many children bouncing around in foster care that desperately need loving homes -- but should not consider using reproductive technologies or other means to create or give birth to a child that is biologically related to one of the two members of the couple. I would say the same thing to an unmarried single heterosexual woman, and for the same reason. It's the reason that Elizabeth has been spelling out in her recent posts. To me, put most sharply, here is the principle: The right of a child to know and be loved by both her mother and father is more important than -- morally more weighty than -- the right of adults who want children to intentionally bring into the world a child who by definition can never know and be loved by both her mother and father. BRAVE NEW VACATION FOR SPRING BREAK: Students offered Australian holiday for their spermAt least the Australian law preventing donor anonymity seems to have a salutory effect on getting sperm donors to think about what they are doing. Once a man is ensured sperm donation not the equivalent of an anonymous one-night stand, he's more likely to think about the long-term consequences. So now sperm banks are forced to bring in foreign fathers. Perhaps donors should also be forced to take legal responsibility for their children. As a child, how would you feel if your father was your father just because he wanted to get a free vacation? MATT TAYLOR REPLIES: It would be callous indeed to question the value of a living child, but actually I had in mind children who are not yet born. Perhaps a better way to ask the question would be, "Do you think it is so hard for kids of gay parents that gays shouldn't have kids?". This question is very real for me, as I don't yet have kids and am uncertain as to the circumstances that would be best for my future kids' well-being. I do not mean to say that the gift of life overshadows all possible pain that children may feel. On the contrary, childrens' experience is the most important factor to consider in making social policy. The problem with respect to gay parenting is to choose the social policy that affects childrens' experience most positively, through its influence on adult behavior. Therefore, I return to my original question: what behavior should be encouraged in gay adults? To have children in a same-sex relationship, to have children in a traditional, opposite-sex marriage, or not to have children at all? Tuesday, December 16, 2003
STIGMAS AND SILENCE: Some have suggested that to oppose SSM � or to suggest that the norm should be two bio parents raising kids, with the exception of adoption � is to participate in the perpetuation of stigmas for the children of gays and lesbians. I�ve been thinking a lot about stigmas. I certainly agree that gays and lesbians and their children face a significant stigma in our society and I would like to see that be eradicated. Maybe SSM would eventually reduce the stigma for these couples and their kids (though I fear SSM could make things first get worse, not better, for the current generation of kids of SS couples). But there�s something else I worry about, a kind of childhood pain that can operate in tandem with or apart from stigmas, and that is silence. When I was growing up in a divorced family (born in 1970) I faced no stigma at all because of my family makeup. In my young lifetime divorce came to be so widespread it was often seen simply as a new norm. I don�t ever remember a single kid teasing me about it and the adults, to the contrary, took pains to say nice things to me about my parents. Yet the lack of a stigma did not make the pain of my family experience disappear. Growing up in a divorced family left me always missing one of my parents, faced with complex moral issues, struggling with loss � stuff I�m writing about in my forthcoming book. And growing up I navigated all of this completely alone, in silence. The adults either did not know or did not care to know how different my childhood was from the one they had known. Their largely well-intended efforts to pretend that my childhood was �just fine� left me to sort out the morass of post-divorce family life completely alone. Here�s my worry: We can confidently say that children of SS couples do just fine without their bio father or mother, and maybe, just maybe, saying it will make it true. But I suspect the reverse is more likely: By confidently stating these kids are fine without a dad or mom without really knowing if it�s true � and when evidence from other family forms suggests that it�s often not true � we might be turning our backs on these kids, denying them a language to express their own experience, and doing to them what was done to us children of divorce over the last several decades. Instead of being willing to affirm what they might be feeling we will leave each of them to grow up, alone, struggling to articulate independently an experience they have no idea they share with other kids, because none of the adults are willing to talk about it. For me, this danger of denying the experience of another generation of kids is the heart of the matter. A TRADEOFF IN SSM? Matt Taylor responds to my suggestion that there is a tradeoff at stake in SSM. I wrote: �I would have much more sympathy for the pro-SSM argument if it faced up to the conflict of interest and said something like this: "�Yes, it is on average a harder way for kids to grow up. But we think the tradeoff is worthwhile given the enormous stakes for the rights and dignity of gay and lesbian adults.�� Matt Taylor replies: I agree with the downside of the tradeoff you have formulated; it's usually harder for kids to grow up with one or more openly gay parents, regardless of the parent's marital status. Such kids will likely be separated from one of their biological parents, and will be subject to ridicule whether the openly gay parent lives in a straight or gay relationship. We also appear to agree, if I understand you correctly, that a gay parent disguising his or her sexuality is ultimately painful for everyone, including the kids. The conclusion: life is harder for kids of gays under any circumstances. I appreciate Matt Taylor thinking carefully about my proposition of a tradeoff at stake in SSM and offering his own version more true to his experience. I respect his version. At the same time, since I began suggesting that children of SS couples might possibly miss their bio father or mother enough people have challenged me with the question, �So, do you think these kids would be better off never having been born in the first place?� that I find myself a little reluctant to accept Matt�s reformulation. Any child who is already here is a gift � the question of whether a living child should have been born seems irrelevant and rather callous to bring up (though I don�t think Matt at all intends it that way � but I sense that others have tried to make me sound callous by raising the question). However, I�m interested in Matt�s feeling that the tough tradeoff here is not adult rights vs. kids� needs, but, if I understand him correctly, a desire to support full flourishing of the kids� lives while recognizing that their lot is admittedly harder in the first place. Yet it seems like Matt has changed the focus a bit. I was arguing that in larger, social terms there is a tradeoff at stake in SSM. He seems to be arguing that in concrete terms, looking at families that already exist, whatever hardships the kids might experience are outweighed by the gift of their birth in the first place. Of course I agree with him. But does a recognition of the fundamental worth and dignity of every child lead us to endorse every possible policy change that affects children? Do we as a society say, well, they have the gift of life, whatever other pain they may experience is not worth focusing on? Again, I don�t think Matt means to suggest that, but I think this quibble is why I find his reformulation if anything less reassuring. A BIT MORE ON STROM: Interesting comments over at The Volokh Conspiracy on the despicableness of Strom Thurmond. It's really a shame this didn't all come out when he was alive, and much younger. What an awful father. He most likely took advantage of his daughter's mother, the family's 16-year-old maid. Then, throughout his life, whether due to racism or rank selfishness, he refused to acknowledge his own daughter, his own flesh and blood. But didn't he at least support her financially, you say? Only in the sense that he most likely paid her to deny that he was her father. He paid his daughter to deny her own father. For over 60 years. And it was his fault that she would have been poor in the first place. Strom Thurmond: an irresponsible, horrible father to the end. CIVIL UNIONS, ANYONE? (MR. PRESIDENT?): In an early transcript released by ABC News [in an interview with Diane Sawyer, to air tonight], the president is reported to have said he supports an amendment "which would honor marriage between a man and a woman." He also says, "The position of this administration is that whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they're allowed to make, so long as it's embraced by the state or at the state level."Is he endorsing the possibility of civil unions? PRIVELEGE OF TWO PARENTS, CON�T Matt Taylor responds to my earlier posts (here and here) on the question of whether it's a privelege (as compared to a birthright, for example) to be raised by your own two parents. His perspective is quite interesting: In your reply to Gabriel Rosenberg, you reject his comparison between children raised by their mother and father and children raised by affluent couples. If I understand you correctly, you find the comparison flawed because non-traditional families result from adult choice, while poverty and lack of education do not. My response: I don't think gay people should marry straight people to have kids (having seen the pain that results for everybody when that happens) nor do I think gay people should somehow be barred from having children. On the contrary, this is why I struggle with nailing down my position on this, because I understand the desire for children very well, and at the same time my life's work, so far, is all about studying children's loss of their father or mother through divorce. I support gay adoption and certainly support gays raising their children that may have resulted from a previous relationship. What troubles me is what I see as a lack of candor when it comes to using radical reproductive technologies to create families. There is a strong civil rights argument to be made in favor of SSM. At the same time, is it just possible that children of gays and lesbians find the lack of their biological father or mother in their homes to be a loss just like other children do? I would have much more sympathy for the pro-SSM argument if it faced up to the conflict of interest and said something like this: "Yes, it is on average a harder way for kids to grow up. But we think the tradeoff is worthwhile given the enormous stakes for the rights and dignity of gay and lesbian adults." I don't think being raised by a SS couple is akin to being raised by abusive or alcoholic parents or anything like that. But I suspect it may be a lot like being raised by divorced or single parents, because of the shared loss of having one's bio mother and father in the same home. And it's the flat out denial, earlier by divorcing parents, and now by gay and lesbian parents, that there could be any problems at all, whatsoever, with this family model that bothers me. "A group of men are accusing judges of gender bias. Fathers Are Parents Too, a coalition based in Lawrenceville, say men don�t get a fair hearing in divorce proceedings in Gwinnett and often have to spend thousands to even see their children." NOT A GOOD DIVORCE: Mr Justice Wall took the unusual step of making his ruling public because it raised points that warranted public discussion ... In this case, the father had accused the mother of child abuse, defamation and perjury. These allegations were "manifestly unsustainable, indeed absurd", the judge concluded. O [the child] had told a social worker during the course of the court battles: "It is like a war. You know they are fighting and they are fighting over me." And in a letter, the boy wrote: "I just want them to be friends. I love them both." His mother had said during one of the hearings that her son had said he did not want to see his father again, but she thought he did not mean it. During a series of hearings the courts had found that the stresses of coping with the parents' divorce and their continued "acrimonious behaviour" towards one another were becoming intolerable for the boy ... He added: "Blaming the system, as the father does in this case, is no answer. He must shoulder his share of the responsibility for the state of affairs he has helped to bring about. All the evidence is that he has proved incapable of doing so" ... O's parents married in 1978 and were divorced in 1998, when their son was six. Contact between O and his father initially took place by agreement but rifts began when the father applied to the courts for increased contact. O was becoming increasingly independent, the court was told, and began to find the visits to his father a burden because he could not use his evenings and weekends to see his friends or go to parties. The judge said the father had mistaken his son's reluctance over visits and telephone calls for evidence that his former wife was trying to drive them apart ... [The father] made accusations against the mother, her solicitors, court mediation services and judges who had previously heard the case. He said he no longer wished to "pursue justice within the family courts" because his human rights were being abused. THURMOND FAMILY ADMITS PATERNITY CLAIM: After decades of denials, the family of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) acknowledged yesterday a claim made by a 78-year-old Los Angeles schoolteacher that she is the senator's mixed-race daughter....Best excerpt: "There was a time that, had it been known, it would have destroyed his political career," said Fowler, who said he had never heard the woman's name until it was published in The Post. "It would have been very damaging to him. It was inconsistent with his public image." (emphasis added)Well, yes, that's one way to put it. Monday, December 15, 2003
An editorial from the Tri-City Herald in Washington state: "Marriage marketing not job for government" The editorial is astonishingly sloppy and uninformed. It suggests that the main component of the Administration's marriage initiative is a pro-marriage ad campaign. Patently false. It suggests that another big part of the program consists of efforts to "make it more difficult for couples to get divorced." Unless they know something I don't know, false again. It says that the program would seek to pressure couples into marrying. Absolutely false. And it also reports that "studies show" that increasing marriage would do little or nothing to reduce poverty. In fact, numerous studies suggest that more marriage would mean less poverty. Attention Tri-City editorial writers: If you want to be against this inititiave, fine. But you owe it to your readers to know what you are talking about. This editorial is a pretty weak outing. DIVORCE LAW REFORM ANYONE? Barry Maley, a senior fellow at the Australian Centre for Independent Studies and author of the new book, Divorce Law and the Future of Marriage, has an essay in (tomorrow's!) Sydney Morning Herald on the injustice of "unilateralism" in divorce. It's worth a read. Maley is a very smart guy -- I met him in Australia a few years ago; he's been working in the marriage vineyards a while -- and to me he makes a lot of sense on this issue, even though, in terms of public opinion, his is clearly a minority view. His essay reminds me of what, on most days, I wish marriage nuts were doing here in the U.S. instead of endlessly debating you-know-what. Clarence Page on SSM: "Don't Like Gay Marriage? Don't Have One." I's a clever line, and it summarizes one of the key pro-SSM arguments out there today: How is a same-sex marriage going to threaten opposite-sex couples? The people who make this point seem very sure of themselves, as if the point is self-evident to anyone not dumb as a tree or blinded by bigotry. But it's not self-evident to me. (If it were, I would be unambiguously pro-SSM.) I recall that lots of advocates made exactly this argument in favor of no-fault divorce in the late 1960s and 1970s: How is letting people who want to divorce going to threaten people who want to stay married? "Don't like divorce? Don't have one." Well, we now know that it's not that simple. Research by Paul Amato, Norval Glenn and others clearly suggests that, in a high divorce society, marriage in general -- everyone's marriage -- is adversely affected. In retrospect, I think this point is pretty clear to everyone, with respect to no-fault divorce. Those old "where's the harm?" arguments from the 1970s seem remarkably naive and simplistic when we look at them today. So I don't see why it's so hard for Clarence Page and others to realize that the relevant scope for our consideration of SSM is not just a discreet number of individual cases, but also the vitality of an institution and the impact of a particular (and arguably rather fundamental) change on a larger social ecology. Don't like crimes? Don't commit one! Don't like litter on the street? Don't litter! It's a valid point. But it is also highly misleading, because it obtusely refuses to recognize other points which are equally valid. STROM THURMOND, UNWED FATHER: It looks like one of America's most notorious segregationists was also an unwed, absent father who never even had the decency to acknowledge his daughter. Of course, Thurmond lacked decency in many spheres of life. He never apologized for his hateful, racist Dixiecrat campaign and continued to blatantly lie about its core aims up to his death. Here's part of what his supposed daughter told the Post: "I did not want anybody to know I had an illegitimate father," said Williams, who has four grown children. "My children convinced me to tell the truth. I want to finally answer all of these questions . . . that have been following me for 50 or 60 years."I've never seen the term "illegitimate father" before, but I like it, at least applied to Thurmond. The term "illegitimate child" is fortunately falling out of use because it stigmatizes a child. "Illegitimate father" shifts the stigma to the adult, where it belongs. At the time of his death, Focus on the Family hailed Thurmond as a "Pioneer Conservative from the South." Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation said that Thurmond was "an important part" of the pro-family conservative movement. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition called Thurmond a "great U.S. Senate leader" who fought for "pro-family conservatives." Oh, the irony. Sunday, December 14, 2003
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