Re: Fatherlessness

December 16, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

Hello Pete,

My comments are between the lines of your message.

You wrote:

Greetings,

I looked all over your website and I see that your organization is based in Canada, however I still have a couple questions. Why do you use the words fatherless and fatherlessness when talking about disadvantaged children?

The reason why you don’t find the expression “disadvantaged children” at our website instead of the terms “fatherless children” and “fatherlessness” is because children who grow up with their fathers having been expunged from their lives do grow up fatherless while their fathers are still alive.  That then causes the consequence that those children are disadvantaged; with fatherlessness being a problem cause, and with the many disadvantages stemming from that being problem symptoms.

No problem has ever been solved satisfactorily without eradicating its causes.  Only someone with an agenda he wishes to promote and perpetuate would hide a clear problem cause by using a euphemism that points at the symptoms of a problem cause and neglect to mention the cause of the symptoms.

Why would anyone wish to keep on putting Band-Aids on problem symptoms instead of eradicating the cause of those symptoms?

Fatherless has always meant that the child’s father was dead or missing.

Children whose fathers are dead have a less difficult time coping with their loss.  In such cases it is unusual that the mothers of those children feel compelled to slander the children’s fathers, thereby to deprecate half of their genetic heritage.  Still, we know some women who run even the fathers down that literally dropped dead from working too hard in trying to provide for and to protect their families.

A child’s father could be missing for a great many reasons, usually not because the father absconded but more likely because he was expunged from the child’s life.  Death of a family member is final, divorce isn’t, it is a death of a thousand cuts, especially for children of divorced parents but most of all for divorced, fatherless children.

In the vast majority of the cases of disadvantaged children the mothers and or the government know who and where the fathers are because they’re after them for child support.

You are preaching to the choir and are pointing out the obvious.  Nevertheless, children whose fathers are still alive but who nevertheless grow up fatherless have a handicap from which they will suffer for the rest of their lives, long into adulthood.  They are truly disadvantaged, but, besides fatherlessness, there can be many other reasons why children can be disadvantaged.

And if you read any sociology book that was written in the last 40 years or more from the library or even junior college they never use the term fatherless, it’s alway been disadvantaged.

Yes, sociologists and other social engineers have a vocabulary of their own.  Our language is being changed by them to reflect and further their agenda for social engineering that intends to eliminate many of our social institutions and moral standards.

Are you a sociologist or a social worker?

If a child applies to any public college or university in the United States he/she is asked if they come from a single mother home so they can apply under affirmative action.

Is that a good thing?  Will that fully compensate those children for the loss of their fathers from their lives?

You may want to read some of the references at Fathers for Life to the research work done by Judith Wallerstein on that.  She has done the longest-running longitudinal study on the fatherlessness of children of divorce undertaken by anyone.

Something I read on your website said the divorce trend is enabled by the welfare system.

That is true, and so is that claim.  In states in which it had been made difficult for divorced mothers to obtain welfare, the divorce rate fell substantially.

This is another myth created by feminists.

Can you corroborate that assertion with any citations?

The divorce industry was started before the turn of the century after feminists demanded for decades that women get custody of their children in divorce. By 1916 divorce increased by 1400 percent and mother custody had become normal practice of judges.

What is your reference for the 1,400 percent increase in the divorce rate by 1916 (compared to which time frame and in which country)?

Your assertion does not hold true for many developed nations, and I have a hard time believing that it holds true for the U.S.

It was not until the “liberation” of divorce laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the regular court system found it was unable to cope with the backlog of divorce applications.  That was the reason for creating the family court system.  That system enabled the judiciary to cope with the consequences of the enormously increased consequences of divorce applications.

Of course, it was not practical to merely shift divorce processes from one sector of the judiciary to another and to leave all of the existing procedures intact.  The notable differences that enabled the family court system to expedite the dissolution of marriages were, for example, to simplify the rules of the court, the rules of evidence and jury trials.  Family courts even eliminated the right to face one’s accuser and to be present at one’s own trial.

Which in turn caused thousands of children to become disadvantaged, year after year.

Right, but children were not disadvantaged just because the courts robbed them of their fathers.  The escalating divorce rates created massive numbers of children that were disadvantaged because of court-enforced fatherlessness.  That was in addition to the number of children who had become disadvantaged for many other reasons.

Welfare wasn’t created by the government for another 30-40 years later.

Welfare always existed, for as long as civilization did (e. g.: poor houses and alms).  I have not been around for as long as civilization has been, but in my childhood, which began in 1936, welfare was already in existence, long before you claim it was created by government. However, it was not as freely available and as generously handed out as it was when it became for all intents and purposes an entitlement. It was also not such a big tax burden as it is now.  (It was also called “welfare”, not social assistance or any other thing.)  By making it freely available, especially to women, and by removing all social stigmata associated with it, Father State assumed the role of fathers as teachers, providers and protectors of their children.

Welfare should begin at home and not be used to replace fathers.  There is another, related issue that began to be of concern long before the all-out systematic destruction of families.  That was the creation of government “sponsored” pension plans.  Pension plans eliminated the need for families to have children.  In many under-developed nations children in families are virtually the only effective social safety net for the elderly.  Nevertheless, that topic is a different one and falls into another area of taxation.

Do you consider your organization as conservative or moderately conservative feminists?  The reason I ask is no where on your site do you oppose judges giving custody to mothers.

Thank you,

Pete

You have not read all of our website.  The lack of evidence you perceive is not proof of the absence of evidence.  You merely limited your search terms and thereby prevented yourself from finding what you are looking for.  You could, for example, look for the planned destruction of the family or for social engineering or for war against the family.

You would be well served if you were to read our home page.  That will not take much time, as the home page is fairly short.  That will give you tips on how to navigate the website of Fathers for Life.  For example, it would bring you to the main table of contents and especially to the ToCs on Law, Justice and the Judiciary and on Fathers, Fatherhood and Fatherhood Issues.

By reading the home page you would also have been motivated not to ask that last question of yours.

With respect to your last question (there is a ToC on Feminism that you obviously overlooked in your eagerness to express your criticism), I would like to ask you whether you constructed and run a website that contains the sort of information you feel is missing from ours.

If you have information that falls within the scope of fathers- and family issues that is presented at a website of yours, please provide pointers to it, so that we can determine whether we should link to it.  If we were to make our website to look like yours, we would surely be duplicating efforts.  Why should we do that?

Regards,

Walter Schneider
http://fathersforlife.org
http://blog.fathersforlife.org

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