Hello Pete, re: Fatherlessness
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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Pete Kaplan
says:Greetings,
The reason why I haven’t explained myself better is because there’s not a lot to say. I was involved in the fathers rights movement up until about ten years ago. I joined COPS, My Child Says Daddy and hung out with a couple smaller groups. It wasn’t until I read a couple books Prof. Dan Amneus wrote that I realized all the problems started, for my ex spouse, our children and me, when the judge ordered custody of our children to her. When a judge gives custody of the child(ren) to their mother he automatically creates 100 social problems. Who’s going feed, clothe, house, educate, discipline, provide health care, councelling, ect. For over a hundred years lawyers and millions of other people have been working in the cottage industries that had to be created to provide for single mothers and their children. Like Welfare and child support, food stamps, children’s court, Women’s Hospitals ect. Either that or we could let them sleep on the streets. Dan Amneus pointed out in his books that this problem was already addressed for thousands of years in hundreds of different cultures. It was simply rediculous to think that a single mother could take care of herself and children. The entire system was created to exploit women and children. By the turn of the century there were already thousands of children working in factories for pennies a day.
I’m sorry I don’t have the time to address all the points of your post. (fascism, hitler’s germany, your mission statement,feminist ideology ect)
I will say that “child abuse” is a feminist term coined to be used against men, for doing the same thing a mother might do, like spanking or yelling at a child.
Thanks,
Pete
Pete Kaplan
says:Greetings,
there are not many feminists who agree with one another about everything. However, every feminist does agree that women have the natural and moral right of custody of their children in divorce. This has been a religious view point for thousands of years. Read the bible. Jews and Christians still have this belief today. How under the circumstances, there are a lot people who don’t believe that the courts should give custody to the mother in divorce. You might think this is an extreme idea. We think it’s pragmatic. I’m not going into a diatribe about single mothers. You’re either a feminist or your not.
It’s obvious, because the fathers rights movement has been around losing ground for almost 50 years, you’re desperate and believe extreme jargon is needed to get your point across. You have as much right as anyone to modify the meaning of words. But don’t you realize that everyone already knows how detrimental divorce is to children and men? The point that needs to get across is that judges should not give custody to mothers in divorce.
Pete,
What you state with respect to your belief “that the vast majority of men in the fathers rights movement do not want the responsibility of being a single parent. All they want is what all feminists want,” is true to a far greater extent in the population of expunged fathers who are not active in the FR movement.
That should not surprise anyone. All of those who are parents now of children
that have not yet reached the age of majority are not necessarily feminists, but
they were indoctrinated through the feminist curriculum, not just through the
curriculum of the education system but also through its logical extension, the
media and most of publishing. They were a captive audience for intensive,
massive, all-pervasive propaganda for all of their lives.
It appears that you may think that feminism’s goal is to create more
feminists, preferably of the female variety. That is not feminism’s main goal.
Feminism’s main goal is the complete abrogation of all traditional moral
standards and social institutions, and to achieve that primarily through the
systematic destruction of the institution of the traditional nuclear family
headed by two married, biological parents, one of each sex.
The creation of new feminists is merely a by-product, although a necessary
one, so that the process of the re-engineering of society can be maintained,
until hardly any traditional nuclear families and any of the traditional moral
standards and social institutions that once promoted traditional nuclear
families and made them thrive no longer exist.
When that comes about, or perhaps even a bit earlier, the construction of the
global, socialist-feminist, totalitarian State will be an accomplished fact.
Yes, more feminists to bring that about will be required, but those are by no means only of the female variety. Even right now thare
are more male than female feminists.
I was born into and grew up in Hitler’s Germany. Would it surprise you if I
told you that, even though many Germans were not Nazis, many more Germans were,
some of those even religiously and fanatically so?
Why should it surprise you that the feminist ideology (with solid socialist
and Marxist roots), an ideology that has total and virtually absolute control of
the education curriculum (and of its extensions) in all developed nations (and
in many of the developing ones), an ideology that indoctrinated its captive
audience, students as well as adults, for far longer and far more intensively
than Hitler’s propaganda machine ever did with his population, managed to fully
indoctrinate all of our population with an equally radical and destructive
ideological doctrine to a far more pervasive extent?
If that topic interests you, do what I recommended once before (in the
original article to which you are responding) and look for articles containing
any of these terms or any combination of them: "education", "Fascism, Nazism,
Communism, Feminism". Look also, as I stated once before, for "Destruction of
the Family".
You may also wish to look up the mission statement of Fathers for Life:
http://www.fathersforlife.org/fatherhood/better.htm
As to your objections to my custom of calling the willful creation or
infliction of pain, neglect, death or any other "disadvantages" on children
"child abuse", I will persist in doing so. Child abuse is not, as you state,
"just an implication," it is a crime. Child abuse is a crime, even the
sociologists say so, and on that I agree with those who say so.
Pete, you need to put more thought into your assertions and disagreements.
Take for example your assertion that "semi-orphan refers to children who live in
orphanages, underprivileged with one parent."
I won’t spend a lot of time in taking the semantics of that apart in great
detail, but, by your definition, a child who lives with a widowed parent at home
is not a semi-orphan — not even if the child is disadvantaged. Furthermore, you
stated that only an underprivileged child who lost one of his parents and lives
in an orphanage can be a semi-orphan.
Pete, your argument just doesn’t wash, for more than just the two reasons I
mentioned.
Lastly, you stated that children don’t do well in single mother families has
"been the rule for thousands of years, read the bible." You are not a great one
for using citations and references, as you so far have not supplied a single one
(which is, by the way, a violation of the rules of this blog), but that should
not be difficult for you to substantiate, although the Bible is to my knowledge
a bit short on statistics relating to that issue.
Nevertheless, you have to give this a rest, because I will. One reason for
that is that I don’t like repeating myself and hate to go around in circles.
Check the rules for this blog: http://blog.fathersforlife.org/about/ and,
please, live by them.
Pete Kaplan
says: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?
Greetings. I believe that the vast majority of men in the fathers rights movement do not want the responsibility of being a single parent. All they want is what all feminists want. To share the responsible of raising their children(with an ex-spouse, grandparents, relatives, the community ect) And they don’t want to pay child support, or pay as little as possible.
Most of my citations and ideas come from books Prof. Dan Amneus wrote.
No. I am not a social worker or sociologist.
Whether it is caused by violence or not, children living with single moms don’t do well in our society. It used to be the exception. Now it is becoming the rule and progressively worse. Is that not child abuse too?
It’s been the rule for thousands of years, read the bible. And there you go stretching the meaning of a word. It’s plain to say they are disadvantaged. “child abuse” is just an implication.
And semi-orphan refers to children who live in orphanages, underprivileged with one parent.
Hello Pete,
I made some minor edits to your post, to make sure that all of the links you identified will work. If a URL you post in a comment is not enclosed by leading and trailing spaces, it won’t work as a clickable link.
Pete, of course, a child whose father died is a semi-orphan. He is also fatherless, without a doubt. That should not be the question. The question should be what we should call a child who became fatherless while his father is still alive but no longer present in the child’s life. There are many more times the number of fatherless young children of the latter kind than there are fatherless young children whose fathers truly died.
There is obviously a difference in impact on a child, depending on whether the child became fatherless on account of his dad having died or his dad having been expunged from the child’s life without having died. I described some of those differences in my response to your original message (the main article to which this is a comment).
I understand why you would like to make a clear and legal or logical distinction between children who lost their fathers through the deaths of their fathers and those children who lost their dads because of divorce or separation.
You figure that there should be words to describe the two categories of fatherless children, but you must consider that while formerly it was that dictionaries were used to reflect the evolution of languages, they are now used to drive the evolution of languages. That is a critical distinction that falls into the scope of a different discussion.
Virtually all English-language dictionaries evolve now to drive the way we get to think, along the lines of the feminist ideology. Not only that, but the changes in dictionaries are being driven and controlled by feminists, as is almost all of the publishing industry and virtually all of the media.
I am a bit too old to see the sort of change to the English language you seek happen. For example, it took decades of efforts by many to get Merriam Webster’s to include a definition of “misandry” in its online version of its dictionary — that addition was made just a little while ago. I don’t know whether its latest printed edition now contains that definition or not, but its 10th edition did not.
I imagine that definitions of fatherlessness that take into account the different ways in which children may become fatherless could easily take more than fifty years to be included in any dictionary.
Just as Merriam Websters was eventually forced to admit that there is such a thing as “misandry”, because more and more people insisted on using the word and related terms, so people like the feminists that control the contents of dictionaries will eventually be forced to admit that there are many forms of fatherlessness and that the worst of them all, the one with the largest detrimental impact on our children, is the fatherlessness that children experience on account of their parents’ separation or divorce.
So, make sure you talk and write about children being fatherless while their fathers are still alive. Do not instead call those children disadvantaged, as then you would perpetuate the consequences of feminist indoctrination.
To support your arguments against the enforced fatherlessness of hundreds of millions of children, always keep in mind the consequences of such fatherlessness and of single-mother custody:
— Children and Single Moms —
Whether it is caused by violence or not, children living with single moms don’t do well in our society. It used to be the exception. Now it is becoming the rule and progressively worse. Is that not child abuse too?
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHILDREN FROM SINGLE-MOTHER FAMILIES http://fathersforlife.org/fv/DV_news_letter_971223.htm#Children_in_SMHs
— Children of Divorce & Separation — Statistics —
Consequences of father absence
http://fathersforlife.org/divorce/chldrndiv.htm
P.S.: Pete, I spent a lot of time answering all of your questions, but it seems that you answered none of mine. I will hold off with providing answer to you until you caught up with providing answers to my questions to you, okay?
Pete Kaplan
says:The cause of the problem isn’t that the child is fatherless he died or was killed a hero in war or in the line of duty and now his mother is a widow. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/widow
The cause of 90% of our social problems is because too many children are being raised by a single mother http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/single%20, thus making them disadvantaged. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disadvantage No one thinks a child who’s father died is disadvantaged. Only feminists believe that.
If the father dies, the child doesn’t become disadvantaged, the child becomes disadvantaged when a judge puts a child in the custody of a single or divorced woman.
Maybe we just use a different dictionary here in the U.S. and this [is] a matter of Semantics? What word would you use to describe a child who’s father died? (fatherless) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fatherless
and both parents? (orphan) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orphan
Sam,
Thanks for that. You are absolutely correct!
For example, most mass murderers grew up fatherless while their fathers were still alive; most assassins of American presidents grew up fatherless while their fathers were still alive; and even Adolf Hitler grew up fatherless while his father was still alive.
One of the ostensible icons of male violence in Canada, Gamil Gharbi (a.k.a. Marc Lepine), the perpetrator of the 1989 massacre in Montreal, Quebec, a psychopath of feminist creation whose killing of 14 young women is being used by the feminists as a propaganda tool to promote the concept of male violence against women, grew up fatherless while his father was still alive.
See: http://blog.fathersforlife.org/2008/12/06/gamil-gharbi-aka-marc-lepine-and-propaganda/
It boggles the mind that the feminists are using him, a consequence of their creation, and his unprecedented and never repeated deed for their dark purposes.
I especially like the most important point, in my opinion, that the label “disadvantaged” is incorrectly used to mask the real problem – “fatherlessness”. Since my investigation into the divorce process I was amazed to find out that the vast majority of the time, when dealing with the true and egregious miscreants of society, that these individuals came from fatherless families. I feel ashamed that I was duped into not realizing the true cause for the heinous acts perpetrated by many of these individuals who were robbed of a father.