CBC debate on The Meaning of Fatherhood

CBC debate on The Meaning of Fatherhood

CBC News: Sunday airs on CBC-TV at 10:00am, and on CBC Newsworld at 9:00am (ET)

Jan. 10, 2009

The Meaning of Fatherhood
Comments (70)

The Ontario Superior Court’s decision to order a man to continue paying child support – even though he is not the biological father of his ex-wife’s twins – has renewed the debate over father’s rights in Canada. We talk to Judith Huddart, a Toronto lawyer specializing in family law, and Grant Wilson, whose organization opposes the judgment, about the implications of this week’s decision.

The video (about 10 minutes) and the comments that were sent in are accessible at http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2009/01/011109_6.html

Some may wonder why I posted this item as belonging to the category of “Women’s Violence”, amongst others.  The reasons are simple.

(Update 2009 01 17 1:08 a.m.: The text following this note was posted as a comment to the article at the CBC website.  I received an acknowledgment stating that the comment had been received and thanking me for posting it.  Curiously, nine hours after my comment had been received by the CBC it had not yet been shown.  One would almost think that the comment shown below violates some unspecified speech code.  I wonder.)

It is an act of violence against a man to pretend that he is the natural father of children when he is not.

It is an act of violence against children to deny them to get to know and to be cared for by their natural father.

Grant Wilson said things very well, without identifying that a woman who conceived two children by a man she was not married to committed adultery.  On the other hand, Judith Huddard thought that to be quite normal and not necessarily malicious, as a woman who conceives a child by a man who is not her husband could easily have forgotten whom all she had sex with.

Going by what Judith Huddard stated, marital fidelity does not matter, but all that matters is that a man who has been fingered to be the natural father of two children should be held responsible to pay for the consequences of him being successfully duped.  By her reasoning, that is all that matters, as it is the right of the children to receive child support from a man who is not their father.  According to her, child support is paid to children and not to the children’s mothers.

I have got news for Judith Huddard.  The name of the mother of the children is on the child-support checks she receives.  Nowhere does it state what she must do with the money.  She can do with it what she wants, and she will not be held accountable for how she spends that money.

According to the judge in my case, with respect to child support that I had to pay for children who had been abducted for eight years, the money for the child support arrears had to be paid to the mother, not to the children, because child support is the income of the mother.