You may be interested in this exchange of ideas on the advice, “Don’t marry,” that is often offered to those contemplating marriage.
On 05/09/2010 10:35 PM, Don’t Marry wrote:
Fathers for Life,
Hello. I am the moderator of a forum, Don’t Marry, and would like to request that you place a link to it on your website in the appropriate place or blogroll.
Two months ago I learned that there are lawyers suing forum owners, bloggers and moderators for reprinting too much of an article in a forum post. The old DGM forum has 120,000 posts and thousands are reposts of articles.
I simple do not have the time to go through every post to bring the content into compliance, so I locked the forum and I have begun copying the most popular and exciting threads over to
www.dontmarry.proboards.com
Our members write about: their avoidance of marriage in America, Marriage 2.0, dating, divorce (some scary stories!), living and working outside the USA, and other relevant topics.
If you would be so kind as to post this link to my forum in your blog roll I would appreciate it.
www.dontmarry.proboards.com
Many thanks in advance.
All The Best,
Lee Raconteur
Administrator
My response to that was:
Hello Lee,
Please understand why I cannot list your URL in our blog roll. Our website is pro-marriage. It would be incongruous to link to your website.
No thought experiment is necessary to test the validity of your aim. In 1918 the USSR did away with church marriages and made it easy to obtain divorces for about a nickel each, simply by having couples intent on divorce make a declaration in front of a neighbourhood magistrate. The result of that was rampant social chaos. It is a sad testimony of our growing social chaos on account of identical reasons that you promote what the USSR long ago found needed to be cured instead.
What you advocate is comparable to amputating an arm to cure a hangnail. Still,
….There is nothing new under the sun. The methods for disfranchisement of parents were a big part of the Bolshevik agenda in the early days of the USSR. That was the wish to deconstruct the institution of the family, so that out of the resulting ruins and rubble of society a bigger and better socialist state could be constructed. That resulted in social calamities that were in short order addressed by the USSR, in order to extricate itself from the social chaos of its own creation.
Free love, as the early communists called it, is today called sexual freedom.
See The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926 (See also a more exhaustive history of the evolution and destructive social impact of Soviet divorce laws)In the long run, the USSR (and its affiliated nations) never escaped the escalating chaos that it had caused for itself by its early family-hostile policies. For instance, the population of the Russian Federation is currently in the order of 140 million and will by 2045 have shrunk to 70 million. Incredibly, though, the Russian divorce laws were imported, verbatim, to the USA in the mid-1940s and became, through the efforts of feminist law societies, part of family-hostile legislation and law in the USA, from where they were then exported to all nations in the so-called “free” West.
In the last days of his regime, Hitler had these thoughts on disfranchising parents (especially fathers but even more so bachelors who refused to become fathers) but with the aim of producing new human material for the construction of a bigger and better German army. Do the current fascists in power in the developed nations have goals that are any different?
(Source: http://blog.fathersforlife.org/2008/06/20/daughter-vs-father)Regards,
Walter Schneider
On 06/09/2010 4:33 AM, Dont Marry wrote:
Hello Walter,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
While I think you mis-understand the concept behind our forum, in that it discourages men from marrying due to the severe legal, financial and societal biases against men in the current climate that exist in the USA, and does not encourage divorce on a whim as you seem to believe, I appreciate that you took the time to pen a reply.
All the best in your endeavors,
Lee
Which prompted me to write:
Hello Lee,
Yes, I understand that you emphasize that there is a difference between undoing a marriage and not entering into one. On the one side there will be the children who will for all extents and purposes be turned into semi-orphans, with the vast majority on account of having their fathers expunged from their lives. On the other side there will be the creation of comparable numbers of semi-orphans, children conceived and born out of wedlock who may never get to even know their fathers. The results are the same.
I hope that we can agree that men and women who lead monastic lives (single lives, that is) generally produce children out of wedlock and that even those who cohabit habitually and as a norm for all intents and purposes do the same, as cohabiting couples are even more likely than married couples to break apart and to turn their children into semi-orphans. The practical difference is that in longer periods of cohabiting it is more likely that the identity of a biological father can be established than is the case in a series of one-night stands.
It seems that you did not take the time to read The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926, as that article describes in great detail that a most serious problem resulting from the abolition of marriage was the creation of unprecedented numbers of orphans. That was not the least of the problems. The USSR also experienced, for example, a massive increase in polygamy. Still, even there, whether someone pretends to live in a single marriage in each of those ostensibly single but multiple marriages or whether he claims that there is no longer any need or even the wish to become married, thereby through rationalizing to “legalize” his promiscuous screwing around, what is the difference? The results are the same.
I should not have to describe that to you. Because you urge people not to marry, you should be interested in all of the consequences of the revolution you thereby promote. It would be totally irresponsible of you to disregard the consequences of your actions.
Judging from many of the comments by subscribers to your blog, I do not see any evidence that chastity or abstinence is being promoted anywhere at your blog. What your blog promotes is no better than what the Soviet Union had to cope with, namely the creation of hordes of fatherless children who instead of their natural fathers to guide them experience a succession of unrelated men — ostensibly father figures — in their lives, some of whom are quite likely pederasts or pedophiles but whom even the worst father would not want to have serve as substitutes for the role models the real fathers could and should have been.
You have my fullest sympathy with respect to the need of many men to vent their frustration with today’s deteriorating state of sexual relations, even to the extent of promoting a marriage strike. However, I regret that you feel the need for that. It should not be celebrated or promoted. The mark of a civilization is that it regulates human sexuality. No civilization can thrive by promoting unrestrained promiscuity.
Whether you promote free love (as the old communists called it), sexual freedom (as the modern euphemism for unrestrained sexuality goes) or quite plain, simple, honest and open “hooking up” (a.k.a. unrestrained promiscuity), it closely fits the lifestyle of our ancestors that still went swinging through the trees. Although “progressives” consider that to be progress, objectively it must be considered to be a return to the law of the jungle.
No wonder the progress of socialism is so notable in the U.S. and the other developed nations, because the promotion of “free love” is one of the ten planks on which the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is based. Lenin quite openly called people who blindly, inadvertently and unknowingly helped the spread of communism “useful idiots”. Is that how you wish your children to remember you?
Your blog does not promote a marriage strike, it promotes nothing other than what Marx, Engels, Lenin and any other communist — including radical feminists — ever promoted: the abolition of marriage. Calling it a strike does not change its aim and social consequences.
Sincerely,
Walter Schneider
http://fathersforlife.org
_____________
Note by F4L: I have no idea whether Lee Raconteur is his real name. Raconteur could very well be a joke. It generally means “teller of tall tales,” of which a famous example is Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen (German soldier and raconteur).
Hello Lee,
The Russian effort to abolish marriage took place from 1917 to the 1920s, at the end of which measures had been put into place for correcting the damages that had been caused. Still, it took a long time to undo the damages that had been done, so much so that,
“In his recent book Perestroika ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0851245013/qid=1076198346/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/002-3696667-5476800?v=glance&s=books#product-details ), Mikhail Gorbachev reflected on 70 years of Russian turmoil: “We have discovered that many of our problems in children’s and young people’s behavior, in our morals, culture and in production are partially caused by the weakening of family ties.”” — Carey Roberts, January 13, 2004; http://www.dvmen.org/dv-49.htm#dissolution
Lee, it would be a good thing if, instead of calling for radical solutions (e. g.: “Don’t Marry”), you were to reflect on the Russian experience of social chaos that was launched so long ago and took so terribly long to repair, even though the efforts at repairing began very soon after the damage had become apparent. Consider at the same time also the saying: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Take great care that the cure does not become a disease that is far worse than the one it was intended to address.
As to your discussion threads on marriage to foreigners being an alternative that is preferable because of the allegedly much lower divorce rates, that is contrary to my experiences and observations. However, I would love to see any citations you have for credible research from reputable and objective sources to substantiate your claim.
All of this is a discussion that deserves more attention than you and I can give it on a one-one basis, which is why I no longer want to have it via this e-mail exchange. I moved it to Dads & Things http://blog.fathersforlife.org/2010/09/06/dont-marry/, so that many more people can benefit from it and perhaps even become involved.
Regards,
Walter
Lee wrote, 2010 09 07, 04:58
Hello Walter,
One of the means by which to deal with the current legal, social and financial situation in the USA is to not marry at all.
In addition many members on our forum discuss;
-Marriage to women from other countries.
-Moving to another country and marrying there.
The divorce rate for an American Man marrying a Foreign Women, and settling into American life in America, is about 20%. This compares quite favorably with the 43% to 60% divorce rate that 2nd generation and above Americans currently have.
“It seems that you did not take the time to read The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926, as that article describes in great detail that a most serious problem resulting from the abolition of marriage was the creation of unprecedented numbers of orphans. That was not the least of the problems. The USSR also experienced, for example, a massive increase in polygamy. Still, even there, whether someone pretends to live in a single marriage in each of those ostensibly single but multiple marriages or whether he claims that there is no longer any need or even the wish to become married, thereby through rationalizing to “legalize” his promiscuous screwing around, what is the difference? The results are the same.”
Thank you for the refresher in Gramscian School Cultural Marxism, but I have been aware of such ideas for 15 years or so. Moving to the Philippines, or China, or Russia, or Brasil, or Mexico or any of a number of other countries, getting married and rearing a healthy family, does not fit in with ‘The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage’, etal. Bringing a wife to the USA from a culture that has solid family values, as the USA did pre-1965, strengthens marriage and does not weaken it.
All the best,
Lee