A year later, the tone had changed. Alarmed speakers focused on study after study showing that fatherless kids from single mother households pack the prisons, comprise the bulk of school dropouts, lead in drug and alcohol addictions, and account for high numbers of teenage pregnancies.
Gone is the focus on dad the "deadbeat," dad the checkbook. Concerned talk now was how to get fathers back into the family, and what must be done "to strengthen family life." Echoing in the background, as it were, was New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's warning, 30 years earlier:
...a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relations to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder -- most particularly, the furious unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected, it is very near inevitable.If fathers' presence is crucial to children's healthy maturation, word has not yet reached the state courts.
To judges ruling in domestic battles, fathers are still little more than sperm donors and checkbooks. In a recent battle over five frozen embryos sitting in a John T. Mather Memorial Hospital freezer, New York Supreme Court (Nassau County) Judge Roncallo said as much. Once the male ejaculates, wrote the judge, Mom alone has the right to decide whether there will be either procreation or termination of a pregnancy.
Despite what we like to thin are American "rights," for men, in brief, family court is an undemocratic horror. For them, it offers no equal treatment, no due process of law, no jury trial (except in paternity cases), no respect for human dignity, and, in violation of the ancient tenet of Anglo-American jurisprudence, no right to be considered innocent until proved guilty:
In court, their pleas fall on dead ears. Beyond wagging fingers, judges do nothing to support their own visitation orders.
Is there a better way? Both the Commonwealth of Maine and also California would say yes. In them and in a handful of other states, emphasis for domestic relations cases has been shifted from litigation to mediation. In Maine, judges are obligated to refer for mandatory divorce mediation all couples having minor children.
The upshot is that 80 percent of the state's divorces now are managed directly or indirectly through mediation. And couples are spared the emotional and financial holocaust that Pennsylvania's inflammatory courts inflict.
If in Maine and California, why not in Pennsylvania? The bottom line? The common myth that fathers don't want to share their children's lives is false. The reality, as David Levy, Esq., president of Children Rights Council, and others have said, is that public policy wrongly keeps them away.
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