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If Juan Gonzales is MAD, so are a lot of American fathers! In recent interviews, Juan Gonzales has said that he would like to "break the necks" of American politicians who are blocking the return of his son, and "take a rifle" to the Miami Mafia.
We understand why Juan is angry, but it is lucky for him that he is in Cuba, because if an American father made threats like that against American politicians, he would be arrested for threatening public officials, and probably never see his son again. At least 10,000,000 American fathers feel the same anger that Juan feels, but if we express that anger it is routinely used as evidence that we are unfit parents.
Mothers in America are allowed to get mad, but if fathers do the same, we are treated as nut cases. American mothers are allowed and even encouraged to express normal human emotions, but when fathers do the same we get slammed down so hard, that many of us never get up again. Small wonder that with the normal human emotions of divorced American fathers so severely suppressed in America, that we commit suicide at 13 times the rate of divorced mothers.
Small wonder that Juan does not want to come to America when he is so angry at what America has done. But until he can work through his anger, and try to find more positive ways to channel his emotions, we think he would be ill-advised to come to come to America, because this country would eat him alive, as it has already done to millions of American fathers who feel exactly the way he does. We would offer the same advice to American fathers caught in the same degraded American family court system - don't get mad, get even. Instead of lashing out at people who don't understand why you are so angry, work through your anger and learn from it.
What so much of America still does not understand is that fathers are every bit as human as mothers. There is no crime more fundamental than kidnapping a child, and most fathers feel the same way as most mothers would feel if you did the same thing to them. Fathers tend to express their emotions differently, but the fundamental human emotion is exactly the same for both mothers and fathers.
Americans often misinterpret the economic success of a free market economy to mean that we do everything better than other countries. Yes, it is true, material life does not get much better than this. But better economic performance does not mean that America is superior to other nations in everything, particularly in social policy. Some of the poorest people on earth, the Chinese for example, live relatively stable, crime-free lives despite their poverty, because government has not communized the family and driven fathers out of it. In human parental rights, Cuba does much better than America. Joint custody is the norm in Cuba, and the rights of fathers to be fathers is upheld and enforced.
Millions of good American fathers are routinely denied the due process of a free choice to be responsible fathers in a family court system that Supreme Court Justice Stevens once called "the cesspool of American Law." Instead, as we saw in the action of the Florida court in this case, family court judges think they can do anything they want, and nobody will do anything about it. Except for the national prominence of this case, that Florida court would probably have gotten away with trashing the rights of Juan Gonzales as a father, as it probably does every day of the week in less prominent cases.
The sad fact of American family courts, is that all too often there is no law for fathers and children. Instead of justice, fathers are routinely beaten into discontented submission with name-calling, property right violations, onerous child support, loss of driver's licenses, jackbooted cars, and the threat or reality of imprisonment for debt in violation of the 13th Amendment prohibition of slave labor. In 1998 in the case of Moss vs. Superior Court, even the California Supreme Court ruled that "the unusual nature" of child support justified slave labor otherwise prohibited by the 13th Amendment. In the area of family policy America has serious human rights abuses that beg to be proactively addressed.
In most areas America understands that capitalism, freedom and democracy are inherently linked - you can't degrade one element of this triad without degrading another. In the Lincoln Douglas debates, Lincoln's most powerful argument against slavery was economic, that you can't degrade the economic rights of one class of citizens, without degrading the whole society, because any free citizen who wants to compete in whatever commodity is produced by slave labor, is forced by market forces to compete for slave wages. By addressing our human rights abuses in family policy, we predict not only an even better economy, but improvement in urban social stability, overall improvement in social indicators measuring the well-being of the average American woman and child, and across-the-board decreases in virtually every crime indicator.
Rather than rejecting or fearing Juan's angry assessment of American social policy, we should look to the source of the problem - our own anti-father, anti-family policies. We do not believe that these issues will be resolved until America grants fathers comparable rights to be in the family that we have granted to women in the workplace. Instead of rejecting Juan's anger, let us learn from it. Let us begin a great renewal of American family policy by returning Elian to his father as soon as possible.
Children Need BOTH Parents!
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