The Government, Divorce, and the War on Fatherhood

For whatever reason, social conservatives focus considerable political effort on abortion, gay rights, and obscenity, but pay scant attention to divorce. Perhaps they think that ship has sailed for good, whereas other battles still offer winnable stakes. Perhaps too few look at our "family courts" and see a culture war; or perhaps too many lack the conviction to fight it. And when conservatives do target divorce, rather than lobby for legal reform of the "no-fault" divorce system, or changes in the way courts award custody or child support, they have preferred to employ the tools of ministry, treating divorce primarily as a moral problem rather than a political one; its attendant social evils as a consequence of sin, not of bad policy.

This is a grave mistake, says Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. In his startling new book, Taken into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, he asserts not only that reforming America's divorce paradigm deserves a far higher priority among conservative culture warriors, but that our divorce courts today are agents of radical sexual ideology, occasions of shameless graft, and instruments for the expansion of governmental power at the expense of Constitutional rights. [...]

With the advent of no-fault divorce (before which divorces required cause, and fault could be assigned proportionately), "the fault that was ostensibly thrown out the front door of divorce proceedings re-entered through the back." Working from the "therapeutic" (read: morally relativistic) premise that both parties must be equally to blame -- which is to say, not at all to blame -- for a marriage's failure, divorce courts begin with an "automatic outcome" and then set out to find or manufacture evidence to support it.

How is that evidence obtained? Via "extensive and intrusive governmental instruments whose sole purpose is intervention in families." Having quit the marriage-enforcement business, government has turned the full weight of its resources and coercive powers to the divorce-enforcement business.

The main area in which government brings to bear those resources, and the red thread of Baskerville's book, is in assigning custody of children. With two-thirds of divorces initiated by women -- thereby immediately casting the man as the "defendant" -- and with courts overwhelmingly biased toward mothers already (in a paradoxical inversion of feminist doctrine, women are held both to be and not to be more naturally suited to nurturing and child-rearing), in practice the custody process typically amounts to a "power grab" by which fathers are forcibly separated from their children. The children, for whose benefit the process ostensibly exists, are then used as leverage by the prying state and as trophies by the custodial mother.

The fathers may have committed no crime; they may in fact be more dedicated than the mother to the marital stability that's in their kids' best interest, but no matter. The mother is rewarded for courageously having taken the "initiative" in the divorce -- for having invited, that is, the power of the state to arbitrate in the most private areas of their family life. Maneuvered by skilled lawyers, abetted by social-science "experts" steeped in anti-father ideology and myths, and followed by media more interested in soap-opera storylines than justice, she can by the very hint of a suggestion of an accusation -- of physical or sexual abuse, for example, or mental or emotional cruelty -- rob a man of his marriage, his children, and his livelihood.

Read the full text at insidecatholic.com