The Case for Father Custody
Dr. Daniel Amneus'
Dr. Daniel Amneus' thought provoking article The Case for Father
Custody has grown into a book length volume Case_for_Father_Custody.pdf
(2.2 mb).
Here are a few excerpts from the book:
Today "civilized countries" suffer from a below-replacement level
birthrate. Men in them don't view babies as a threat to their survival;
their fear is that they can't have families--that women, with the help
of the divorce courts, are imposing a matriarchal society upon them.
The men who get married believing that marriage will give them families
are going to rub their sleepy eyes and realize that marriage has become
a fraudulent contract which gives men no security of having families and
children....They are going to realize that the wife's withdrawal of her
primary contribution to the marriage, her sharing of her reproductive
life with her husband, removes his reciprocal obligation to support her;
and that since the purpose of this support was to benefit his children,
the children belong with him, not with her.
The solution is perfectly obvious: father custody of the children in the
case of divorce, as was automatic and mandatory in the mid-nineteenth
century. This will permit men to have families and children to have
fathers. It will restore male motivation. It will make women understand
the value to themselves of the double standard and of their sexual
loyalty, the things which formerly gave them their bargaining power in
the patriarchal system.
Patriarchy tries to make women sexually responsible; sexual
responsibility is what they are in rebellion against; rejection of
sexual responsibility is what feminism is all about. They will get what
they want unless their rejection of sexual responsibility is understood
to forfeit their claim to custody.
"It's never going to happen"--the restoration of meaningful fatherhood
and the two-parent family--until men realize that the anti-male bias of
divorce court judges is so total that the only solution is to take all
discretion out of their hands and to return to the 19th century practice
of automatic and mandatory father custody.
An economically independent woman is privileged to get out of a bad
marriage--or a boring one. This is why economically independent women
have the highest divorce rate and why sensible men ought to avoid
marriage with them--unless custody is given to fathers.
It is a woman's voluntary renunciation of sexual independence which
makes a family possible. This is the reason why a husband is willing to
subsidize a wife. When she insists on her right to sexual independence
and implements this "right" by adultery or divorce, she loses her right
to subsidization and custody of her husband's children.
If the sexual regulation of women were not what makes civilization
possible by permitting men to be fathers and children to have fathers,
it would be an absurdity. But the sexual regulation of women is what
makes civilization possible by permitting the creation of families and
by permitting males to participate in reproduction, by making sex
something more than one-night stands, more than recreation--by
channeling male energy into being providers, by creating fatherhood.
Accordingly, the sexual de-regulation of women, now taking place under
the aegis of the sexual revolution attacks patriarchy at its core by its
withdrawal of female sexual loyalty to the family and to marriage.
Maggie Gallagher cites George Rekers, professor of neuropsychiatry and
behavioral science at the University of South Carolina School of
Medicine, as follows on father absence:
Both developmental and clinical studies have clearly established the
general rule that the father's positive presence in the home is, in the
vast majority of cases, normally essential for the existence of family
strength and child adjustment. Research [says Gallagher] shows that
children without fathers have lower academic performance, more cognitive
and intellectual deficits, increased adjustment problems, and higher
risks for psychosexual development problems. And children from homes in
which one or both parents are missing or frequently absent have higher
rates of delinquent behavior, suicide, and homicide, along with poor
academic performance.
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The
Best
Parent
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