Second Chances on the Divorce Superhighway

As a child of divorce,* and as one who had a surprise divorce forced upon him, I read this (link downloads pdf) report, titled "Second Chances: A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce" with interest (HT: Maggie Gallagher, writing in Human Events). Penned by a University of Minnesota professor and a two-time Obama nominee to the SCOTUS and retired Georgia supreme court judge, the report lays out the objective case that:

(a) a slight majority of divorces (50 - 66 percent) are unnecessary, "unnecessary" in the sense that these divorcing couples experience average happiness and low conflict,

(b) a lowered divorce rate would be in the best interest of children (e.g., adjusted for parental income and education, children of divorce are at higher risk of poverty, lower family wealth, higher risk of school failure, stunted educational and professional achievement, higher risk of substance abuse, incarceration, and teen pregnancy, and higher risk of physical and/or sexual abuse),

(c) our current divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing rates cost US taxpayers estimated $112B annually,

(d) many divorces are preventable, in that about "40% of US couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation", and (e) around 1/3 of marriages that ever experience low marital happiness "turn around"...in other words, they recover. This fraction is uncannily similar to the fraction of spouses that are open to pursuing
reconciliation.

The report also makes several recommendations for action. The report authors suggest:

(1) requiring a longer waiting period between the filing of a divorce petition and when the divorce would be granted. Some states do not require any "cooling off period", some a mere 20 days, and others a period of 1-2 years. The report advocates for a one-year waiting period,

(2) require a "divorce warning" to be issued from the petitioner to the respondent prior to being able to file a divorce suit, coupled with connecting the two parties to reconciliation resources,

(3) encouraging marriage counselors and therapists to adopt a more pro-marriage counseling stance (the report claimed a slim majority of marriage and family counselors are neutral-to-negative toward marriage, a factoid this author found simply astounding), and equipping clergy with better skills to assist struggling couples with marital issues,

(4) court-ordered mediation,

(5) require divorcing couples with children to complete parenting/co-parenting classes prior to being permitted to filing divorce petitions,

(6) tax rebates for marriage education, and

(7) establish centers at universities to help prevent unnecessary divorce

Analysis and discussion of this article: My own personal experience with divorce corroborates much of what this report discussed. My former wife had already absconded with my children across the country when she served me with divorce papers, thus her act of filing for divorce was both the beginning and the end of the divorce process. It was all over but for the court date to make it official. This single act set us both on what the report calls the "divorce superhighway"; only in my case, it wasn't necessarily the speed, but the relative lack of "exits" providing opportunit(ies) for reconciliation that confounded me.  I was reduced to attempting reconciliation via attorney-attorney communication, 6 unanswered personal letters, the only face-to-face meeting she would agree to, and via pastoral communication. None were effective.

Incidentally, her Catholic priest recommended to her that she seek a divorce (and later the Archdiocese of Washington would breezily approve the annulment, after having the sac to ask me for a $500 "donation" to finance their declaring that my marriage to her never happened and my children were henceforth bastards).

In short, I was one of those 40% who want to reconcile, despite all the false allegations she had levelled and the bad feelings that had been built up in the months since she left, but it was as if every person and agency involved in the process either considered divorce a foregone conclusion, or had a pecuniary interest in seeing my marriage dissolved.

Moreover, the online "parenting classes" we had to complete prior to the hearing were too little/too late of a reminder that the interests of the children should come first; besides, when dealing with a former spouse who had convinced herself that her acts were in the best interests of the children, such "education" serves as a poor brake on the bullet train to splitsville.

Thus, I found unpersuasive the study authors' recommendations to impose/extend waiting periods, impose a "divorce warning" measure prior to the filing of papers, and providing education about divorce and its impacts to counseling professionals, require co-parenting classes, offer tax rebates for married couples, and establish anti-unnecessary-divorce centers at institutions of higher learning. To be sure, these steps will probably be helpful and on that basis alone deserve to be implemented, but my sense is that, since they the measures merely nibble around the margins of the divorce problem rather than step outside the entire divorce mill framework and address root causes and social/financial/legal incentives to divorce, these measures will prove insufficient. Indeed, the report's recommended legal language for state legislatures leaves the entire human trafficking language wholly in place, namely:

Married persons living apart, whether or not they have asked a court for divorce, separation, annulment, or dissolution, may nonetheless ask for any of the following temporary relief, in a court that would have jurisdiction in a divorce case or other domestic relations case between the parties:

a. Parenting time (i.e., child custody, visitation, access, etc.), subject to state and federal laws on jurisdiction for such cases.

b. Child support, subject to state and federal laws on jurisdiction for such cases.

c. Protection from domestic violence.

d. Spousal support; preservation of marital or community property, and fair, equitable access to marital or community property.

e. Preservation of evidence of the existence, character, and value of property, grounds of divorce, or any other issues in a future divorce or separation case.

f. Court-ordered marriage education, marriage counseling for the purpose of repairing the marriage, custody/parenting education, or mediation.

As this and likely any mother or father on the receiving end of a parendectomy knows, "parenting time" is more popularly called "visitation" for a reason, and is not likely to be enforced with nearly the same vigor as is chalimony. Have fun enforcing access to your children in the court system. And temporary restraining orders are notorious for being convenient vehicles for launching scorched-earth campaigns to separate a parent from his/her  child(ren), on the way to establishing the precedent of a domestic situation sans the other spouse that courts are loathe to change one year hence.

All these criticisms aside, a greater emphasis on reconciliation versus fast-tracking divorces to the courthouse will likely be a step in the right direction, although I think the marginal effect will be small and the entrenched interests of the divorce-industrial-complex left fully intact. Thus, in the spirit of incrementalism, I suppose I am supportive.

* I was shocked to learn from the above-linked report that a child of divorce, who marries another child of divorce, has a 200% higher risk of divorce him/herself than average. Thus do the sins of the father or mother self-reinforcingly reverberate from the past through the present to the future.

A Case for Anger

Having been reliably informed that anger does me no good...my physicians being one of the chorus of those proffering such advice, I have been making an effort here at EW to avoid delving much into feminism (except at a high, broad-brush level), especially where feminism intersects with other touchy subjects for me, such as family law.

But this reticence doesn't proscribe me from recognizing the great work of others.  Like Dalrock, who  characteristically knocked it right out of the part with his "A Case for Anger" post.  Go ahead and read it.  I'll wait.

And in the comments section to that post, along comes my friend Novaseeker to detail the lay of the land for those who are somehow unclear on how supposedly sex- and gender-neutral law is applied in real life:

By the way, if anyone reading thinks that John’s story quoted in the post is atypical or odd for the US, you’re quite wrong.
Be aware that, in many US states at least:
(1) Your spouse can clean out the bank accounts (and in many cases the movable assets) without any real accounting at the time of the finalization of the divorce, because you weren’t separated at the time of said cleaning out, and the cash, which was a marital asset at the time, has now simply been consumed, as in “poof, there it goes”. This is why so many people do it, by the way. Feel vindicated and that the judge will view this poorly? Guess again (unless you’re the guy, of course).

(2) Once your spouse leaves with the kids, or you are removed by your spouse from the spouse and the kids, your likelihood of getting custody is quite small, because a temporary custody order will generally come into effect (if she is being advised properly), and the final custody determination, which typically comes quite some time later, gives heavy weight to this “de facto” custody situation — in effect, the way the system works is that in everything other than outlier cases, you lose custody almost immediately upon separation, and even though this is “temporary”, technically, de facto it generally becomes permanent.

(3) If the situation described in (2) happens, you’re very unlikely to get the house, either. The house normally goes to the parent with the custody. In some states, the court will make that spouse “buy out” the other spouse’s portion of the equity value of the property by selling or refinancing, but in situations where there are significantly unequal incomes, the asset distribution can be quite unequal, too (in favor of the lower-income spouse), resulting in this simply not being distributed, or being greatly reduced.

(4) Your ability to enforce visitation “rights” is almost nil in most places. Technically, your spouse is violating the law by violating the court’s decree, but other than issuing a new decree reiterating the visitation order, courts generally won’t do much else to enforce these. They almost never are willing to accept this as a basis to revise the custody order, either. In fact, custody orders are very hard to revise under almost any circumstances, barring a truly awful situation involving the custodial parent — it’s more likely that the kids get referred to CPS than that your custody order gets revised, to be honest. So, your ability to see your kids depends largely on the goodwill of the custodial parent. If you find yourself in this situation, and she is of relative goodwill, maintaining this is the best option, if you want to see your kids regularly. If you have a war-like relationship with your ex, your likelihood of having regular visitation decreases, as she has incentives to block and no real enforcement. Once a lover/boyfriend/second husband comes into the picture, it complicates things even further around visitation, because you start to have a step-Dad in the picture who spends more time with your kids than you do, and has more of an influence on them than you do, whether he actively does that or not. Also, keep in mind that quite a few states won’t prevent a custodial parent from moving very far away with your kids simply on the basis of a visitation order — in these states you’ll be expected to lump it and figure it out, or move yourself to where your kids now live if you want to see them more often (but don’t expect your support obligations to go down if your new job pays less).

My personal experience more or less bears out what Novaseeker writes.  We didn't have much in the bank account, so (1) wasn't a factor. Point two was definitely a player, she all but had custody in the bag before I even knew my kids were gone and not coming back. And I live out (4) each and every day.  A state of war existed between my former spouse and I--after all, she did kidnap my children, accuse me of hideous crimes, and sold me into semi-slavery--and The System was not interested in ensuring that my former wife live up to her responsibilities like it was interested in ensuring that I live up to "mine".  Even the sheriff's deputies called to my former in-law's house (where my former wife resided for several years after her departure) were not interested in enforcing visitation when I arrived one day to pick up the kids and transport them to my house on the other side of the country.  Also, I say "existed" to indicate past tense, not because we've mutually buried the hatchet, but because I've stopped resisting. It wasn't worth the physical and financial cost to me, my wife, and S3 to constantly throw myself onto the thorn bush any longer. Besides, S1 and S2 were 2 1/2 and 9 months when she took them away; it has been nearly a decade since and the window of opportunity to impart whatever contributions I had to their development has largely closed.

I don't write any of this to gain anyone's sympathy. It is what it is. It is, however, both a warning to the ignorant and a message of solidarity for those guys burnt by a system geared to deprive children of (mostly) fathers while exploiting them in our oh-so-legal form of fractional human trafficking.You have a right and a reason to be POed.  My advice is to let it turn into something else...let it be the energy that propels you.  And don't let the fire burn you down.

At The Intersection of Racialism and Misandry

This man was metaphorically pulled over for "parenting while white and male". Twice. The first time was in 2008:

Two-year old Ty particularly loves a nearby neighborhood park, so off we went around mid-morning with her tiny hand wrapped around my index finger. After a fun time, we took a different route going back, at Ty's suggestion, in order to pass by a house where she knows she'll often see (and get to pet) a couple of friendly cats. Two blocks from home, an Austin police officer pulled up and, to my surprise, got out and announced she was there to question me. Someone had called 911, she said, to report a suspicious looking white man walking down the street holding hands with a black toddler. (I could tell where this line of questioning was headed.) She said this as though it were the most natural thing in the world for police to investigate,as though my race and Ty's, in and of itself, was reason enough to stop and question me. I asked if we could leave, but the officer kept me there demanding answers. "Someone complained," she declared, "we have to follow up."

While the second time was last week:

Henson, who describes himself as "an almost stereotypical-looking white Texas redneck," said he was walking home from a roller skating rink with his 5-year-old granddaughter Ty, who is African-American, on Friday night. "The officers got out with tasers drawn demanding I raise my hands and step away from the child," Henson said. "I complied, and they roughly cuffed me, jerking my arms up behind me needlessly. Meanwhile, Ty edged up the hill away from the officers, crying." Henson said he provided officers with phone numbers they needed to verify that Ty was his granddaughter, "but for quite a while nobody seemed too interested in verifying my 'story.' How hard would it have been to perform a safety check without running up on me like I'm John Dillinger and scaring the crap out of a five-year-old? I hated for a five-year-old to be subjected to such an experience," Henson said. "I'd like her to view police as people she can trust instead of threats to her and her family, but it's possible I live in the wrong neighborhood for that."

Rarely do we see anti-White and anti-male bias, two facets of the same lib-theology stone, depicted in such sharp relief. Really, they come from the same place in the soul, that place that demands an Other to hate, the foil against which an entire political edifices are defined. Feminists demonize the malevolent male,then define themselves as opposite of the half-truth strawman they've erected. Ditto with whites; to people of European origin are attributed the ills of the modern world, and whites (particularly white males) are liberal fascism's juden.* This episode strikes me as the poster-child expression of both of these bigotries. Weissehasse of the sort that can't countenance a white raising a non-white child, and a misandry that reflexively eyes with suspicion any male in a caregiver role,despite the fact that the safest place in the world for a child to be is in the arms of his or her biological father.

 "Someone complained". Anyone care to hazard a guess as to the demographics of that "someone"? Although I suppose one could argue that he was asking for it, since he was so blatantly race- and sex-baiting (e.g., white male in a high-crime neighborhood walking hand-in-hand with a 5 yo black girl).

* These incidents happened in Austin, no slouch as far as left-liberal burgs go.

Stylish Singlehood

In an article for NRO that would more appropriately been titled "Why Men are Slackers and Women are Easy", Suzanne Venker writes:

The rise of the single woman is hardly something to celebrate. She represents the culmination of a decades-long revolution that has chipped away, relentlessly and insidiously, at the traditional family unit. First it was motherhood, now it's marriage. The online version of this article incorporates a video in which Rosin (and her daughter) conclude, while sitting at a table opposite her son and (very emasculated) husband, that "girls are better than boys." And we can't forget one of the liberal media's favorite professors, Stephanie Coontz. In an article last week in The New York Times, entitled "The M.R.S and the Ph.D.," Coontz exalts the ascension of women and suggests they resign themselves to marrying down.

[F]eminists are inherently insecure women who demand validation for their unusual choices. They do this by implying the so-called rise of women is a great thing - and proof that marriage is an outdated, patriarchal institution. High-profile feminists such as Bolick, Rosin, and Coontz celebrate the ascension of women as though it were a win-win. But the fact that today more women than men get college degrees and have good jobs is nothing to smile about. "The good news about women is accompanied by bad news about men, which also turns out to be bad news for women," writes Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto.

The "bad news" about men is always couched in the context that men aren't "manning up," or doing what's necessary to be responsible adults. Perhaps they aren't - they're certainly retreating from marriage, that's for sure. The question is, why? And the answer is simple. With premarital sex a foregone conclusion and cohabitation on the rise, men live the good life with no responsibilities. Moreover, women have made it clear they don't need a man to support them, to be happy, or even to become a mother. The result is that men become slackers. And those so-called empowered women feminists created? Many learn, eventually, that they were cruelly misled. Millions of women find that they do, in fact, want to stay home with their babies when they're young and therefore need a husband with a good job. But by that time, it's too late. Their husbands have been schooled in the art of feminism just as they have and expect their wives to go to work and "pull their weight."

And that's just the women who were fortunate enough to find husbands in the first place. Others put off marriage indefinitely - until they decide they want a baby. Trouble is, they can't find men who are willing to marry them.

While I agree with Ms. Venker that the fashionista enthusiasm regarding female singlehood is a suicidal elite-sponsored pathology that we as a society haven't quite yet figured out how to counter, I find her analysis to be a bit too facile for my taste. For instance, insecure as feminists may be, I don't think that their antipathy for marriage comes from some sort of group psychological neurosis. Rather, I think they truly do regard marriage to be the bicycle to their fish. Worse, not only is marriage regarded as useless and irrelevant, feminists also find it stifling and constricting, an institution freighted with responsibilities to others that maximizers of feminine autonomy find quite inconvenient. Marriage has gotta go, and to help show marriage the cultural door, feminists labor to supply via different means the resources marriage awards to women, and mothers in particular. Thus alternatively provisioned, marriage is irrelevant to the liberated easy woman's life, and marriage will therefore decline into obscurity through lack of use. Or so the theory goes.

In addition, her discussion of slacking men lacked nuance. She claims that men slack because they can get all the sex and companionship they want, with no accompanying responsibility. But that's not nearly the whole story, as only a small fraction of so-called "slacking" men have access to sex and companionship. My sense is, and the rising proportion of male virgins in college bolster this impression, that the remainder of slacking men largely do without. At least the kind of sex that one doesn't have to pay for, download, or view on Skinemax. I can hardly blame Ms. Venker for this oversight, however. The Apex Fallacy, however fallacious it is, is widespread and influential.

And this brings me to my next point, in that the very word "slacker" is a judgement, while "single" is not. Which is why I recommend replacing "single" with "easy" in the title of Ms. Venker's NRO post. "Slacker" perjoratively suggests a lack of conformity with the social role of men that prizes taking responsibility for oneself and protecting others. In contrast, "single" is merely a descriptive word, it does not contain judgemental connotations, whereas "easy" both describes and condemns, hinting as it does at formerly socially disapproved promiscuity. As to whether the two are related, I agree with Ms. Venker that they are, and hereby invoke Spengler's Law of Universal Gender Parity as support: For every "slacker" living his parent's basement and working and living only for himself, there is as his counterpart at least one promiscuous young woman living the materialistic SYF life.

I also found Ms. Venker's quotation of WSJ editor Mr. Taranto interesting, for that, on one hand, it continues our society's habit of making any news item relevant to women, if it is to be relevant at all. As evidence I give you all the efforts to feminize the mancession a couple of years back, where the steady drumbeat of bad employment news for men somehow, some way, hit women harder. But on the other hand, Mr. Taranto's quip is also factually accurate. Bad news for men will be, directly or indirectly, bad news for women and, I might add, bad news for children. That Mlles Bolick, Rosin, and Coontz all celebrate "the ascension of women" while also ignoring (or worse, also celebrating) the relative decline of men is short-sighted at best.

Courageous

I took in the movie "Courageous" the other night at a church-sponsored showing. A film about fatherhood, it follows five men, four of whom are police officers in a small Georgia town, the fifth a presumed immigrant (due to his heavy Spanish-accented English). The film tracks the men and their families as they deal with the loss of a daughter to a drunk driver, struggles to make ends meet, protecting a child from making dating mistakes, reconciling with the estranged mother of an illegitimate child, and from threats to their integrity, to include falsifying reports and stealing drug evidence. In addition, the movie is cut from the same cloth as the much-maligned "Fireproof", and as such it was a Christian morality tale, heavy on the exhortation for men to become better fathers, spiritual leaders and providers, even (dare I say it) patriarchs of their families.

Also, just like "Fireproof", the movie doles out a healthy dose of shame upon men. In exhorting men to be better fathers, the film cites the litany of sad outcomes that befall children raised in fatherless homes...poor school performance, poor relationship performance, and increased crime and delinquency. All these things are true, and the evidence is strong. The film also, unfortunately, implies that the bulk of fatherless children face these sorts of risks because their father selfishly abandoned them and their long-suffering mother. I say unfortunately because we know better...we know that only a small fraction of children in single-mom situations are there because a married father chose to abandon his children. Just as we know that the bulk of children raised in single-mom households are that way because of a divorce and/or because mother and father did not marry in the first place. This persistent fiction, unfortunately (there's that word again), serve to keep blinders on the Body as to the true scope of the problem of fatherless children, and where corrective action need be applied. I submit that it is not just abandoning dads, although it is true that shirking fathers are responsible for a portion of the ills that blight our society's family structure. Mothers need to do a fair piece of introspection too, and I eagerly await the day when the Body recognizes the not insubtantial role, maybe even the dominant one, that women and mothers play in the formation, the lack of formation, or in the dissolution of families, and begins to craft companion movies to this one that address the feminine part of the familial breakup equation.

However, while it is true that this movie heaps unbalanced, un-nuanced, and frankly undeserved opprobrium upon Christian men, while leaving women's responsibility for this present sorry state of affairs untouched, this fact should not and is not the end of the story. For when one puts aside the one-sided nature of the movie, and open up one's heart to the fair critiques of modern fatherhood that the movie offers, I found quite a few positive takeaways from this movie.

First, I was mildly surprised about the movie's unwavering promotion of patriarchal male headship of the home. The man, the father, is called out as the person responsible for teaching his children, for loving his wife (sacrificially of course), for helping his son(s) develop into men, for guarding the sexuality of his daughter(s), and for modelling the behaviors he wishes to see in his children and in his community. And if this unabashed promotion of patriarchy weren't enough to make modern secularist-humanist heads explode, get a load of this: each wife was submissive and supportive to her husband. Horror of horrors, one wife homeschooled the children and the other three demonstratively encouraged and supported their husbands (the fifth man was unmarried, but had previously had a child out of wedlock with a cheerleader in his school). None of the married wives had jobs or supra-domestic duties that impinged upon their stewardship of the home. Nope, the counter-cultural message was clear: dad is the father, husband, provider, and leader of the home. He is held accountable for discharging his God-given duties of husbandship and fatherhood. Implied in this message is a wife following his lead, and bolstering him when he flags or falters. Quite a different paradigm in a modern egalitarian/equalitarian world, for certain.

The second takeaway is one that sounds obvious in print, but in application can be difficult. We all have many things vying for our attention. Jobs, hobbies, other things that have no eternal value should not (but do sometimes) take priority over savoring the time that a parent has with their spouse or with their children. Particularly the latter, since the window of time to make a difference in their lives is sow narrow. Message: take advantage of the time when you have it, and be grateful for it when you no longer do.

The third takeaway involved a scene in which one of the fathers, seeing that his 15-yo daughter is starting to attract the attention of the saggy-pants thug crowd in the neighborhood, enters into a pact with her to guard her dating life and to screen potential suitors. She agrees to wear a ring her father bought for her, symbolizing his custody of her sexuality, until such time as she has a wedding band to replace it. What I found noteworthy about this scene is how potentially revolutionary this message is. I suspect it is quite unusual for modern-day fathers (or mothers for that matter) to take this sort of extensive interest in the dating/love lives of their children. The movie may be on to something here: We can see the inadequacy of the modern Western method of seeking husbands and wives all around us..."eros" marriages result in embarrassingly high divorce rates. Perhaps committed Christians' already low divorce rate can be lowered further were parents to take a much more active role in mate selection for their children. Now, I don't think arranged marriages are the answer, nor am I promoting such a model, but I do think that young people lack the experience and objectivity to make good mate selection choices on their own. Furthermore, I am convinced that turning the corner on family dissolution is the key issue for the Christian community and for society as a whole...which is why this message is so revolutionary. Imagine the huge second- and third-order effects on society at large were two-parent marriage to make a comeback, economically, legally, socially, morally. A monstrous impact, I think.

In short, this movie offers much of the same as Fireproof, only with a slightly different twist. It was steeply exhortative of men, while speaking little to women's needs for behavioral reform. Moreover, the movie's stance on paternal abandonment is simply not consistent with the facts, and unfortunately repeats some of the same incorrect pap we've had to endure for two generations now. However, once one gets past the wrong-headed conventional wisdom about fatherlessness, and opens up one's heart to the other worthwhile messages the movie has, it was enjoyable and even had a few quite funny scenes.

Pregnant Man Gives Birth

In an scene straight out of the Mike Myers film "So I Married An Axe Murderer" and the Weekly World News, we learn that a "man" became pregnant and subsequently gave birth:

The Daily Telegraph understands that the man, whose identity has not been disclosed, is from the West Midlands and is in a long-term relationship. It is not clear whether his partner is male or female. Although he has legally changed his gender to male, the man in question was able to give birth last year because his womb was not removed during the original sex change procedure. The boy was likely to have been delivered by caesarean section although it is possible the man may have retained the ability to give birth naturally.

Miss Darrell said that the identity of father and son were being kept secret. "I'm not able to pass on any of his personal details out of respect to his and his son's privacy," she said.

The news comes four years after an American transsexual, Thomas Beatie, 38, of Arizona, sparked controversy by announcing he was pregnant. The subsequent birth of a baby girl made headlines around the world. Mr Beatie, who had a partial sex change operation but retained all his female reproductive organs, went on to have another two children after hormone treatment to restart menstruation and restore fertility.

All were reportedly delivered naturally.

Undetermined pronoun person with
wife and child (photo source here)

Writing this post made me feel like I had just taken a trip to the twilight zone. It is that surreal. Perhaps it was all the talk about "men" with wombs and ovaries delivering children "naturally". Or perhaps this is the natural consequence of using words like "gender" (which describes the particular role one performs) when "sex" (which describes one's biological state) is more properly descriptive, and vice versa. Whatever the reason, I hate to be a gender-bending killjoy, but if a person has girl parts, double x chromosomes, and female internal organs, that person is biologically female no matter how much T you take, how much facial hair you possess, and how butch you act. And if you are able to gestate and give birth, you are most certainly not a man, nor should you be called a "father". I don't care how thick your mustache is.


I can appreciate the difficult position that the Telegraph was placed in when writing this article. What pronouns do they use to describe a person that identifies as Y, was sortof-changed from an X to a Y, yet still functions biologically as an X, and just got done doing something that biologically only Xs can do? He? She? He-she? It? What pronoun should be used for a hermaphrodite?

This Is What You Get When You Surrender

...your children to institutions captured by your spiritual, religious,and civilizational adversaries. And no, I'm not necessarily referring to Mohammedeans here, although that is, on the surface, the promixal problem in this example:

It was the first week in October in Newton, an upscale suburb of Boston, and Tony Pagliuso's daughter, a sophomore at Newton South High School, was visibly disturbed. When Tony asked her the problem, she showed him a passage from the chapter she was assigned in her World History Class. It was a chapter called "Women, an Essay," from a supplemental text called the The Arab World Notebook. In a paragraph devoted to women "in the struggle for independence from colonial powers," we find:

Over the past four decades, women have been active in the Palestinian resistance movement. Several hundred have been imprisoned,tortured, and killed by Israeli occupation forces since the latest uprising, "intifada," in the Israeli occupied territories.

Pagliuso assured his daughter that this was "total propaganda," and took the matter up with the young teacher, a Miss Jessica Engel, who couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. The material had been "vetted" and was deemed "appropriate," she said, "and would stay in the curriculum. After all, she continued, the head of the history department had gotten this material at an outreach workshop of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard! It turns out, not surprisingly, that most of the Notebook is as slipshod, even farcical,as the chapter on women. But it is no less dangerous for being slovenly.As the AJC report confirms, "Teachers are subjected to heavy propaganda,both in the Notebook and in the teacher workshops sponsored by MEPC and conducted by AWAIR, in which the Notebook is the primary source material....The Notebook critiques other educational materials for being Eurocentric; yet it provides students with a completely Muslim-centered perspective." Worst of all, educationally speaking, in addition to inventing history,the Notebook is guilty of two cardinal sins, according to the AJC: "It uses no qualifiers to differentiate between fact and interpretation; and it fails to clarify that, like the stories behind many other religions,some of the stories within traditional Islam are disputed or unverifiable." The all-important qualifier, "Muslims believe," or"Islam teaches that" is entirely eliminated. Imagine all the Miss Engelsin the world preaching to the class, "And God chose Abraham." Or "Jesus performed miracles." Sandra Stotsky, a professor at the University of Arkansas, [adds]: "What is most astonishing about this 'historical information' is that it seems not to have been recognized as fake history by all the satisfied teachers that MEPC claims have participated in its workshops over the years." Ay, there's the rub. Thanks to the Tony Pagliusos of this world,perhaps more parents will rear up on their hind legs and shout, "Who's teaching my kids? And what in God's name are they teaching?"

Gramscian Marxists of the Frankfurt Columbia School seem to have succeeded in their bid to assimilate both higher and lower houses of education and exert a very powerful influence over the central government. On the surface, it seems that the problem is creeping Sharia, but when one digs deeper, one finds that insidious Islamism isn't the problem.  Rather, it is the sec-humanist religious worldview that seeks to disrupt and eventually depose a post-Christian, European, Western Civilization and replace it with a debased Marxist global equalitarianism. That this invading culture happens to promote Islam at the moment shouldn't distract anyone; this is a stalking horse intended to sow cultural confusion and incoherency in the culture being subverted, serving the eventual goal of hegemonic succession. I suspect that, eventually, once the the post-Christian host culture has been sufficiently atomized, Islamists will find the easy inroads they are making today to be much more difficult as the sec-humanist juggernaut trains its guns on them.

Exit question: given that the public school system is merely taxpayer-funded Sunday School for the religion of Marxist sec-humanism, why do American parents perist in handing their children over to those paid minders whose very mission is to subvert the culture they take for granted and the attack the values that claim to hold dear?

The Racism and Sexism of Diversity Mongers

While "pale, male, and stale" is a catchy paean for those apex fallacy-afflicted gender warriors and their itchy quota fingers, it does tend to belie the straight-up racism and sexism inherent in the motives of those who push for more "diversity" in corporate boards. As Exhibit A, I give you how Facebook's all-male board has recently drawn the ire of the diversity brigade:

Most of Facebook Inc. (FB)'s more than 800 million users are women. You wouldn't know it from looking at the board, whose seven directors are all men.

"We're long past having to defend or explain why women should be on boards, given all the data that shows how companies with female as well as male directors perform better," said Anne Mulcahy, former chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corp. and a director at Johnson & Johnson Co., Target Corp. and Washington Post Co. "It's unfortunate when companies with a large percentage of women constituents don't reflect that in their boardrooms." A Catalyst survey of Fortune 500 companies found that those with three or more female directors outperformed those with fewer between 2005 and 2009, achieving on average 43 percent better return on equity. As Facebook prepares to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering, the composition of its board shows its business strategy is faulty, said Susan Stautberg, co-founder of New York-based Women Corporate Directors, which promotes female board membership.

"It doesn't make sense for a company that claims to be so forward looking to not have any women directors," she said. "If they just have an old boy's network in the boardroom, they won't have access to diverse ideas and strategies."

The other directors are Donald E. Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co.; venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape Communications Corp., James W. Breyer, CEO of Breyer Capital; Peter A. Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies Inc. and a fund manager at Clarium Capital LLC; Reed Hastings, chairman and CEO of Netflix Inc.; and Erskine B. Bowles, president emeritus of University of North Carolina.

[Facebook's board is] drawn largely from the male investor community as is often the case at Silicon Valley start-ups, said Mulcahy, who groomed Ursula Burns to succeed her at Xerox, where four of 11 directors are women. As Facebook and other young companies mature, "they need to break out of this pattern and have more diverse representation," said Mulcahy, who is chairman of Save the Children Inc. "And women also need to be better represented in the private equity industry."

I'll get to the sexism/racism inherent in this passage in a moment, but first, permit me to address Ms. Mulcahy's claim that "we're long past having to defend or explain" the business case for female representation on corporate boards. A quick google of "women corporate boards" yields a slew of various economic and law journal hits in support of greater female representation in corporate governance. Two noteworthy documents in support of bolstering female representation on corporate boards include this one by McKinsey & Company, a company dedicated to promoting diversity in management and corporate performance, and this one by Lord Davies, a former Labour MP who has also taken a personal interest in boosting female representation on corporate boards. Both reports cite the greater return on equity of companies that have women on their boards (e.g., 41% better RoE, 56% higher EBIT margin in the McKinsey study), as opposed to companies with male-only boards. Both reports also suggest ameliorative measures to boost female representation on corporate boards, to include set-asides, special processes to access, select, groom, and promote female managers. The Davies report, apparently impatient with the glacial pace of increases in female participation on boards, even goes as far as suggesting quotas:

All Chairmen of FTSE 350 companies should set out the percentage of women they aim to have on their boards in 2013 and 2015. FTSE 100 boards should aim for a minimum of 25% female representation by 2015...

The Financial Reporting Council should amend the UK Corporate Governance Code to require listed companies to establish a policy concerning boardroom diversity, including measurable objectives for implementing the policy, and disclose annually a summary of the policy and the progress made in achieving the objectives.

So then. The mask is off, and equality of opportunity isn't enough. Those old-boys-clubs must be, well, clubbed over the head and forced to permit women into their li'l rascals treehouses. But is Ms. Mulcahy's vaunted business case that clear?

The short answer is no. Here's why: First, the entire dataset is suspect because the research presented in these reports was conducted by organizations and individuals potentially biased in favor of promoting the phenomenon they were measuring.

Second, just as in the "pay gap" myth, which pivots around the ludicrous idea that companies in a dog-eat-dog competitive marketplace sacrifice profitability to maintain more-expensive-yet-equally-skilled men on the payroll, if sexual diversity is such a slam-dunk driver of profitability, why aren't companies jamming women into their boards and into their management ranks like crazy?

Third, there is the problem of causality, in that the direction of causality may be reversed. We are told that companies with women on their boards outperform those without. But consider this: Perhaps it is true that companies with women on the boards are large and successful enough to afford women on their board and withstand the costs of female preferences and set-asides in hiring and selection processes in their company? Or maybe that interested, available, and sufficiently successful female board members are such rare birds that only the most successful companies can attract them? Or perhaps that more successful companies seek female board members and female middle- and upper-managers as talismans to ward off brand-destroying scrutiny by government regulators and social grievance advocacy groups?

Fourth, could it be that the entire diversity meme, usually pushed as a means to avoid groupthink among staid, calcified corporate boards populated by silver-haired white men, is itself groupthink on a massive, societal scale?

Our relatively small sample of interviews (36) provides no evidence of the emergence of what might be reasonably called a master narrative of board diversity. One plausible candidate-a business version of Justice Powell's Bakke narrative-appears from time to time. Our subjects have mentioned their beliefs that diversity creates a "richer conversation," "an entirely new perspective," "different points of view," and "a very positive dynamic." But it is a theoretical narrative without concrete detail, a story without substance. When invited to elaborate, subjects have digressed into instances that had little to do with race or gender, and in fact have often distanced themselves from demographic variables. And none expressed anything more than a hope that diversity would correlate with business performance. Overall, our subjects tell a story that amounts to little more than "it seems like a good thing to do."

Now that the business case for diversity on corporate boards has been well called into question, I will now address the blatant sexism and racism inherent in the entire Bloomberg article. First, let us evaluate the article's title: "...board shows white male influence". I suppose the headline could be a reference to how Facebook is successful because it is run by white men, but how likely is that? More likely, I think, is that the headline is meant as a slam on clubby white boys keeping those girls out because they can. It's a race- and sex-baiting attack against one of the only groups which is still a legitimate target for sexist/racist offensive comments in the present PC climate.

Second, Ms. Mulcahy is quoted as saying "if they just have an old boy's network in the boardroom, they won't have access to diverse ideas and strategies". Now, if I were a woman or a non-white, and if I believed that I should be judged by my ability and the content of my character, this statement would make me quite unhappy. For the very implication that my skin color or the fact that I possess a vagina versus a penis expresses itself in certain attributes, attitudes, traits, skills, abilities, or behaviors is by definition sexual or racial stereotyping, if not straight-up sexism or racism. This headline implies that those presumed liberals who push illiberal diversity measures are using race and/or sex as a proxy for whatever qualities they are seeking, something that if done by others in other contexts, would be roundly and accurately denounced as sexist or racist.

Third, let us assume for a moment that such stereotyping and racism/sexism is now permitted. Let us also assume that the sort of sex-based grooming that Ms. Mulcahy herself engaged in is now permitted for white men. We would then have a culture in which white male executives and managers are hired, selected, and groomed for no other reason than because they are white and male. Somehow I don't think Ms. Mulcahy and her ideological fellow-travellers are prepared for that reduction-ad-absurdum outcome...yet this is what she practices by her own admission.

I'll wrap up this post with this observation: the champions of diversity, as exemplified by this article, have apparently abandoned the principles of equalitarianism upon which they formerly stood. They now, nakedly, advance openly racist and sexist ideals and advocate for State-enforced discrimination no different in character and tone of the sort which they claim they opposed two generations ago. Rather than having progressed to the next higher plane of human existence, they have merely swapped one form of prejudices for another, and one form of State oppression for another. They are truly Orwell's pigs from Animal Farm.

Exit questions: At what point have we achieved enough diversity? If "diverse" is defined as "not a white dude", is "completely diverse" the complete extirpation of white male presence in an organization?

Female on Male DV in the Daily Mail

In the "femail" section, no less:

According to recent British Crime Survey statistics, a third of domestic violence victims are male. That’s 400,000 men a year. At least.

‘All the evidence suggests it’s much more widespread than the figures suggest,’ says John Mays of the equal rights organisation Parity. ‘Between one third and 40 per cent of domestic abuse cases are female perpetrator and male victim, and it’s a sad fact that this isn’t generally known.’

Assuming that American sociologist Murray Strauss' research on DV holds in the UK, we can expect the number of male victims of female-perpetrated DV to slightly dominate that of male-perpetrated DV, with a majority of the cases involving "mutual combat" in which both sexes aggress more or less equally.

But what I found most noteworthy about this article was its matter-of-fact tone, and the clearly one-sided nature of the comments...comments which found credible the claim that female-on-male violence does not only exist but is a huge problem deserving of serious consideration. Moreover, a good many of the comments recognize the special situation that male DV victims find themselves in when it comes to reporting: less likely to report due to shame and social stigma, less likely to be believed, and less likely to receive public support when escaping violent situations, to include being turned away from women-and-children-only DV shelters.

Kudos to the Daily Mail for publishing the facts and not letting themselves be carried away by the feminist conventional wisdom.

Birth Control That Is Free

No, not the recent federal rule that requires church-affiliated employers to provide birth control for their employees, but the kind of birth control that involves keeping your fly/legs closed. But apparently that sort of self-control is too much to ask for decended-from-apes American citizens, and once again government force is being employed to coerce the faithful into violating their consciences wrt abortifacients:

Many church-affiliated institutions will have to cover free birth control for employees, the Obama administration announced Friday [January 20th, 2012] in an election-year move that outraged religious groups, fueling a national debate about the reach of government.

In a concession, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said nonprofit institutions such as church-affiliated hospitals, colleges and social service agencies will have one additional year to comply with the requirement, issued in regulations under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

"I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services," Sebelius said in a statement.

Liberals and women's rights groups praised the decision, saying that women who work for religious employers should not have to accept a lower standard of health coverage.

"The administration stood firm," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "As a result millions will get access to contraception, and they will not have to ask their bosses for permission."

First, we have Federal funding for PP, compulsory and paid for out of your tax dollars, and now this. Anyone want to take bets on how long it will be before any claim of religious exemption will be overruled?

We're no longer simply post-Christian, we're post-Constitutional, and well on our way to the establishment of a government-approved religion and church.

Note also the feminist group's language here, in support of this Federal rule: "women...should not have to accept a lower standard of health coverage" and "...not have to ask their bosses for permission". Such statements assume employment as a public good, where employers are forced to hire employees or employees are forced to take a job at Company A or church-affiliated organization B. But the reality is that women can choose to work where they like...and if they don't want to work at either of those places, they can do so, and either control their sexual urges or pay for the BC themselves out of their own pocket.

This is what you get when property rights, and the rights of free association, are abridged in favor of "justice" or "fairness" or levelling. So-called "women's rights" once again entail reaching past a woman's nose and the taking of someone else's stuff or exertion of control over another's body. Further, once can no longer associate with whom one wishes, and one may no longer acquire and dispose of one's own property as he or she wishes.

Lifeboat Feminism in Practical Application

This article by Rich Lowry over at NRO heaps shame upon the men of the Costa Concordia who allegedly jostled women and children on the way to the lifeboats. While I can relate to the author's assertion that we as a society have lost something valuable when the strong push aside the weak, for indeed we have, it is but the natural and predictable consequence of decades of equalitarian social engineering that we find ourselves in this situation today.  We have declared men and women absolutely equal and fungible. Mr Lowry laments the lack of chivalry amongst the men; I assert it is merely what happens when men, having witnessed the liberation of women from their duty to act like ladies, decide that it is quite silly to die like men of auld for unrelated women and children:

[An] Australian mother said of the scene, "We just couldn't believe it - especially the men, they were worse than the women."

Another woman passenger agreed, "There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats." Yet another, a grandmother, complained, "I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls."

Guys aboard the Costa Concordia apparently made sure the age of chivalry was good and dead by pushing it over and trampling on it in their heedless rush for the exits. The grounded cruise ship has its heroes, of course, just as the Titanic had its cowards. But the discipline of the Titanic's crew and the self-enforced chivalric ethic that prevailed among its men largely trumped the natural urge toward panicked self-preservation.

I have argued several times over here at this blog that this is the logical end of equalitarianism and sec-humanism. When women are declared the equals of men, their inherent biological vulnerability is papered over, and they are seen as just another male. Better smelling and better looking, but the same worth as men. And no more worthy of preferential treatment in the mad dash for the exits than the next guy. On the Costa Concordia, it was every human for him/herself. One would think women, the sex for whose benefit feminism tirelessly toils, would be overjoyed at this indicator of equal consideration. At long last, they have arrived! But they are not. Funny how feminist equalitarianism goes out the window when in mortal danger. Seems the two gals quoted above really don't want to die like men, despite living as an equal to one.

It was also interesting to contrast the tenor of Mr. Lowry's slightly anachronistic article and that of the vast majority of the comments. While they do not explicitly connect the dots wrt the lady-gentleman dynamic that is part and parcel to chivalry, the comments tended to pin the tail of responsibility for this present state of affairs on the feminist donkey. Thus, as far as the readership to NRO is concerned, there is at least a vague awareness that if chivalry is dead, it wasn't men that killed it but feminism. And that it is quite presumptuous to demand preferential selection for a lifeboat when you demand equal-or-even-preferential treatment in all other facets of life as well.

Something else, too: Chivalry doesn't mean preferential treatment for women, although it is frequently cast as such in contemporary culture. Neither is it necessarily manners, although that is a component of it. At its heart, chivalry was/is a code of conduct that sought to shape the behavior of warriors (who also enjoyed a superior social position) so that the strong protected the weak who could/would be harmed by the otherwise untrammelled violence of the powerful.

Viewed in this manner, in a way it is not unreasonable to appeal to chivalry when recommending the behavior of the physically strong (men) vis-à-vis the physically weak (women and young children). However, as political and social violence is force just the same as is physical violence, given the socially inferior position of men in modern post-Christian society when compared to women, the principles of chivalry would require that women (the strong) yield to men (the weak).

Let that bake your noodle for a moment...feminism, by socially advantaging women in all aspects of life, and technology, by neutering the historical inherent advantage of brawn, has flipped the script such that we ought instead be saying "men and children first". As counter-intuitive as it is, when protection of the vulnerable from the violence wrought by the powerful is the focus of chivalry, then shielding the weak and relatively powerless becomes the logically consistent act. That is, if logic and reason were the basis upon which we grounded our acts.

I'll close this post with a poem, supposedly written in 1912, submitted by a commenter to Mr. Lowry's article:

"Votes for women!"
Was the cry,
Reaching upward to the Sky.
Crashing glass
And flashing eye-
"Votes for Women!"
Was the cry.
"Boats for women!"
Was the Cry.
When the brave
Were come to die.
When the end
Was drawing nigh-
"Boats for women!"
Was the cry.

Indeed. I do wonder how much more time cultural lifeboat feminism has left. For it doesn't seem sustainable to demand manhood from men while not making a symmetrical demand for womanhood from women. And for far too long, womanhood has been an empty vessel, something for which girls do not strive toward but they simply arrive at. If we are to have manhood once again--something I think our society won't long survive without--it seems to me that we as a society will need to start demanding something more of womanhood as well. For manhood is the complement to womanhood, and if womanhood is an empty suit skirt, then the human organism isn't wholly complete. Without its complement, it withers and dies.

Related:
"Boats and Votes"
"Lifeboat Feminism"