It is fatherhood that makes childhood possible.

by Daniel Amneus





© Elena Elisseeva – Fotolia.com All rights reserved.

A judge will try a divorce case in the morning and place the

children in the mother’s custody. He will try a criminal case in

the afternoon and send a man to prison for robbing a liquor store.

The chances are three out of four that the criminal he sends to

prison grew up in a female headed household just like the one he

himself created that morning when he tried the divorce case. [1] He

can’t see any connection between the two cases. The time lag

prevents him: the kids he placed in the mother’s custody were

toddlers and the criminal he sent to prison was in his teens or

twenties. Toddlers don’t rob liquor stores.

Besides, most fatherless boys don’t grow up to rob liquor

stores and most fatherless girls don’t grow up to breed

illegitimate children. Therefore what? Therefore the legal

policy of giving custody to mothers is OK? Therefore we can ignore

the increased probability that fatherlessness will create

delinquency?

This is the “safe drunk driver argument.” Most drunk drivers

don’t get in accidents. They get home safely and sleep it off.

Therefore drunk driving is OK.

It’s not OK. And exiling fathers from families is not OK.

The fact that will not go away is stated by sociologist David

Popenoe in his book Life Without Father:

The negative consequences of fatherlessness are all around us.

They affect children, women, and men. Evidence indicating

damage to children has accumulated in near tidal-wave

proportions. Fatherless children experience significantly

more physical, emotional, and behavioral problems than do

children growing up in intact families.

Why do Judges routinely award custody of children to mothers

when they try a divorce case? Two reasons. The first is that

motherhood is more solidly based in biology. Motherhood is a

biological fact, as Margaret Mead says, fatherhood merely a social

invention. Mammals and motherhood originated two hundred million

years ago, when the dinosaurs were young. Fatherhood in the sense

of major male participation in reproduction is, from the point of

view of evolution, a recent development. Fatherhood in the sense

of male headship of the stable patriarchal families which make

civilization possible is only about five thousand years old, as

feminist Dr. Gerda Lerner has shown in her book The Creation of

Patriarchy. Prior to the Patriarchal Revolution human reproduction

followed the ghetto pattern, where the mother was the primary

parent, and the father was a mere boyfriend who could be discarded

when the mother got tired of him.

The second reason why judges favor mother custody is their

recognition that women and children are dependent creatures. This

was formerly understood to mean they needed husbands and fathers.

But husbands and fathers require authority if they are to function

as providers and protectors. (“He shall rule over thee,” God says

to Eve, Genesis 3:16.) Without the sexual loyalty of wives there

can be no family. Patriarchal civilization depends on female

chastity. Without it men cannot have families and children cannot

have fathers.

This is the hitch, the reason we have a feminist revolution:

Females dislike sexual regulation. Feminists say “A woman needs

a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” “A woman has a sacred right

to control her own sexuality,” “End human sacrifice! Don’t get

married!” Women’s primary object, according to feminist Anne

Donchin, is to create a society in which “women can shape their

reproductive experiences to further ends of their own choosing.”

This is the feminist program. It’s succeeding. Marriage is

becoming meaningless. “Family law,” says Brenda Hoggett, former

British law commissioner responsible for family law,

no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of

marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for

the protection of children and dependent spouses which could

be made equally applicable to the unmarried. In such

circumstances, the piecemeal erosion of the distinction

between marriage and non-married cohabitation may be expected

to continue. Logically we have already reached a point at

which, rather than discussing which remedies should now be

extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether

the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any

useful purpose.

The emphasized sentence means marriage no longer grants the husband

any rights whatever–only the obligation of giving up his children

and accepting slavery–laboring for the benefit of another person,

his ex-wife. (Or equally his ex-girlfriend, since marriage makes

no difference.) “The courts have abandoned,” says Ms. Hoggett,

the concept of breach of matrimonial obligations–and their

powers of adjustment of property interests in the long term

are now so extensive that ordering one spouse from his own

home no longer seems so drastic. Far from ordering spouses

to stay together, courts are increasingly able and willing to

help them separate.

This is the female kinship system, matriarchy, the condition of

the ghettos–made tolerable for the female by the male’s acceptance

of slavery.

A Georgia judge named Robert Noland shows how the legal system

thinks: “I ain’t never seen a calf following a bull. They always

follow the cow. So I always give custody to the mammas.” The

reason Judge Noland never saw a calf following a bull is that

cattle don’t live in two-parent households. If we want to live

like cattle, Judge Noland has the right idea. But human beings

differ from cattle and the difference is created by fathers.

A green turtle–a reptile–begins its existence as an egg and

never learns it has a mother or a father. Its mother’s

participation in its existence consists of conceiving and gestating

it and burying the resulting egg in the sand. After remaining

there and maturing awhile, it emerges from the sand and waddles

down to the water to find a meal–or to become a meal for some

other creature. It is self contained and lives on its own

inherited resources or it dies.

Mammals came into existence during the Age of Reptiles.

Mammalian mothers cherish their young, feed them from their own

body, protect them, educate them. If you have a cat with kittens

you can witness how mammalian motherhood works–how meaningful

motherhood is, and how irrelevant merely biological fatherhood is

once the father has performed his minuscule sexual function.

Motherhood enables the kitten to have an infancy. This is the

relationship which Judge Noland understands and seeks to preserve

by awarding custody to mothers.

The kitten has no childhood. After a rather short period of

helpless infancy, the kitten is almost suddenly a mature adult

capable of fending for itself like the baby turtle after it emerges

from its egg.

It was John Fiske, the nineteenth century American historian

and philosopher, who pointed out what made human beings special–

and more successful than other mammals: the prolongation not only

of infancy, but the creation of a whole additional era of life,

childhood, something unknown in any other species–so that human

children can enjoy an enormously long period during which they are

protected, cherished, educable, playful, exploratory, sensitive and

aware, a period during which they can reach out and learn about and

come to love the world they live in.

It is fatherhood which makes childhood possible. It is father

absence which creates ghettos and gangs and messed-up kids–boys

trying to find their identity through violence, girls trying to

find their identity through sexual promiscuity, which will lead to

the violence of the next generation. They need real fathers,

“sociological fathers,” not mere studs interested in sharing a one-

night stand with Mom.

Sociological fatherhood is real fatherhood,

as Margaret Mead says, “a social invention.” In the ghettos the

biological fathers are seldom sociological fathers. They aren’t

good for much because Mom’s sexual disloyalty denies them the role

of sociological fatherhood. Lawmakers and politicians don’t

understand what Margaret Mead tells them, that fatherhood is a

social invention, that it must be created and maintained by

society. They suppose, as Judge Robert Noland supposes, that

humans can live like cattle, without fathers.

Until lawmakers and

judges see that they must support the father’s role because it is

the weak link in the family we will have more matriarchy–along

with its familiar accompaniments: crime, educational failure,

illegitimacy, teen suicide, gangs and the rest.

Notes:

1. 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home

Fulton Co. Georgia Jail Populations, Texas Dept. of

Corrections, 1992. Statistics from other states show similar results.