Hey, fathers!

It’s your special day!

It’s the one day of the year that we take a break from exalting mothers and actually acknowledge your contributions to creating life and raising children. (Well, all right, we acknowledge your contributions all year round when they are of the financial sort and we want you to pay up.)

So, how shall we celebrate this special day?

A new necktie, perhaps; a silk leash around your neck, a symbol of your bondage, just to make it perfectly clear what your family keeps you around for.

Along the same lines, how about a new wallet?

Or how about you just get called a piece of shit?

That’s what Prime Minister David Cameron has done, in so many words.

Runaway fathers are like drink-drivers, blasts David Cameron David Cameron is launching a full-scale attack on fathers who abandon their families – calling for them to be “stigmatised” by society in the same way as drink-drivers are. The Prime Minister’s intervention – in an article for The Sunday Telegraph to mark Father’s Day – is one of the most outspoken he has ever made in defence of traditional family life, which he describes as the “cornerstone of our society”. Mr Cameron said Britain needs to be made a “genuinely hostile” place for runaway fathers, who deserve the “full force of shame heaped upon them” and are “beyond the pale”.

So, on Father’s Day, of all days, Cameron has launched an attack on absent fathers, without any thought given as to why fathers might become absent in the first place. And the reason for this has nothing to do with male fecklessness or irresponsibility, despite what traditionalists and feminists preach.

No, the reason why fathers leave their families is because they are forced out. Britain is already a genuinely hostile place for fathers, who have to deal with the full force of shame heaped upon them, and who are already seen as ‘beyond the pale’.

Blaming men for being forced out of their own homes by ex-wives ‘looking for a better deal’ and the state mafia which Cameron himself ultimately controls is a whole new level of sick.

But, of course, there is rhetoric and then there is politic. The government is committed to making significant cuts all round, which means that the baby mammas won’t be able to depend on the timely arrival of a welfare check as they once did. Cameron (or whoever writes his speeches) is not stupid; his government has already faced criticism and protest for scaling back public sector jobs and services. He knows that the clucking hens of Mumsnet could cost him the next election if he appears to be denying single mothers the cash they are accustomed to receiving.

So he covers his own ass by picking a target that he knows a lot of women love to hate: men.

And so the grand project of scapegoating men continues.

But, in regards to those men who have children and make no effort to be a father emotionally or to hand over their cash: can there be a moral case for blaming them, given that they have no reproductive rights to speak of?

Men cannot choose to terminate a pregnancy; whether or not a child is born is a decision left entirely up to the mother. It is entirely her choice; he has no rights, and no say on the matter.

But still, he will be expected to pay; even in the case that the mother commits fraud to access his frozen sperm without his permission and has children without telling him.

Even Keith Macdonald, dubbed “Britain’s worst father” by the Daily Mail for fathering at least ten children by ten different women, did not choose to become a father.

So why should he be held financially responsible for the choices of their mothers?

Indeed, since no man has the right to have children, no man chooses to become a father.

Another mother of one of his children, Stacey Barker, 22, said: ‘Men like him should be made to have a vasectomy or be fined or even jailed.’ […] The mothers are entitled to jobseekers’ allowance, income support, child tax credit and child benefit. Most also get housing benefit.

Yes, a lot of women would rather subject a man to genital mutilation or debtor’s prison, than give up the perks of single motherhood. And yet, these women all chose to have sex with this man; and they all chose to carry his children to term. While Keith Macdonald could have chosen not to have sex with the women, he had no choice about whether or not the children were born. Each of the women could have chosen to have an abortion; none of them did. So why should he pay a single penny for someone else’s choices?

Speaking of debtor’s prisons, they actually have those in the United States, for ‘deadbeat dads’ – a feminist slur against alienated fathers who lose their jobs and can no longer afford crippling child support bills. This is a particularly cruel slur given that feminists have actively kept unemployed men out of work:

Originally, the “stimulus” (which was supposed to keep the official unemployment rate well below its current level) was supposed to be spent on infrastructure. The I-35W Mississippi River Bridge collapse in Minnesota in 2007 and the DC Metro crash earlier this year in June […] showed that spending on maintaining current and building new infrastructure has been insufficient for a long time. The stimulus would have been a good opportunity to begin to correct this massive error as solid infrastructure is necessary for long term economic growth (not to mention safety), but womens’ (such as NOW) groups objected. They called the original stimulus “burly”, “macho”, and “sexist” demanding that the stimulus be spent on women. This was despite the fact that millions of men were losing their jobs, and education and health care added jobs primarily benefiting women. NOW and the other womens’ groups were successful with the stimulus was skewed towards education and health care leaving infrastructure in the same dangerous state it was before. In addition the gap between male and female unemployment is the largest in the history of unemployment data going back to 1948 when such data began. This “women oriented stimulus” along with other things has caused the federal deficit for this year to surpass 1.8 trillion dollars, far beyond the deficit of any previous year. This causes more men to be unemployed since this massive federal debt is sucking capital out of the private sector which destroys jobs. Literally, there is no capital for new business creation and business expansion that would create jobs.

Not content to keep men (many of whom are fathers owing child support) out of work, NOW has also been pushing to reduce the amount of owed child support needed to chuck an unemployed man in prison:

RI NOW Supports Promoting Economic Justice Would decrease the amount of child support arrearage constituting a felony from $10,000 to $5,000

In feminist thinking, ‘economic justice’ equates to criminalising and imprisoning as many men as possible – particularly those already victimised by circumstance or the feminist groups themselves. There is a certain inefficiency to their cruelty, however, since a man’s child support debts continue to accumulate while he sits in prison, obviously unable to work.

The feminists have a solution to this, though, and if you guessed slave labour camps, you would be right. I wish I was joking. I quote April McCaffery, who writes for Examiner as the LA single parenting correspondent:

Deadbeats don’t mind going to jail because then they have food and shelter paid for by YOUR tax dollars. […] Deadbeat dads should be forced into slave labor. It’s the only possible solution that might actually lead to results.

Since we’ve moved onto America, how does the Premier of the most powerful country in the world acknowledge the role of fathers on Father’s Day?

Well, typically, he uses the occasion to bash fathers. In 2008 he said the following:

if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. […] We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Perhaps somebody should have mentioned to President Obama that around three quarters of divorces are initiated by women, who proceed to use the biased family court system to impoverish men and strip them of the right to even see their children. When the President blames a group of people for suffering at the hands of the state, it is hard not to see it as blatant oppression.

We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one.

More unconstructive ‘man up’ nonsense. More to the point, a man’s responsibility does indeed end at conception. There are no responsibilities without corresponding rights, and a man has no rights over the foetus growing inside the mother’s womb. The decision to keep or get rid of it is hers and hers alone, enshrined in law; that is a decision she has to make, based on the evidence at hand.

Will I be able to raise this child? Will I be able to if I am on my own? The failure to ask these questions of oneself does not mitigate one’s moral obligations. Reproductive rights are entirely hers, and therefore so are reproductive responsibilities.

Obama continued to lecture fathers on the one day, in 2008, dedicated to them:

our young boys and girls see that. They see when you are ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself.

He even used the occasion to venerate mothers:

We need to help all the mothers out there who are raising these kids by themselves; the mothers who drop them off at school, go to work, pick up them up in the afternoon, work another shift, get dinner, make lunches, pay the bills, fix the house, and all the other things it takes both parents to do. So many of these women are doing a heroic job

We might compare this to his Mother’s Day speech this year. Did he criticise feckless, gold-digging single mothers, and pay tribute to the struggles of fathers? Of course not. He venerated mothers again.

On Mother’s Day, we celebrate the extraordinary importance of mothers in our lives. The bond of love and dedication a mother shares with her children and family is without bounds or conditions. Whether an adoptive mom or grandmother, mother or partner, the women who raise us show us that no hurdle is too high, and no dream is beyond our reach. As sons and daughters, we show our gratitude for the women in our lives who care for us, shape our values, and set us on the path to a limitless future. Throughout our history, mothers have made remarkable sacrifices for the well-being of their loved ones […] Mothers are the rocks of our families and a foundation in our communities. In gratitude for their generous love, patient counsel, and lifelong support, let us pay respect to the women who carry out the hard work of motherhood with skill and grace, and let us remember those mothers who, though no longer with us, inspire us still.

Notably, he has not taken the opportunity of Father’s Day this year to chastise fathers. A part of me likes to believe that the storm kicked up by the Men’s Rights Movement after his previous speeches attacking fathers has persuaded him to tone it down somewhat. Rather than speaking of ‘deadbeat dads’, he refers to fathers serving abroad in the armed forces, and those who have lost jobs in the recession (in some cases thanks to him caving in to feminist demands to redirect that stimulus package, although he curiously omits this one detail). All in all, this year’s speech is a lot more positive towards fathers than those of past years, but he still holds back from really giving fathers their due; compare it to the Mother’s Day speech cited above.

So, back to David Cameron. Attacking fathers on Father’s Day is a pretty disgusting thing to do, not to mention cynical. He is attempting to deflect blame from government by stirring up hatred towards common men – always an easy target. And yet, men cannot honestly be held morally responsible for creating children until they actually have the right to do so.

This old article sums up the position of Legal Choice For Men:

Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men’s rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child. […] The gist of the argument: If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood. […] “There’s such a spectrum of choice that women have — it’s her body, her pregnancy and she has the ultimate right to make decisions,” said Mel Feit, director of the men’s center. “I’m trying to find a way for a man also to have some say over decisions that affect his life profoundly.”

For as long as men lack reproductive rights, and for as long as we allow women to force men to become fathers when they do not want to, then of course we are going to have ‘feckless, irresponsible, deadbeat dads’ – although I don’t blame them, and I won’t call them that. I will call them victims of fraud and financial manipulation. Consenting to sex is not the same as consenting to fatherhood, and any man who has not consented to the latter owes the world nothing.

And that’s why Legal Choice For Men seems reasonable to me. A woman does not ‘abort’ the baby so much as she ‘aborts’ herself from a lifestyle she does not want. Why should a man not have the right to an ‘abortion’ on the same grounds? In that case, inviolable contracts could be drawn up, prior to the birth of the child (or even prior to conception) in which the father signs up to fatherhood. If he doesn’t sign, he can’t be held liable, because it was never his choice to have a child; thus there can be no grounds for requiring him to sweat and toil for the mother’s sake.

Strange how feminists are unwilling to commit to this version of ‘my body, my choice’.

Happy Father’s Day!

– Snark