Thanksgiving

This Thursday the people of the United States celebrated Thanksgiving Day. On that day, we the believers dedicate time to meditate on the gifts that God ha brought into our lives and give Him thanks for them. Since I am a believer, I join that celebration, join that exercise in gratitude. Allow me then to take a rest from the battle for this week and enumerate briefly some of the many gifts that God’s grace has granted me.

I thank God for my family in Puerto Rico, because even in the distance they have been my support in the moments when I needed it the most.

I thank God for my old friends, who have the extended family that, if not my blood, life has given me.

I thank God for my new friends and brothers in arms that life has brought me during this year, letting me know this way that I am not alone in this struggle.

I thank God because He is reestablishing multiplied everything that life had taken from me.

I thank God for the prosperity that has began to bloom in my life, alter a long season of limitations and needs.

I thank God for my health, health to fight the struggles of today and the struggles that Hill come tomorrow.

I thank God for the First United Methodist Church of Montclair, New Jersey, because when my shadows where most dark, it was the instrument used by God to bring back hope.

I thank God for give a job that I like and in which I have a professional future full of possibilities.

I thank God for the privilege of being an adoptive parent, privilege of bringing to a little girl the love and care that every child needs and deserves.

An above all, I thank God for my daughter Sofía Isabel, definitely the greatest and most important of all His gifts.

For all these things, thanks God.

For women’s rights

I say that men’s rights are not only their rights: they are also the rights of women.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because if it is true that at family courts the weighing scale is still leaning towards women, in a very near future, when laws Project both parents rights no matter gender, we should make sure that laws are formulated in such a way the weighing scale does not leans in the opposite direction, like it has happened infinite times before in history when it comes the time of adjustments and corrections (Remember the French Revolution? And the urban violence unleashed in the post-apartheid South Africa?). Only through clear laws and fair court we would be able to achieve this task.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because the present state of family laws is ideological fossil that states that men belong to streets and women belong to their house wit the children, limiting this way the spectrum of divorced women with children. And this goes from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the woman who since divorced has been forced to relegate his professional career to a second plane because she does not have time for it, to the one who, as one woman confessed to a pro-joint custody militant in Puerto Rico, she had not been able to go to the movies in years because the situation after her divorce had killed her social life. We fight for fair laws that assign equal responsibilities to men an women, laws that insert men in the family life that they are entitled to by right, and liberate women from having the full load of raising children.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because in the present state of things, those women who live with divorced men with children live with the continuous stress of sharing the emotional, social, and economical pressure to which present laws submit them. There is no worst enemy for a new family than a former wife devoted to sabotage it.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because many aunts, grandmother, godmothers and other women relatives of children of divorced men find themselves without contact with the children they love, because when courts block contact between fathers and their children, they’re not only blocking them, but their whole families.

It is for all of the above that leaders of pro-joint custody groups, like Ana Isabel Gorduño of Amor de Papá in Mexico, and Anneliese Garrison of Parents Without Custody of Southern New Jersey are women. They have understood what is at stake in this struggle.

It is time that men and women to be equal for the law. Let us fight to achieve this equality. Our children are waiting.

The single mother industry

Last Sunday I discussed the subject of the elections in Puerto Rico and how these elections could signify a change in the state policies regarding family laws, a change towards laws that simultaneously protect children and treat fathers fairly.

I ask to my non-Puerto Rican readers a little bit of patience while I go back to my country to discuss a problem that I believe is not exclusive of Puerto Rico, since it has multiple more subtle incarnations in many other places.

In many contemporary societies single mothers have become a sacred object, something untouchable that cannot be questioned, because the universal consensus, sponsored by the political correctness tyranny, sustains that single mothers are a kind of social martyrs that we all have to pity and feel compelled to help and sustain economically. This notion is being spread by mass media, even though is evident that the proliferation of single mother is more than anything a symptom of a social disease, the dissolution of the family nucleus, which in turn creates a long sequence of other social evils: children raised without a father figure, children that due to this condition have more propensity to criminal behavior, depression, promiscuity, etc. (Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, propose that the drastic reduction of criminality in the United States after Roe versus Wade was due precisely to Roe versus Wade, because this decision reduced dramatically the amount of children raised by single mothers, children that, as many studies have shown, have twice the probabilities of becoming criminals than children raised by both parents.)

Puerto Rico is an extreme case of this canonization of the single mother and of the conversion of this canonization into an industry. Many women have discovered an easy way to earn a living: have children and live of child support. And I am not talking about that women who has had to divorce and who now struggles to rebuild her life and who receives child support to help her raise her children. I talk about those women that in Puerto Rico live of their motherhood, because the child support that they get is being used to support them and not their children, or even worst, because, because they are serial mothers who have children of different men in order to live solely of the child support checks that they get from those men.

The present laws of child support pervert the whole process of supporting economically our children, polluting it from its base. The present situation is supported by three equally pernicious legs:

First, the absolute disproportion between the obligations of both parties, demanding from one (the father) much larger money amounts than the ones required to the other (the mother). The disproportion is such and the load is so onerous for fathers that most times it is far beyond their real possibilities and ends up taking many of them to bankruptcy, many of them to jail, some of them to suicide, and blocks the possibilities of rebuilding their lives after divorce. To add insult, the other party can even stay without a job, because the State does not believe that it has to help with the financial burden of raising their own children.

Second, the absolute lack of controls that ensure that the child support money will be used for child support. I know of a case on which a father calls ASUME, the government agency that is in charge of managing child support, to denounce that one of his child support checks had been cashed in a San Juan casino, just to be told that his responsibility was to pay child support, and once it was in his ex-wife hands, she could use it as she wanted to. Now, give me a reason to pay child support. While the government does not enforce mechanisms that ensure that the money paid for the children is being used in the children, child support Hill remain being used by unscrupulous mothers as a means to earn a living.

And third and most important and revealing, the outbreak of single mothers in Puerto Rico is the direct result of the discriminatory policy of family courts, which award women child custody in the almost entirety of cases. Like in the urban legends on which a villain amputates the legs of a child to force him to beg for money in the streets, in Puerto Rico the State denies joint child custody to the fathers and then and ask the people to feel pity for the women who have to raise their children by themselves. There is no better example of an ill-intentioned social consciousness.

The single mother, as it is conceived in the Puerto Rican social discourse, is a political creation that has the purpose of creating a group of voters loyal to the political part that protects its privileges, no matter that in order to do so the rights of a great part of the population, children and fathers, have to be sacrificed.

I say something that because everyone knows, nobody says, but it is worth to be brought to this discussion: politicians do not look for the good of their countries, but for their own perpetuation in power. Because women are the majority of the Puerto Rican electorate, politicians have not taken the risk of losing the votes of this sector, and have turned it into a privileged sector, exempting it from the duties that are demanded from the others, in this case, of financially supporting their own children. Ask yourself: When was the last time that you heard of mother going to jail for not paying child support? Never? I thought so.

The insufferable passivity and cowardice of men have been the fundamental vehicles for this situation to reach this point. Without them, the present state of family laws would be unsustainable. It is time for this to change.

Our children are waiting.

On the Elections in Puerto Rico

I should start clarifying that I am not a follower of the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista or PNP), the political party that last Tuesday won the elections in Puerto Rico. Until the year 2002, the year on which I moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey, I was a member of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño or PIP), and I still relieve that the best choice for the future of my country is its political independence. I should say also that I don’t feel towards the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático or PPD), the still governing party that lost this elections, the visceral rejection that of the PIP traditionally have felt towards the PPD. If the PPD embraces the soberanist autonomical ideal that proposes its left wing, its proposal would be as valid as independence.

Having said this, I should say that if the PNP fulfill its promises and works on following its proposed platform, its victory could be the best that has happened to the family institution in Puerto Rico.

For reasons that combine the most vulgar electoral logic (women are more than men and vote in biggest proportion than them, therefore, political parties should never do anything that could scare their votes away) and a perverse interpretation of feminism (the majority of Puerto Rican feminism does not promotes equality between genders, but a kind of feminine supremacism), the PPD and the PIP have opposed vehemently to every attempt of approving laws that promote joint custody and establish fair parameters for child support payments. When during this administration, an excellent law pro-joint custody was submitted for the legislature approval, the government aimed at it all its cannons, from the Department of Justice, the Courts Administration to, shamefully, the Department of Family.

The PNP includes in its platform (Juntos hacia el cambio, http://www.fortunogobernador.com/images/PLANDEGOBIERNOPNP2009-2012.pdf) a section dedicated to its proposals on family issues (p. 147-50), and in it includes promises of promoting joint custody whenever possible and the revision of laws on child support to make them more fair. Now that the PNP has won, we Puerto Ricans should dedicate the next four years to remind it to fulfill what its platform promises. If the PNP does it, it would become the first Puerto Rican party that really does something to remedy the accelerated deterioration of the Puerto Rican society.

For the sake of Puerto Rico, let us believe that the PNP is going to keep its promises. All of us should continue reminding them to do so.

Our children are waiting for us.

Against giving up

The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
Jesus Christ

Resignation is cowardice. Accepting life as it comes to us, accepting injustice and inequality as if they were unavoidable of life, is cowardice.

Because of that, because no human being should be forced to settle up for less than he/she deserves, because no human being has to suffer in silence the blows of life, the only choice that is left is to fight bravely, to fight relentlessly, to fight until the victorious end.

That is why every time I hear someone telling me that I should be happy because at least I can see my daughter, while other fathers cannot see their children, their words, instead of being a comfort, are nothing more than a well-intentioned insult.

I ask myself what would Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had replied, if during the effervescence of the civil rights movement, someone would have told them that should feel satisfied because, at least, they were not slaves. I am convinced that both of them would have felt as offended as I feel every time someone ask me to settle for the present state of custody laws, state that perpetuates inequality between genders by priming the role of the mother over the role of the father.

Human life without dignity is not human life. And there is no dignity in living a second-class life, being demoted from parent to vice-parent. Anything less than equality is unacceptable. No human being should accept being treated in way less than he/she should be treated. We are fathers, not babysitters of our own children, not the guys who visit them occasionally and who are important only because they supply the money. We are fathers and it is time to demand being treated as such.

We cannot accept that the immense majority of times child custodies are awarded indiscriminately to a gender, disposing of the rights of the other. We cannot accept that financial responsibilities of rising children to fall falls upon a gender, allowing the other to use the money assigned to the children without any control that ensures that the money is being used in what was assigned to. We cannot accept that children who are not orphans to be forced to live as such by court decree.

It is time for the fight to start.

Our children are waiting for us