Sunday, November 23, 2008

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.

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