Call for suggestions

Holidays and traditions are important. They make us reconnect with our values, reflect on what we believe, share our beliefs with believers and non-believers. No matter if it is Ramadan, Yom Kippur or Good Friday, all of us who believe in something have special days on which we remember our purpose in life.

When we announced in this space the foundation of the pro joint custody organization Children of Mom and Dad, we announced also our intention of declaring 2009 the Year of Joint Custody. I add to that statement that our intention is to dedicate every year a month, a week and day to publicize the cause of joint custody.

Why a year? Because we should mark the beginning of our campaign in favor of joint custody, a campaign that from this year on will be continuous and total.

Why a month? Why a week? Why a day? Because from this year on, every year we will dedicate a month to intensify the campaign, and on this month, a specific week and day to, in the fashion of liturgical dates, call everyone to think about the terrible condition of the family under the state and state laws.

This celebration would give us the opportunity of bringing the message to every forum, of developing mass media campaigns, in sum, of creating conscience.

We invite all our readers, friends, and brothers and sisters in arms to propose a month, a week and day to be the Month, Week, and Day of Joint Custody.

The process to select the ideal time for this celebration should start choosing a meaningful date, from which would be derived that the week and month to chose would be those on which that date would fall. Allow me to suggest that the date should make remember a specific happening, like the first time a joint custody was awarded in the United States, or one of the many deaths and incarcerations of fathers that have fought for the custody of their children, and have been murdered by their former spouses or punished by the state.

Send us your suggestions. And keep on fighting. Our children are waiting.

Four Trends for the Next Decade

Four trends has been taking place during the last years, four trends that will radically change the way in which we conceive couple and family relationships. They are the following:

1. The gradual, albeit delayed, loss of prestige of the until now untouchable figure of the single mother – Several weeks ago, I publish in this page the article titled “The Single Mother Industry”, in which I accuse the social canonization of the single mother as responsible of great part of the social disaster to which the family has been submitted during the last decades. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in the recently published book by Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (Crown Forum, January 6, 2009), the second chapter is dedicated to demystify the single mother and to show how these supposed victims are really victimizing society and causing irreparable harm to their own children. It is good that it has been precisely a woman the one who has taken bull by its horns.

2. The standardization of the prenuptial agreement as normal part of the processes to get married - Books as popular as “Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life” by Donald Trump and Bill Zanker, (Collins Business, September 30, 2008) and “How Come That Idiot's Rich and I'm Not?” by Robert Shemin (Crown, March 4, 2008) identify divorce as one of the biggest economical disasters that a person could suffer, specially if that person is a man, automatically taking at least half of their income and assets. As preventive measure, prenuptial agreements allow to avoid the most disastrous economical results of divorce.

3. The normalization of single fatherhood as a family model – CNN published recently on its webpage the article “One and only dads: Numbers, challenges grow for single fathers” by Andrea Harry (http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/18/single.dads/index.html), on which the author documents that families headed by single fathers are the fastest growing household form in America. Currently, one in six families is headed by a father, compared with one in 10 in 1970. Of that number, only 5% are widowed, 42% are divorced and a surprising 38% have never been married. Is this last group the most socially significant, because speaks about the growing movement of men who opt to be single fathers, among many reasons, because in this way they avoid the risk of losing their children in case of a divorce. This movement is the answer to the slow pace in which laws are changing to agree with the times and the changes that have happened in the structure of nuclear family, and to correct the discrimination by reason of gender that exist in family courts.

4. The gradual but consistent standardization of joint custody as the predominant arrangement among custody arrangements – As we discussed in this page a few weeks ago in the article “Two articles on Newsweek,” joint custody arrangements have been slowly gaining territory in the American society, what should encourage us to continue the fight.

We should keep our eyes open to these phenomena and watch how they will be changing or daily lives on the next years. And we should keep fighting. Our children are waiting.

The King Is Dead. Long Live The King!

In these moments in which the people who run our governments are changing, and with them public policy, we who relieve in the cause of joint custody should aim our actions and strategies to these new governments and to the way on which they will apply current family laws and modify state policies regarding them.

Countless groups must be already bombing the new members of the government with their interests, interests that go from the most elevated to the lowest, from the ones who look for funds for schools to the ones who seek to deregulate environmental controls. And among these groups, those who oppose our cause by error or by wickedness, by laziness or by complicity.

We should not lie to ourselves: politicians are the ones who control the game and for that reason, no important change will happen without their participation. Some will tell me that I have discovered the Mediterranean, but in struggles like our struggle, in groups like our group, many people like to reduce ours to an innocuous and amorphous “social” struggle, without any real sting, without any real bargaining power.

If our cause is a just cause as it is, if it is as necessary as it is, we need strong arms capable of starting change, and in this case I am talking of presidents, governors, congressmen and women, in summary, of every politician that we could put in our side to implement the transformation that our legal system so urgently needs.

Because there are so many putting pressure on them, those who like us want to get results, have to be particularly resilient, particularly passionate. We have to put pressure on every political party and at every government level. This pressure should be constant and by every possible means: visits to their offices, public meetings, telephone calls, e-mails, interventions in public presentations, letters, interventions in radio and in TV. Pressure should be total.

Now is the time to fight. Our children are waiting.