On “Divorced from Reality” by Baskerville (2 of 2)

This is the second and final article on Stephen Baskerville, “Divorced from Reality”.

Baskerville believes that the child abuse “epidemic” is almost entirely the creation of radical feminism and the welfare bureaucracies. He quotes evidence that proves that an intact family is the safest place for women and children, and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse and domestic violence overwhelmingly occurs in homes from which the father has been removed. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), children of single parents have a 77% greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse, an 87% greater risk of being harmed by physical neglect, and an 80% greater risk of suffering serious injury or harm from abuse or neglect than children living with both parents. And according to Britain ’s Family Education Trust, children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family. Baskerville writes:

“The principal impediment to child abuse is thus precisely the figure whom the welfare and divorce bureaucracies are intent on removing: the father.”

It is not married fathers, but single mothers who are most likely to injure or kill their children. Research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household. Mothers accounted for 55 percent of all child murders. Women ages 20 to 49 are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: and since male perpetrators are not usually fathers but boyfriends or stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers.

In family courts, false allegations of child abuse and domestic violence are routine, and used almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. These false accusations are virtually never punished, and as a result of them, protective orders separating parents from their children are issued without any evidence during divorce proceedings.

There is a cruel political rationale behind all this government family-destruction machinery. Bureaucracies expand by creating the very problem they exist to address. By eliminating the father, government officials can present themselves as the solution to the problem they have created. The more child abuse there is, the more justification the government has to expand the child abuse bureaucracy.

Judges create the most dangerous environment for children when they remove fathers in custody proceedings, and they do it because they know they will never be held accountable for any harm that may come to the children. As Baskerville writes:

“On the contrary, if they do not remove the fathers, they may be punished by the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose funding depends on a constant supply of abused children.”

The figure of the “deadbeat dad” is another result of hysteria manufactured by the divorce machinery. Fathers are less likely to abandon offspring than to be involuntarily divorced fathers who have been “forced to finance the filching of his own children.” Originally a method of recovering welfare costs, child support is now a “massive federal subsidy on middle-class divorce.” If no-fault divorce allowed a mother to divorce her husband for no reason and to take the children with her, child support allows the divorcing mother to use the now-fatherless children to claim her ex-husband’s money, money that she may spend however she wishes with no accounting requirement, and if he refuses to pay, he could be incarcerated without trial.

Child support finances family dissolution by paying mothers to divorce: it’s “an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother.” Evidence shows that only one-fifth to one-third of child-support payments is actually used for the children, the rest is profit for the custodial parent. Furthermore, mothers are not the only ones who profit from child support. State governments receive federal funds for every child-support dollar collected, what gives states a financial incentive to create as many single-parent households as possible by encouraging divorce. Baskerville writes:

“This is why state governments set child support at onerous levels. Not only does it immediately maximize their own revenues; by encouraging middle-class women to divorce, governments increase the number of fathers sending dollars through their systems, thus generating more revenue.”

The logical conclusion of this draws a terrible picture of how the power structure works:

“All this marks a new stage in the evolution of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to raising revenue and, from there, to law enforcement. The result is a self-financing machine, generating profits and expanding the size and scope of government—all by generating single-parent homes and fatherless children. Government has created a perpetual growth machine for destroying families, seizing children from legally blameless parents, and incarcerating parents without trial.”

Finally, Baskerville, an Anglican, accuses the church of refusing to protect the marriages it has consecrated, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the state. He believes that family structure will be restored when the church takes families out of the hands of the state, does what is supposed to do by helping them to survive, and protects them from government intervention.

Again, I insist the the readers should read the full article. Every father who has been a victim of the family court system should.

On Baskerville’s “Divorced from Reality” (1 of 2)

In the January/February of 2009 issue of the Christian magazine Touchstone, Stephen Baskerville published the article “Divorced from Reality” (http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-01-019-f), on the family crisis in the US. I would like to summarize its content, but strongly recommend my readers to read the full text, due to to the extension and depth of Baskersville’s analysis on the issues discussed.

According to the author, the decline of the family structure has reached dangerous proportions, and it is the major source of social instability in the Western world, and a major threat to civic freedom and constitutional government. Quoting G. K. Chesterton, he sustains that the family structure serves as the principal check on government power, and that today family and state confront one another as the primary social organizing factor. He believes that today’s divorce laws are used by the state to erode family primacy, and to enhance its own power as social control. He writes:

“Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce authorizes unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.”

Baskerville’s main concern are the laws regulating “no fault divorce”. When four decades ago laws were passed to legalize “no fault” divorces, these laws enabled the government, at the request of one spouse, to dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other. Divorce today, he states, seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways, but are unilateral in nature, prevailing over the objection of one spouse. He writes:

“Under “no-fault,” or what some call “unilateral,” divorce—a legal regime that expunged all considerations of justice from the procedure—divorce becomes a sudden power grab by one spouse, assisted by an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.”

Unilateral divorce generates political and costitutional problems because by its nature, it requires constant government supervision over family life. Divorce expands government power because it involves state functionaries to enforce the divorce and the post-divorce order.

The implications of unilateral divorce are terrible: it allows the government to remove innocent people (usually fathers) from their homes, to seize their property, and to separate them from their children, even if they are innocent of any legal wrongdoing. The state seizes control of his children with no burden of proof to justify why; the burden of proof (and the financial burden demanded by it) falls on him. Baskerville writes:

“By far the most serious consequences involve children, who have become the principal weapons of the divorce machinery. Invariably the first action of a divorce court, once a divorce is filed, is to separate the children from one of their parents, usually the father. Until this happens, no one in the machinery acquires any power or earnings. The first principle and first action of divorce court therefore: Remove the father.”

The divorce machinery can take an respectable parent, block him for seeing his own children without government authorization, arrest him for failure to conform to a variety of additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him; arrest him for domestic violence or child abuse, even if no evidence is presented that he has committed any; arrest him for not paying child support, even if the amount exceeds his means; he can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or a psychotherapist he has not hired.

The growth of the divorce machinery has generated a series of hysterias against fathers so hideous that no one dares to defend those accused: child abuse and molestation, wife-beating, and nonpayment of child support. The accused of these offenses, even in the absence of any formal charge, evidence, or conviction, loses his children and is isolated from everyone, since no one wants to be associated with a “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

An while all these happens, there is no evidence that the family crisis is caused significantly by fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children, but there is irrefutable evidence indicating that this crisis “is driven almost entirely by divorce courts forcibly separating parents from their children and using these false accusations as a rationalization.”