FATHERS' MANIFESTO (9/8/95)

From: fathers@soho.ios.com (Daniel Amneus)
Date: 8 Sep 1995 20:19:21 GMT
Organization: Internet Online Services

                       FATHERS' MANIFESTO
						September 8, 1995

Society is based on the institution of the family, but our society,
instead of encouraging men to marry and create families, is destroying
half of its marriages in its divorce courts, routinely creating
female-headed households by expelling the fathers.  It is creating more
female-headed households by subsidizing illegitimacy through its welfare
system.  Three- quarters of the criminal class grows up in these
female-headed households.  Most welfare spending goes to them.  They
generate most underachievers, drug addicts, teen-age suicides and much
other pathology. 

Most divorces (about three-fourths) are initiated by wives who are
encouraged by feminist propaganda and by the anti-male bias of judges. 
Girls are taught by feminist teachers to say "I don't want to live the
kind of life my mother led,"  "I want a career so I don't have to depend
on a man," and "Most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and
human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children" (Phyllis
Chesler). 

The "independence"  women demand is understood to include dependence on
ex-husbands, justified by giving child custody to the mothers.  The father
who loses his children is required to forfeit a portion of his income to
subsidize the destruction of his family and the placing of his children in
a female-headed household where they are far more likely to be abused,
neglected, impoverished, delinquent and sexually confused. 

In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote, "society asks so little of women."  What it
principally asked of them was the sexual loyalty which enabled men to have
families and children to have fathers--which created the family stability
and the astonishing economic growth of the era of "the feminine mystique"
(1945-65)--the doubling of America's industrial plant and the 250 percent
increase of its GNP. 

Women no longer regard marriage as a lifetime commitment, no longer
consider their marriage vows as binding.  They suppose, as Fergie, Duchess
of York, supposes, that divorce is justified if they can say "At least I
was being true to myself."  Being true to herself was not required by her
marriage vows.  These required her to forsake all others and be true to
her husband. Being true to herself means repudiating her marriage vows and
(if she gains custody of the children) depriving her husband of his family
and her children of their father

Children have the right to be raised and cared for by their fathers.  And
fathers have the right to preserve their families and their incomes rather
than working for ex-wives who wish to repudiate their marriages.  An
acknowledgment of these rights will eliminate incentives for divorce and
fatherlessness, will reduce violence and welfare spending, reduce the
public debt incurred by attempts to replace fathers with government
subsidies, restore incentives and vitality to our economy, reduce taxes
and promote healthier and happier children and better citizens.  

We the undersigned fathers and future fathers will oppose attempts to
replace paternal love with sole-maternal custody abetted by government
largesse.  We will oppose the existing anti- male bias of the divorce
courts which exists largely because men have hitherto been willing to
tolerate it and subsidize ex-wives with support money--thus betraying
their children and paying to have their families destroyed. 

What would happen to lawmakers if they permitted husbands to do what
they now permit wives to do--to expel their wives, take their children
from them, deprive them of their homes, load them with debts, and compel
them to work and turn over as much as half of their income to their
ex-husbands for the support of the children of whom they had been
deprived? 

Lawmakers who perpetrated such a law would be torn to pieces by mobs of
frenzied women.  Why do men tolerate it?  Men must stop consenting to pay
support money to ex-wives and in the event of divorce take custody of
their own children.