Article here. Excerpt:

'Fathers and Families is your voice in family law. Fathers and Families continues to grow and so does the strength of your voice. We want to start our next affiliate in your state.

Fathers and Families believes shared parenting is the single most important social change we must make for our children. Society should support shared parenting and the rights and responsibilities of both parents in the same way it supports other children’s issues, including child support enforcement.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'In all the discussion of the horror in Newtown, one factor that should be considered is the absence of appropriate influences for boys and men in our increasingly feminized society. Many of the traditional supports for male maturity have been withdrawn, traditional manhood is often mocked and diminished, and the qualities promoted today tend to be the more feminine ones of acceptance, nurturance, etc., instead of the more masculine demand to measure up. The killers are often misfits of precarious masculinity, who may be unconsciously or consciously furious at a feminized world that denies and denigrates who they are. Years ago psychologist Erich Fromm described the difference between the unconditional love of the mother and the conditional love of the father. Both are needed, and of course it’s possible for both men and women to extend both kinds of love, but in the desire to glorify women, our society has gone too much in the one direction. Instead of teaching self-control, Dennis Prager points out, we teach self-esteem.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'BERLIN — German lawmakers on Wednesday passed legislation ensuring parents the right to have their boys circumcised, bringing a close to months of legal uncertainty set off by a regional court’s ruling that equated the practice with bodily harm.

The measure passed by a vote of 434 to 100, with 46 abstentions, in Germany’s lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag. The vote followed months of emotional debate, and angered and alienated many German Jews and Muslims, for whom circumcision is a religious rite, integral to their beliefs.'

In contrast: U.N. seeks a global ban on female circumcision

Link here. Excerpt:

'As we commemorated World AIDS Day earlier this month, the importance of addressing the needs of women and girls as part of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy was clear. While we have made tremendous progress in learning how to prevent and treat HIV, including among women and girls, much work remains. Of the approximately 1.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, about 290,000 are women and women account for 23 percent of new HIV infections.

This Administration has made combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic a priority. For women, that includes addressing gender-based violence and gender related health disparities.
...
From December 20, 2012 to January 20, 2013 you will be able to submit your individual stories, experiences, and comments to the working group by completing this online form. While we welcome any comments salient to the issue, we also ask that you consider the following questions:

From Warren Farrell:

This, a documentary on divorced fathers called 'Broken', is excellent. It's some touching interviews with divorced dads. I know the fathers with whom you work will feel less lonely and isolated as they see this. The documentarian, Steve Brulé, has submitted this to a Canadian film festival. Brulé interviewed me in my capacity as the author of Father and Child Reunion and my experience doing expert witness work for dads. Feel free to make this available as a holiday present to the dads you are helping.

Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
www.warrenfarrell.com

Press release here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON, Dec. 18, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A legal reform organization has unveiled innocence quilts to highlight the growing problem of the loss of the presumption of innocence. Affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of innocence has long been viewed as a bedrock principle of the American legal code.

SAVE – Stop Abusive and Violent Environments -- believes widespread changes are urgently needed to restore the integrity of the criminal justice system, protect civil rights, and thwart false allegations. False accusations serve to divert scarce services and protections from needy victims.

Translated story here. Excerpt:

'TROMSØ (AP) Bodo Woman (73) beat, threatened and insulted her husband at the coarsest for over 40 years without anyone intervening.

Now the former unpunished pensioner zones three years behind bars.

The couple married in 1961. Some years later abuse. The relationship was not revealed until 2010, when the woman Reviewed her husband for harassment.

After Bodø police began to do research, the case was turned completely upside down.

The investigation revealed that the woman in over 40 years regularly had acted violently and threatening to her husband.

"The man has lived for 41 years under an almost constant terror regime, characterized by constant insecurity and fear of violence and other harassment," stated Salten District Court, which earlier this year sentenced the woman to three years in prison.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A Swedish woman who kept human skulls and bones in her apartment was sentenced Monday to probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric care after being convicted of “disturbing the peace of the dead.”

The prosecution had argued that the 37 year-old woman, who has a history of unemployment and substance abuse, used the bones “for various sexual activities”, but charges of necrophilia were dismissed by the Gothenburg district court.

“Moving parts of the skeleton is a crime, since she was unauthorised to do so, just as it is a crime to assemble a skeleton and keep it lying on the floor, (and) to keep skeletal parts in plastic bags and use them for trade,” the court said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire judge has ruled that a high school girl can continue to play on the boys’ varsity ice hockey team even though her school has formed a girls’ team.

Seventeen-year-old Shelby Herrington made the boys’ varsity team at Bishop Brady High School three years ago, when there was no girls’ team.

Herrington is fighting a decision by the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association that she needs to switch to the girls’ team formed jointly by her school and Trinity of Manchester.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Two special education teachers caught on camera dragging a blind 7-year-old boy 155 feet down the Gonzales Community School corridors are defending themselves and their method to move the boy between classrooms.

A mobility and orientation special education specialist with Santa Fe Public Schools told police weeks after the Nov. 15 incident that the boy wasn’t cooperating with her requests and that grabbing the boy by the ankles and dragging him “was just a way to transport the child and believed it was a natural way of taking the child,” according to the report released by police on Monday. A Braille specialist under contract with the school district also helped her colleague move the boy.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In most of the developed world, women spend more time working each day than men do, if you include unpaid work.

According to the latest report on gender and employment from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, across the developed world and in other countries tracked by the organization, men spend more minutes per day in paid work than women do.

In the United States, for example, men spend 5 hours and 8 minutes working on the average day, whereas women spend 4 hours and 2 minutes.

But when it comes to unpaid work — activities like child care and cleaning — women spend vastly more time than men in every country the organization included in its analysis.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A women’s history class frequently offered at Chapman University glorifies Margaret Sanger while it avoids her racist beliefs, highlights the feminist revolution while sidesteps the suffrage movement’s family values, and heralds Roe v. Wade and the advent of birth control, all while failing to cite the feminist counter-culture movement.

That’s not only not surprising, it’s expected, as classrooms in colleges across America are used to recruit young women into the feminists ranks, says Carrie Lukas, managing director of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum.

“The purpose here is to advance the feminist movement,” Lukas says. “The college classroom is a recruitment tool.”

Lukas, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism,” says the vast majority of women studies classes do not offer fair and balanced approaches to the subject. It’s not unheard of for professors to skip relevant information, slant lesson plans, or skew lectures.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Why are angry young men setting out to kill entire crowds of strangers?

Motivations are hard to pin down, but gender is the single most obvious and intractable variable when it comes to violence in America. Men and boys are responsible for 95% of all violent crimes in this country. "Male criminal participation in serious crimes at any age greatly exceeds that of females, regardless of source of data, crime type, level of involvement, or measure of participation" is how the National Academy of Sciences summed up the extant research.

How does masculinity figure into this? From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. However the belief that violence is an inherently male characteristic is a fallacy. Most boys don't carry weapons, and almost all don't kill: are they not boys? Boys learn it.

Article here. Excerpt:

'I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Well, there are a whole host of reasons.  But certainly parents and our education system have to bear much of the blame.  In the old days, young men were taught what it means to “be a man”, and morality was taught to young men both by their parents and in the schools.  But today, most young men have very little understanding of what “manhood” is, and our society has taught them that morality doesn’t really matter.  Instead, television and movies constantly portray young men as sex-obsessed slackers that just want to party all the time, so that is what many of our young men have become.

How much better off would our society be if we had trained this generation of young men to love, honor, protect and take care of others?

How much better off would our society be if we had nurtured the manhood of our young men instead of teaching them to be ashamed of it?'