The Government, Divorce, and the War on Fatherhood

Article here. Excerpt:

'With the advent of no-fault divorce (before which divorces required cause, and fault could be assigned proportionately), "the fault that was ostensibly thrown out the front door of divorce proceedings re-entered through the back." Working from the "therapeutic" (read: morally relativistic) premise that both parties must be equally to blame -- which is to say, not at all to blame -- for a marriage's failure, divorce courts begin with an "automatic outcome" and then set out to find or manufacture evidence to support it.

How is that evidence obtained? Via "extensive and intrusive governmental instruments whose sole purpose is intervention in families." Having quit the marriage-enforcement business, government has turned the full weight of its resources and coercive powers to the divorce-enforcement business.

The main area in which government brings to bear those resources, and the red thread of Baskerville's book, is in assigning custody of children. With two-thirds of divorces initiated by women -- thereby immediately casting the man as the "defendant" -- and with courts overwhelmingly biased toward mothers already (in a paradoxical inversion of feminist doctrine, women are held both to be and not to be more naturally suited to nurturing and child-rearing), in practice the custody process typically amounts to a "power grab" by which fathers are forcibly separated from their children. The children, for whose benefit the process ostensibly exists, are then used as leverage by the prying state and as trophies by the custodial mother.'